Occasionally, I still write at coffee houses within reasonable driving distance from my house; however, given the current economy, $4 coffee and $2 pastries become prohibitive, not to mention the price of gas.

So I'm happy to finally report that, after long pursuit, I have a legitimate writing-specific workspace in my house. Doing so required time to learn how I work best.

I had tried all sorts of portable writing surfaces. Each of the lap desks and laptop stands I auditioned felt temporary and flimsy. I identified my need to write upon a solid table. Finding this out about myself was a large part of the puzzle.

Next, I needed to find where in the house was best suited for working. I must have produced writing in half a dozen places in the house. Writing n bed failed because a] I had to write with my legs straight out, the eqivalent of standing with my knees locked and b] escape to sleep, already the enemy of the work-from-home professional, became yet more irresistable. Putting myself in a tiny corner of the bedroom felt like punishment and the bed remained too accessible. I tried writing in the living room, but it was too heavily trafficked and distractioins abounded.

When I placed my desk adjacent to my web design office space, I knew I was close. A metal bookshelf separated me from my day job computer. The problem with that location was two-fold: traffic, though less than with the living room, and a terrible chair. I dragged my work chair back and forth, but even this small task took me out of my groove. What I needed was a set-up where I could get an idea, sit down and write.

Finally, I placed a simple narrow wood table—the kind intended for hall use I think—next to where I do web design. All I would need to do is swivel the chair to face the second desk. Why this hadn't occurred to me before, I can't imagine. I'm already used to sitting down and getting right to work there.

Here's my set-up. I use a Dell Inspiron with a 17" monitor. Right now I'm using Woks, but as a friend told me, only Satan and I use that program. Whereas I used to rely solely on the laptop touchpad, I've recently started using a half-sized USB laser mouse with a cool extension feature. You've seen them, I'll wager. If the temperature climbs, I'll pull out my dual-fan cooling station. For backup, I use an external USB Passport drive.

The most important piece of equipment is the sound-supressing headphones. I would be lost, distracted into unproductivity without them. As I've mentioned before, I play The "So" Chord, a non-musical, tonal white noise that effectively drowns out even the loudest room noise and doesn't offer patterns or words to knock my out of my writing groove.

Finally, just today, I replaced my 2-level LED USB light with a 10-watt halogen light mounted to the wall a yard overhead.

For the first time I have a writing home...at home.

The San Antonio Writers' Guild held another 5-hour write-in last Saturday and it, once again, offered me valuable time in a focused atmosphere to work further on 'Rain of a Southern Son'.

The turn-out was somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty writers (and one editor who joked he had knocked out in excess of 100k words when our moderator asked for participants to share their progress).

Personally, I was proud not to have paid attention to my beginning word count. Having dove in to the writing without that having been a concern indicated to me that my mind is in the right place. During the last two write-ins, I regularly checked my word count. And, looking back, I realize that I won't be keeping much if any of the words I produced those days. I am certain I will be keeping all of the words I produced on Saturday. They may be modified somewhat or moved about, but the will be utilized.

I have been considering holding write-ins either at my home or at a neutral location. We just got wood floors in a room that had for months gone unfinished, so we now have two formal places with access to outlets. A half bath is centrally located and the kitchen is right around the corner.

I'll probably wait for the Tuesday Night Critique meeting and make a decision about hosting a private write-in based on that experience.

Viva la Internet! I've spent a good chunk of time in the last couple weeks setting up and filling out my Facebook account.

Look me up. I'm at Thomas McAuley or if you have an account, you can also click here and get there directly.

For a while, I wasn't sure how effective Facebook could be as a marketing tool, so I just enjoyed it for its ability to connect me with old friends and folks around the world with similar interests.

Finding this out now may make me sound a little behind the times, but since I was a MySpace person for the last few years, I didn't so much resist making the switch as didn't think about it.

Come to think of it, I can't even recall what caused me to set up my Facebook account in the first place, but I'm glad I did. I've connected with a couple of people overseas who love English Premier League Football (Soccer) and I've joined some writing groups online. I've connected with a few old friends, even hitting the town with one old acquaintance when he made his way back from Monterrey, Mexico at the beginning of June (2008).

As far as marketing my writing, the jury is still out. I know that having another Thomas McAuley-specific page out there with links to this and my other sties can't do anything but raise my profile to the search engines.

I doubt if there is a relationship between my Facebook account and how much activity it has been getting, but I Googled "Thomas McAuley" and for the first time since its creation, this site comes up first! And that, I AM certain IS a good thing for marketing my writing.

If you are a member of the San Antonio Writers' Guild (www.sawritersguild.com) or just anyone interested in writing, email me and I can offer you some assistance on how to set up your Facebook account because if you're a MySpace user, you might not immediately know what to do, where to go, or what the site is even for.

It's difficult for me to imagine that if things had worked out a little differently, I might have been wrting about my painting instead of my writing.

During the first years of marriage which begain in '89, writing proved an immediately awkward fit. I tended to write vivd erotic pieces, wrenching poetry, false letters to imagined characters, none of which settled well with a girl raised in a meat-and-potatoes, art-is-weird environment. I would either show her what I had written and she would give me the who-did-I-marry look or she would read through what I hadn't set aside to share and I would hear about it later. I pretty much stopped writing.

Around the same time, I inherited a large number of oils, a handful of brushes and a couple prepped canvases from my maternal grandmother. I liked the romantic idea and the solitude of a painter's life, so I decided to give it a shot.

Knowing nothing about the craft, I set up an easel and created a number of decent though uninspired paintings. In a matter of weeks, I painted less and less frequently. Soon, I abandoned it altogether.

Two years later, by then enrolled in art school, an instructor remarked that I "would be good at sculpture" based on my sculptural method of drawing. He invited me to participate in an 8-week block of painting classes at his downtown Nashville studio overlooking the Cumberland River at Riverfront Park. Visions of the painter's life were revived. I decided to attend. .

Actually knowing what the hell I was doing helped me enjoy painting far better than I had the first time around.

But again, after the classes were over, I found keeping up painting in my private life lacked the same romance and ease. Painting at home with a new baby, with inadequate lighting and without the energy of my fellow students around me paled in comparison to what the experience had been at my instructor's full-blown, well-lit studio.

At the time, I took the fact that it did not sustain for more than a few months as proof that, though I loved aspects of painting, it could not occupy the same place in my soul that writing once had.

Additionally, the high cost of supplies and difficulty storing wet canvases finally convinced me to look elsewhere for my expression. For a while afterwards, I gave all of my creative energies to my schooling.

After school, I transferred that energy to my work. In recent years though I've hit a plateau with web design. I know so well what I need to do in order to give a client what he needs that a certain amount of creativity is missing. The next step would be to design higher-end or raw concept sites, but I'm not interested in pushing in that direction. There's too much technical stuff to learn with increasingly less reward.

So what did i learn from having gone down the painting road?

First off, I learned a lot about how I need to work as an artist. The massive time required to set up and tear down every time I felt inspired to paint was a major problem. When I get an idea, I need to be able to walk right up to a ready canvas and go to it.

Second, and i've written about this before, when you're working in an artistic field of any kind, you need peer support. I thrived in the studio atmosphere. I was motivated because we shared and energy and we gave and accepted our peers' opinions and suggestions.

When I restared serious writing, I took these (and other) lessons and incorprated them. I make sure I go to the SAWG and critique meetings, even if I don't have work to critique and even if I don't feel like stopping whatever I'm doing at the time.

I also make sure my work environment is away from daily temptations and that, at any time inspiration strikes, my writing station is ready for me.

On rare occasion, I'll dig out the travel easel I have in storage and slap some paint on a board. Usually, I paint just enough to remind myself why I am not a painter anymore.

Just before I had finished what I thought was the final edit to my short story Rain, Beckie Ugolini, present president of SAWG and valued critique group member, asked what (with an insinuated “if anything”) did the name ‘Rain’ mean. Halfway through my explanation, I realized the title didn't say enough about the story, nor would it incite someone to read it. Again, from yet another unexpected front,

The main symbol in the story is how gifts of love—though manifested physically—are referred to as unexpected rain. I felt I needed to incorporate that juxtaposition somehow. I think at that point I wrote ‘Rain from the Sun’. But more important than the symbol of rain, I realized ‘Rain’ is a story about the main character, Mr. Salley. So I modified the spelling so I had ‘Rain from the Son’. Feeling that spelling may be missed or, worse, viewed as clumsiness on the part of the writer, I felt I needed to modify the part in question: Son. Mr. Salley’s transformation comes in part from his making peace with the place he grew up as a homosexual in the unforgiving Bible Belt of the mid-60s.

I arrived at ‘Rain From A Southern Son’. The title felt right. It communicated the juxtaposition between rain and sun, throws a curve with “Son” instead of “Sun” and the implied reference to a southern son suggests Dixieland. All this without being too cryptic or too obvious.

I hadn't until now completed anything short of a couple short format contest entries; nothing to bring to critique. For that reason, the mid-June (2008) critique session was my first experience having pages critiqued that were written as the end of a work.

You might arch your eyebrow and wonder what difference could there be between critiquing the last pages of a work and all the rest. At least I hadn't given any thought to that possibility. It makes perfect sense to me now though.

Simply put, the middle pages carry the action whereas the end carries action and ties up loose ends satisfactorily. And that doesn't mean we provide the reader with a happy ending necessarily, or give the sort of ending that pleases the reader. Satisfactorily, in this case, simply means the story must end in a way that keeps up our end of the contract with the reader to finish all storylines that we have introduced. The baby can die or the baby can live. It doesn't matter as long as we know what happened to the baby.

I had recently finished the newly retitled ‘Rain Of A Southern Son’. The group had been following the story from the beginning and remembered in imperfect but still astonishing detail much of what had happened to Mr. Salley. Obviously they hadn't lived with the story on a nearly daily basis as I had. So when the last words were read, they were in a much better position to spot questions that had or hadn't been answered sufficiently.

More on the specifics later, but keep in mind the different eye that is given to the end of your work.