I miss you like hell.

A written exploration on creating work that honors those who came before us. I miss you like hell. I wasn’t alive at the time. But, I’ve taken great strides to be in attendance with the help of a time-machine that comes in the form of countless stories my grandfather tells me over coffee and breakfast, both of which he consumes slower than he once did, due to his stroke. An American Sailor finds himself in Japan, a galaxy away from the small town of Francisco, Indiana. One afternoon, he ventures into a Tea House where a woman is working. Her eyes are so black he loses himself in them, searching for her pupils. Her hair is the color of a long winter night. Her skin looks as if she’s existing behind a shadow. He falls in love with her the moment he sees her but takes another three weeks to work up the courage to tell her so. Each day he goes back to this Tea House and each day he loses to the butterflies. One day, he meets her eyes and moves his hand in a circular motion, asking her to a movie –– she smiles, she nods. She’s late, a tardiness he shrugs off as a side-effect of the language barrier. He waits and he waits, for two hours he waits. She never shows. He calls her. He’s been stood up. They reschedule. The next day she shows. Something goes well. Terribly well. The two move into a flat in the city a few weeks later and before he boards his submarine home, they’ve eloped. Once released from duty, he returns on a passenger cruise and brings her back to The States where he marries her a second time. They have three children. The oldest they lose before she’s out of diapers. They visit her grave, religiously, until the day they step into theirs. The second child is my father and the third is my aunt and the two of them go on to find love of their own and have children of their own. The sailor and the woman make these children and grandchildren the center of their universe. With the passing of time, she goes first and the sailor must unlearn how to live without her; after her. He stumbles upon a fifty-year-old notebook where the same shaky English lines are written again and again as she once learned to write their names... Mitsuko Iijima Mitsuko Schafer Larry Schafer While she's been gone for a while now, she continues to have her hands all over my work. With the creation of [After Her]( I started a publishing house of sorts called Iijima Press. Ashitamstu, meme. [Read the first book from Iijima Press.]( Say it with your wallet. So, you like the newsletter and want to say "thank you"? Well, get your goddamn hands out of your pockets and do something about it. If you're broke, [Tweet me]( or [post me up on Instagram]( or [share my shit over on Linkedin](. If you've got some extra dough lying around and want to blow it on a solo creator like me, here's what's for sale... [Snow Cones]( my copywriting guide. [$100k]( my freelance guide. [One Minute, Please?]( my first book of poetry and prose. [Quarantine Dreams]( my second book of poetry and prose. [After Her]( my third and latest book of poetry and prose. [Chasing Hemingway]( [Moscow Mule]( (this is literally you buying me a drink). ["Cheers."]( I can't stop thinking about this story I wrote on Colter Wall last week... As you may or may not know, I run another newsletter called [Stranger Than Fiction]( where I cover bat shit crazy ideas that have made brands a whole of fucking money. I generally don't like to cross-pollinate. But, the story I wrote on Colter Wall a couple of weeks back is so good I can't not share it here. It went something like this... I couldn’t tell you how the hell my ears found Colter Wall. But, I’m damn glad they did. The twenty-five-year-old country music sensation was born and raised in Swift Current, Canada and is putting out tunes so pretty you can almost hear Johnny Cash applauding from the other side. His voice is deep, guttural and visceral, making for the perfect instrument for his brilliant songwriting that reads like something from North America’s past. Two, maybe three songs in, and you’d swear Wall has a time-machine hidden in the barn outside his home, where he visits every so often, stealing musings and stories from centuries ago. Read these lines pulled from his song, Saskatchewan 1881… “It's so damn cold out here, the wind'll cut you half in two I ain't kiddin' now, my old plow is frozen to my mule I've been livin' off of ice-cold rainbow stew” It turns out, he’s the real deal. On an interview with the Canadian actor Tom Green, Rogan shares that, being a huge fan of Wall’s music, his team got in touch with his agent about coming on the podcast. Here’s what his agent had to say… “He works as a ranch hand in Texas over the summer. And when he’s done, we’ll get a hold of you.” Joe Rogan told Tom Green that while he loves his music, he also loves his authenticity and if that’s who he is, Wall is welcome on the podcast anytime. Sometimes saying no has a way of adding to your allure. [Subscribe to Stranger Than Fiction.]( God Bless David Bowie. To promote his song Heroes, David Bowie coined the following phrase… “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.” I can’t pretend to know what he meant. But, for me, it’s a poetic reminder to keep my ear to the ground, to listen more than I talk and to create “purposefully” rather than just strictly “prolifically”. Easier said than done considering that creating in this day of age feels akin to telling a story at a dinner party –– you have to wait out the gaps in conversation and then speedily shout something interesting to have any chance at being heard. To combat this noisy environment, writers and creatives inevitably find themselves lowering the quality of their writing and creations whilst increasing the quantity, in hopes to get more eyes on their work. While consistency has been hugely instrumental in my career as a writer and it has allowed me to produce a fairly large body of work at a young age, consistency frightens me in that it makes me feel tremendously guilty if I have nothing to say for that particular day; it makes me feel as if by not saying anything, I risk falling behind. Guilt can be detrimental to the creative because I think pausing, staying quiet and refilling are just as much a part of the creative process as the actual creating is. David Bowie was notorious for being a voracious reader and I believe he not only enjoyed reading but he used it as an excuse to not “produce” while he was refilling his creative well. Something I’m trying to follow... Writing when I have something to say. Shutting the fuck up when I don’t. ["Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll love ya tomorrow."]( What this small town newspaper editor taught Stephen King about writing. [Before Stephen King was Stephen King]( he was hired on as a sportswriter at a small-town newspaper under an editor named John Gould. In King’s book On Writing, he gives Gould high praise by saying that Gould had taught him more in a ten-minute “editing session” than he had ever learned in all his other writing classes combined. [Here was Gould's advice.]( P.S. If this newsletter made you weak in the knees, you can share it with the world by selecting one of the four icons down below... [Send it.]( [Send it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Share it.]( [Share it.]( [Post it.]( [Post it.]( Copyright © 2021 Honey Copy, All rights reserved. A while back you opted into a weekly email called "Sticky Notes". Remember? If not, you can always unsubscribe below... and risk breaking this writer's heart. Our mailing address is: Honey Copy 3116 N. 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