WELLS, Maine —
Welcome to "Seems Like Hard Times." I was going to make a final post at "Living it up in Southern Maine," but what would be the point? My last post was April 3. It's not like people are refreshing the page.
Why the name change? Good question.
My first paid literary effort was the "Hard Times" column that ran in the York Weekly beginning in 1982. I was paid $10 for each column. I told my father I didn't think that was much money. He told me I was lucky they weren't charging me $10 a column to publish it.
I named the column after my boat, a 37-foot Jonesporter rigged for dragging. I didn't name the boat. The Hard Times was so christened by its previous owner, who was going through a divorce. Some people, my father among them, thought the name was a jinx. I did not. The first job of a fishing vessel is to bring the crew home safe, and the Hard Times aways did.For $25 a week I moved the "Hard Times"column to the York County Coast Star, in Kennebunk, a couple of years later. By and by I stopped writing it because the paper got a new editor who actually edited it. Nevertheless, he offered me a reporting job, so I quit fishing and started covering local meetings. I didn't go back to writing the column until I went to work at the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald a couple of years later, and then only for a short while.
The fishing vessel Hard Times eventually sunk in Northeast Harbor, where a friend of mine had taken it to go scalloping. We raised it with the help of local fishermen and some beer. The resurrected Hard Times sails to this day, as far as I know.
It would have been nice to relaunch the literary (I did not say literate) "Hard Times," but of course the name is taken, insofar as Google blogs go. My second choice would have been "Welcome to Hard Times," except that this is the title of an early E.L. Doctorow ("Ragtime," "Loon Lake," et cetera) novel. Titles are not copyrighted, for practical reasons — you'd run out of them — but you ought to think them up on your own.
By the way, if you like stories of the wild west, maybe even if you don't, "Welcome to Hard Times" is a wonderful book.
My frustration with the "Living it Up" blog occurred after several weeks, when I decided it needed more focus. More focus translated to no blogging. I now plan to focus on getting something written, not worry too much about the topic, and leave judgments about focus to readers who happen along.
My theory is that if a good writer targets a general audience, and is not too long-winded about it, readers will find his effort worthwhile. I would read anything written by John McPhee, for example.
Whether he'd read anything by me, of course, is another question.
