CAMP SWAMPY, OREGON - There isn't really a place called Camp Swampy, at least not here in Scappoose, Oregon, where I call home aboard my floating home across the river from Sauvie Island, northwest of Portland proper.
I nicknamed it that one dreary winter day three years ago when the rain never ceased and the everything was soaked - including me and my dog Biscuit. The name comes from the Beetle Bailey comic strip, where the army camp that Beetle and his fellow soldiers are stationed along with their commanding officer, General Halftrack.
Sometime amid moving around from Oregon and visiting the deserts in Southern California, the SF Bay Area and the California and Oregon coasts, I started posting a lot of my writing on Substack with a site titled Write On and On. That's a play on my newspaper column published weekly in the Finger Lakes Times in Geneva, NY titled Write On.
The FLT Write On continues to, well, write on and is published every Friday. But I have been tinkering with Substack, posting 123 times by last count. I jumped on using this online posting vehicle in part because I want use it to publish my fiction. My one foray into that was a success. I published The Devil's Pipeline, a novel that I published in paperback several years ago. It received plenty of hits from readers.
My next big Substack project is to publish an in-process novel in serial form, a la what Charles Dickens did in the 19th century. Most of his famous works appeared in newspapers, a few chapter at a time.
In process? It means I will be writing much of it live, even the day before (or day of) when chapters appear. Gulp? Yes, it's risky business. But as long as I don't write myself into corner, it should be fine.
More on all that later in another posting. And if you don't see it here, take a peek over on Substack.
