Day 28: Credo

 This post will be kind of a test for me. Instead of working it up on the word processor or collecting notes throughout the day to give me some starting ideas, I'm just diving right in. That's the test, though. I really want to see how this turns out with just a purely spontaneous attempt. 

I have seven days left in the school year, which is to say I actually have nine days I'll be required to show up at my school and work, but I count myself in the group of teachers that only keeps track of instructional days. Once the teaching part of the year is done, we start shedding stress minutes after that final bell that sends the kids home for the summer. I don't mind coming in to work another two days after I'm done teaching. In fact, a part of me is kind of looking forward to it. (It's worth clarifying that I have one less instructional day and one more non-instructional day because distance learning staff is on a slightly different schedule. 

The reason I'm bringing this up is because as soon as my summer break is officially underway, I plan on starting to write my next manuscript for real. I've played at it a little during the past several months, and I've collected a great number of invaluable notes, but I knew I wasn't going to be at my best while trying to wander through Pandemic Fog, so I pushed the start date back to the beginning of summer. Now that this date is so very close, I feel much more ready to begin than I did six or three or even two months ago. Because of that, I think it's time to write out my credo. 

I got this idea from one of my writing professors. I was declared as an English major with a creative writing minor once upon a time, before I switched over to elementary education. I already had enough English credits to just reconfigure them into a minor, and that included two of the three creative writing classes I was slated to take. One was playwriting, which I only took because fiction was full that quarter. Ironically, a play is the only thing I've actually been paid to write...so far. If you were a fan of Elk River Community Theater productions back in 1995, hey, thanks for coming!

Surprise! I digress. I told you this wasn't prewritten -- now you see the rambling evidence. Anyway. The idea of composing a credo as you are about to begin a big writing project is supposed to put you in a mindset of what it is you want the new project to be. It gives you a document you can refer to later that will let you reflect on what you wanted to story to be like in the beginning, what it's becoming, and how much of the original idea do you still want to preserve. With that in mind, here are ten big things I've learned during these past months about what I want out of the manuscript I'm about to write: 

1. It's horror. When I started getting serious about writing back in college, I wrote horror almost exclusively, probably because most of my fiction of choice was Stephen King. This one is a ghost story. I don't want readers to react to it with jump scares from shocking moments or stomach turns from scenes of attention-grabbing gross-outs, but I want them to get chills. I want goosebumps rippling through their skin. I want them turning more lights on if they dare to read it at night. During those last intangible moments before falling asleep, I want them speculating about what in the supernatural realm could possibly be real, and hoping it isn't.

2. I want my cast of characters to be so thoroughly and intricately developed that they could be taken out of the ghost story and dropped into nearly any other story and remain intact. 

3. I want the story I tell around the scary parts to be compelling enough on its own that it could stand as a novel without having to rely on the haunty parts.

4. At least once, I want the readers to hurt. The kind of hurt where they have to put the book down and walk away from it for a time, if not holler and curse me out for what I've made happen.

5. I want readers to have characters they either love or pity or fear, or maybe all of those things at once.

6. I want to establish a sense of place so tangible that someone reading the book and getting really into it would feel surprised to find themselves at home when they look up from the pages.

7. I want moments, either of the story or the characterization, to border on literary. It's hard to explain precisely what I mean by that. I tend to think of literary fiction as the kind of book where the structure and style of the pure writing is just as important, if not more important, than the story itself. (It's possible and super likely there are hundreds of people in publishing who would say my description of literary is completely wrong, by the way, but I'm kind of in the "who cares" camp on this. It's my credo after all, not theirs.)  I'm not looking to write literary fiction; this is legitimately the first full manuscript I'll be attempting with an adult audience in mind, and I honestly don't know if I even have "literary" in my skill set. But moments of it? I can accidentally back into writing the occasional good line, so I think I can pull it off. 

8. I want things to happen that people will not predict. I don't want to color so far outside the ghost story lines that I'll find myself working in a completely different coloring book, but I do want to steer around the more obvious tropes of the genre.

9. In my mind, I'm aiming for somewhere around 400 pages. Of course, there would be at least nine different hoops to jump through before attaining that number, even if it turns out to be reasonable for the story. But I like the idea of writing something with just a little bit of heft to it.

10. I want to write something that will make readers remember my name. Not because remembering my name is all that important to me (other than hopefully getting them interested in a follow-up someday), but because I want it to be that level of good. A story strong enough to make people pause and look at the cover and think, "Damn. Who is this guy?" 

And there we have it! Credo established, notes taken, mind organized. The real work begins in just over two weeks. It'll probably be ready for my usual circle of aggressively-recruited volunteers to read in...well, let's be honest: God alone knows how long. But someday.

Day 23: The Songwriting Conundrum

There are so many things I love about music. I can’t claim to like all of it — most of country music and a lot of what passes for modern day Hip Hop and Top 40 hits leaves me, I suppose, as perplexed as anyone else from older generations that shockingly doesn’t find any connection to music that never intended to include them in the audience to start with. 

The voice of the singer doesn’t need to be perfect, but needs to match and express the emotion of the song. It helps if the recording of the song demonstrates that the musicians involved are strong players, or, at the very least, devoted to their craft. Most of the time I prefer songs with a measure of complexity, the kind that sound either like the lyrics are raw with feeling and were bled out of the writer, or the music was meticulously composed so each note would be as thoughtfully placed as all the others, or both. Which isn't to say I can’t appreciate a simple and nasty Def Leppard guitar hook, either. 

If I think of the songwriters I respect the most, for whatever reasons, I find they share a lot of the qualities I’ve listed above. Granted, songs and recordings of songs are two different things; this is why the Grammy awards have had prizes for “Song of the Year” to recognize the songs and “Record of the Year” to recognize the performances. When I think of peak songwriting, I almost automatically think of Bruce Hornsby. I suspect most people reading this would either think (a) “Who?” or (b) “That guy who did 'The Way it Is' and maybe three other pop hits in 1988?” Yeah. Him. If you only know him from his radio hits thirty-five years ago, you’ve missed out on much of a remarkable music career. The guy is not only a sickeningly talented multi-instrumentalist (he’s likely a true genius when it comes to the piano), but his writing builds songs into living things that almost feel like novels. He may not be the only songwriter perched on the apex of any pyramid representing songwriters from the past fifty years, but he has his share of the real estate up there.

If, or really when, the day comes when I attempt to write at least one honest to goodness song, I know his work is going to be the direction I try to follow. I’d be lost faking my way through a chain of “Sha na na na Na na whoa-OH” sing-along choruses, or looking for the perfect coupling of romantic notions that followed both a syllabic pattern and a rhyme scheme. If I take a run at it for real, I want to aim for something that evokes a feeling of time and place, something that taps into our collective memory and brings back feelings that, while they may be a little different for everyone, will remind people of what they felt at one time, and maybe still wish they could feel again, if only for a moment. After all, if you’re going to try and tell a story, heartbreak is infinitely more interesting than happiness.

As for the music? Nope. I know my wheelhouse. I'll stick to expressing myself through the lyrics, thank you very much. Luckily though, I have a potential collaborator at the ready who I know could conjure up the music needed to match whatever I might have to say. It’s really just a matter of what and when such a project might begin.

Summer maybe? I guess we'll see....

Day 20: Q & A, 2021 Version

 Okay. Here we go….

Gardetto’s or Savory Chex Mix?

I don’t know if I’ve ever had Savory Chex Mix if it’s a store-bought product. I’m okay with Gardetto’s, even if they put in too many pretzels and those big delicious roundish flat things that remind me of the little packs of crackers that family restaurants had on the tables back in the 70s and early 80s always make me afraid I’m going to break a tooth. 

What are the top 5 Doritos?

In almost no particular order: 

*Nacho Cheese

*Cool Ranch

*Sweet Chili

*Taco

*The best kind of Dorito, tragically, isn’t made anymore. Back in the late 80s/early 90s, there was a flavor called “Jumpin’ Jack,” and they were AMAZING. If I could go back in time, I would go back to the back half of my college years, find a Tom Thumb store, and buy enough to bring back until I died.

This also seems like a good time to mention the Dorito thought experiment I came up with a few years ago, which is an offshoot of the Peanut M&M thought experiment: In every bag of Peanut M&Ms, there’s always one M&M with a rotten, stank peanut in it that ruins the bag. I’d argue that probability dictates that eventually there would be (or has been) an entire bag that consists of nothing but M&Ms with rotten peanuts inside of them. On the flip side of this, almost every bag of Doritos has at least one Dorito with a deliciously inordinate amount of flavor powder on it, which leads me to believe that there will eventually be (or has been) a bag of Doritos that consists of nothing but Doritos with way more than normal amounts of flavor powder.

5 favourite bird species (I didn't put the "u" in there)

Thanksgiving turkeys

Rotisserie chickens

That bird that they had a funeral for on The Office

Whatever species Freddie’s bird toy, which we call Bird, is supposed to be

Cardinals, since Erin sometimes uses them to talk to me.

Three things you are going to do after you close up your classroom for the year

Um…maybe I shouldn’t say this too loud, but I’ve been farmed out into another distance learning classroom since I got back, and my classroom has been used as a potential Covid triage center in my absence. So, technically, instead of closing up my room I only need to pray hard and frequently that it will be nice and clean and Covid-free and safe when we return in the fall. But to not ditch the question: 1. It is my great hope that people will be going out to lunch after all of the last day packing is done so I can see my friends one last time altogether and get some feeling of closure on the year. 2. I’ll come home and feel an odd sense of displacement for the rest of that night. 3. I will proceed to spend the following two weeks not doing a single worthwhile thing, and just being instead.

What is your favorite kind of popcorn/movie snack?

It’s changed over the years. If I was going to see a movie this weekend, I’d get a popcorn with butter and some salt, not going crazy with either, and a Fountain mixed Cherry Vanilla Diet Coke.

What is something you are looking forward to, and what is something you are glad is over?

Kind of a basic answer, but I’m looking forward to that first Monday of summer break. The frustrations have been different than usual and low-grade compared to most years, but they’re still there. I am very happy that my taxes are done. 

What would you have liked to have seen happen for the ending of Game of Thrones?

I think generally it was okay. I thought Dany going crazy would have worked if that story arc would have played out over two seasons instead of two episodes. So much had been put in motion to make Jon Snow the king that he should have been in the end, but if it went that way I would have liked to have seen him move all the Kingly stuff out of King’s Landing and either back to his hometown or beyond The Wall.

What kind of tree do you think would be best for drinking a beer under?

Not being a beer drinker, I have to defer to my cousin Paul on this one.

What are your top 5 concerts and why?

*Spock’s Beard reunion for Morsefest and a live performance of their Snow album, and not just because Dax and I are both visible in the concert video that was recorded that night

*Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band on the Tunnel of Love Express Tour

*Rush on the Time Machine Tour at the Gorge in Washington

*Dream Theater in Seattle in 2014

*One of Bruce Hornsby’s shows with his whole band; they’ve all been too great to differentiate between.

Have you ever met a celebrity and if so who was it?

I’m going with Justin Cronin on this and I don’t care if there are all kinds of people who don’t recognize his name. In my eyes, he counts.

What is the most rebellious thing you did in high school?

I was a huge nerd in high school, and got all the rebelliousness out of my system in 9th grade. Maybe that time I kicked a hole in the wall of the hallway? Does that count?

What is your most favorite thing to do?

Anything that allows me to relax and enjoy the rare moments when there is absolutely nothing stirring up stress or worry in my life.

If you weren’t a teacher (or an author) what would you be/what would you do for a living?

I know for a fact if I were to ever go back to college to earn another degree to either pursue a new career or just out of personal interest, I’d absolutely want to be a sociologist. I think I could pull off being a therapist too, if I could put my own issues aside long enough.

If someone owns a piece of land, do they own it all the way to the center of the earth?

Only in Texas. Everywhere else the cutoff point is eighty-seven feet.

If you could go on vacation anywhere in the world (and not worry about COVID), where would you go and why?

The most obvious answer would be to go to Seattle to see my PNW family, since I haven’t been there in years. More bucket-list wise, I think Iceland or New Zealand would be interesting destinations.

How much would you need to win (lottery or other) to be “okay” for the rest of your life?

I am a man of simple and humble needs. In lottery terms, I’d need enough to maybe buy a nicer, but not crazy nicer house, a good, comfortable, reliable car, be able to sustain a modestly comfortable lifestyle that would allow me to live out my years with a rotation of trophy wives and subsequent divorces.

What is your all-time favorite pair of pajamas?

The blue ones. 

If you could only get sammiches from one place for the rest of your life, where would you go?

A really nice grocery store, because they’d have a really nice deli and the widest variety of ingredients scattered throughout the inventory.

Where do you start brushing your teeth, inside top, outside top, inside bottom or outside bottom?

Paul, you’ve asked this in a previous Q & A. And I already answered it. It’s time we all moved on.

If you could be any combination of two animals (varied features), what would you be?

An enigma. 

5 places you’d like to visit:

Since I already mentioned Seattle, Iceland, and New Zealand, I’ll make new choices:

*The version of New York City that exists exclusively in Nora Ephron movies

*Las Vegas, since I haven’t been there in about twenty years, but only in August when it’s 114 degrees there because that was an otherworldly experience

*The office of an editor at a Big Five publishing house after my eight-figure book deal was solidified

*I’ve heard intriguing things about this “Mall of America”

*Any performance venue in the greater Seattle area where Alter Bridge was performing.

John Carlson?

Some questions are without answers.

Day 12: Staying Creative (or not) During the Pandemic

 The past fourteen months have brought different levels of stress, depression, and anxiety into our lives. In my experience, these things aren't exactly conducive to creative production. The thing is though, any degree of "author" I can claim still comes with the tag "unpublished." In my mind, this means that I have to keep doing the work. If I'm waiting to hear about editorial submissions? Keep working. If I'm waiting for feedback on a manuscript? Keep working. If I loaned out a copy of a manuscript to a friend (or several) and they too busy with their own lives to read it as immediately as I'd like? Keep working. While one thing is out there, start in on the next. 

The first part of the pandemic wasn't as difficult to keep working; I'm very used to the routine of setting aside big parts of my summer to do a lot of writing, so if anything having that routine established helped me last year. I had a relatively new manuscript to revise, and since revising is more about directed creativity instead of raw creative production, that might have been easier to do. I worked HARD at it, I still feel pretty good about what I produced, even though surviving the first few months of distance learning at the end of last year was siphoning off my energy. 

By the time it was fall, I had most of the work done and enough momentum to finish the revision. I thought I'd be able to go writing into another National Novel Writing Month, but it turns out I got pandemic'd pretty hard instead. I had a good book idea, but I knew the draft would have to be well over 50,000 words. I kept working, I hit 50,000, I came up with some good stuff, but the process was too forced and mechanical and lifeless. I decided to pause that project and start another one, an idea that was gaining traction at the time. This idea actually was a big deal for me, since, after a handful of false starts, held promise to be the first manuscript I was going to write outside of middle grade. This was going to be a full-on, no holds barred ghost story. The kind of books that will make it hard for grown-ups to sleep at night.

After my Nanowrimo misfire though, which absolutely was affected by all the negative Covid energy, I was hesitant to dive right into starting another manuscript. I'd planned to, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense not to. It seemed better to let it develop. Let the idea take up space in my head, and write down the ideas that came to me. I ended up doing that for months. Everything distance learning was sapping me pretty dry anyway, and I sure didn't want to go back into forcing another manuscript into not working, just because I feel each passing year so acutely and it makes me wonder how many years of a writing career I will ever get to claim once it gets started. 

But I put that separate category of anxiety aside, and just let the divergent part of the brain work on the story. I didn't think word count, or chapter organization. I thought about character. I thought plot, and setting. I thought of secondary characters and how they'd tie the main ones together or drive them over the edge, or be the thorns in their sides that would act as a catalyst for one of several interwoven plot lines that had started to form. There was no formula, no checklist, but just recording ideas on my phone, writing them on the whiteboard in my office, saving them in a document on the laptop. I'd dissect why the books I read worked or didn't worked, and learn what I could from that. I thought about history, I'd ask people who knew more about some of the plot points how things could really happen. It wasn't that long ago I was kind of stunned to realize that I had planned everything out so thoroughly and methodically that I knew the world and people of this story so well, I could have used them all to tell a completely different story that wouldn't rely on the horror elements and could still be compelling just as a literary work. 

I guess if I were going to reflect back on the original question for this post "How have you stayed creative during the pandemic?" I'd have to answer with two points: 

1) I didn't always. 

2) When it happened, it usually happened one voice memo at a time.

Day 3: Building a Mini-Bucket List

During an early morning Target run this past weekend, I bought a new package of Post-It Notes to use on my fridge this summer. If you’re new to the idea, I’ve spent most of the past few summers turning the front of my refrigerator into a massive To-Do list of summertime activities, with each note listing something else to do, which I peel off and throw out as I complete them. Hopefully by the time school starts again in the fall I’ve finished off at least most of the things I had listed. It’s a good cure for the days when you can’t think of anything to do.

I didn’t do it last year, because the options of what to do seemed so severely pandemic-limited and the only thing really on my list was stay home and not die. However, the world seems to be regaining some of its equilibrium. Even though Covid is hardly resolved (and seriously, if you think it’s gone or will end anytime soon you have some real self-searching to do), life does feel slightly less dangerous than it did a year ago. I’ve gotten pretty good at managing a safe lifestyle, and I’ve had both of my shots. Maybe the occasional measured or controlled risk wouldn’t be completely inappropriate? After all, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph — I did actually go inside a Target store, and buy things. Clearly I’m ready to live on the edge.

In all seriousness I have no plans on going crazy with the “open world” idea. But I love my vaccines and the increased security I’ve learned to feel with their 95% efficacy. I think getting out and doing a few things might not be so bad under the right conditions. After a year of isolation, there are a lot of things I’ve always enjoyed, particularly in the summer, that I missed after holding back from doing them.

There are things I’d like to do that I’m not ready to yet, and even some bigger, more adventurous things that I’d like to try someday. But in the short term? There are the things I’ve missed being able to do. There’s stuff I’d like to try, projects I’d like to attempt, things about my life I’d like to work on trying to change, for real. People to see. Skills to develop. The kind of unremarkable but still unusual and potentially memorable experiences to be collected that would be worth the investments of time and effort. 

I think a lot of people might see life this way now, divided between Before Covid and After. Speaking for myself, living through an existential threat (shut up, science deniers) gives you a watered-down version of the perspective that I imagine people who’ve experienced near misses with illnesses or injuries probably feel. They survived, and come out the other side with an appreciation of the opportunities, the potential, and the promise life still holds.

I’ve never really had an official Bucket List so much as some things I hoped I’d get to do or see someday. I’m not thinking in terms like that here, at least not exactly. Instead of putting together a checklist of things like exotic places to visit, I’m thinking of smaller things, sort of like the things that really I could have done at almost any point but never took advantage of the opportunities to do. The smaller things. It seems to me as I start thinking about another summer with my fridge hidden beneath a layer of Post-It Notes, this might be a summer to try and accomplish some of those things.

For example: I’ve never been big on spending a lot of time in the city. Really, it’s just not my thing. I was brought up in small towns, and I’m relatively comfortable here in the blandness of the suburbs. But I’ll admit I can enjoy the energy of the city when I’m there, at least if I'm not trying to steer a grade level through a field trip. Maybe taking the commuter train downtown to meet up with a friend for lunch sometime could be a nice little fun-sized adventure. Of course I’d have to feel comfortable about riding the train, which is far from a lock right now, but we’re really just throwing around hypothetical spitballs here, so why not consider it for the list.

I’d like to give my dog a chance to see more of the world around him than he has; he likes exploring the neighborhood, so he might like getting out a little further. I have friends with dogs he could meet. It could make for a fun evening to go visit with some of them some summer evening, and maybe sit outside for dinner. I’ve been a writer for so long, and my best friend is a professional musician. We’ve talked for decades now, literally, about trying to collaborate on writing at least one song. I know he’s game for it and is just waiting for me to have an idea. Maybe this could be the summer to really try. A few years ago a friend of mine and I joked about making a day trip up North to visit a mutual friend with an alpaca farm and shop. That could be fun. I'm almost certain it would be.

The way I see it right now, I have a little over a month to really zero in on what would be the things that could both enhance my summer and help me fill in some of the overall life gaps I’d like to close while I still have the chance. Even if I only managed to address some of them in the end, I think it'd be worth the attempt.

Pandemic Narrative Part 16: The Beginning of the End

I started writing these narratives back on March 14th, intending to give myself a way to trace how the pandemic changed the world around us throughout its duration. I wrote up a list of ten thoughts on that first post. It seems appropriate on this one, the last post of the year, that I should do the same.

1. Since I’ve included statistics in each pandemic narrative, I feel I should keep that going. Worldwide: 81.5 million cases; 1.78 million deaths. America: 19.4 million cases; 347,000 deaths. This means approximately one out of every one thousand Americans has died from this. If that count been the result of a war, I’m pretty sure that both politically and socially we would be much more united around the idea of working against it than we currently are. However, I’m now able to add a new statistic to the tally: So far, there have been 2.1 million vaccines given. A start.

2. I don’t like this about myself, but I’ll own it: I rarely start a new year with optimism. I think it’s fair to attribute this to losing my sister: When the new year rolls around I always carry at least a small suspicion that there’s going to be a day when I’ll be expecting everything to be normal, and life will put up a serve that resets it in a darker light, and everything will be about trying to survive and process the experiences that follow. Vaccine production aside, there’s still a pandemic going on, and there are still reasons for all of us to begin 2021 with active caution. On the plus side though, at least the most incompetent, self-centered, ignorant, and corrupt president in all of American history, whose foolishness is largely responsible for the predicament we’re in, will be out of office in a few weeks.

3. I honestly feel like I’m one of the few people left on Earth who still bothers to live with any precautions. Cars pass my house all day long like they always have. On the rare days I go to Target for a curbside pickup, all of the parking lots are full. I have filled my car's gas tank twice since March. Granted, I have no metric for what the outside world is like, other than the way the selfish, headstrong few will broadly paint social media with proclamations of their bold stands against anything they’ve been asked to do in the name of public health. Feeling like I’m one of the 0.0004% of the population still striving to adhere to anything but the bare minimum of staying safe is disheartening. It only compounds the isolation. Even if it’s mostly imagined, it feels just as real when you don’t have any evidence in front of you to prove it’s wrong.

4. What will it be like when the world begins to once again take the shape of something recognized as normal, whenever that might happen? How long until the world is safe again? How difficult will that transition be, to rejoin the world? Being an introvert has helped tremendously as far as the isolation goes, but introverts are not, by nature, antisocial. I don’t mind wearing masks, but my God, I can think of maybe five times in the past nine months I’ve even touched another person. 

5. There’s no way this isn’t taking a mental toll on me beyond what I immediately recognize. Many people who’ve known me have heard me say how I feel like I drop off the face of the Earth for someone else unless I’m directly in their line of sight. That’s never been more real now, feeling tucked away like stored human surplus that society has found a way to manage without.

6. I also feel a sense of wasted time, which is probably a reflexive response since I’m always so ready to be self-critical. I haven’t baked any bread or learned any new languages online. I haven’t read a fraction of the books I could have, or caught up on classic movies or developed a yoga routine or painted any rooms or learned the ukulele. But then I remember the time I put into revising a new book, and how difficult that was, and I’m quite proud of the accomplishment. I feel this one could be my best shot at publication, at least as far as middle grade goes. I still think it’s a weird story, but it’s thought-provoking, it’s original, it’s fairly well-written (if I’m allowed to think that about my own story), and I’m anxious for more people in the world to know about it, even if in the immediate that only amounts to a handful.

7. If I were to go back to school and earn another degree, just to pursue an interest, I think I’d study sociology. Because of that, I’ve often wondered exactly what the tipping point was for America, when we went from agreeing to shelter in place and behave in ways meant to preserve the greater good, then shifted over to so much more of a “Well, I’m not sick/This is a free country, don’t take away my rights” ethos. The idea of “we’re all in this together” that was so prevalent back in the spring has worn away to nothing but a faded platitude. I fear that perspective, as well as the reactions to it, will make it much harder for our society to recover and reunite. I’m afraid things will continue to get worse before we see any significant social healing.

8. How much longer is this going to go on? The vaccine is here. When will I be able to get it? When will the rest of my family be eligible? Which one will it be? What will be the circumstances of its availability? Everything about this is still new; there’s no way to see past the next turn in the road when no one has ever traveled the road before. 

9. Do I really want life to go back to what it was before once the world comes back together? Honestly, not in every way. I’m not sure if this is a reaction to the beginning of a new year, but I feel like the pandemic is still going to be around long enough to use this as a transformational time. How could I take steps, even tentative ones, that would develop over time to replace the things in my life I’m dissatisfied about? How much of that thinking is my own motivation, or coming from subtle pressures of what society has to say about what I should be, or what other people in my life expect of me? God knows how many years I have left. Ten? Twenty? Twenty-five? Six? There’s no telling. What do I want that time to be like? What would make it the best, the happiest, version of a life I could build around myself? Has there ever been a more appropriate time for that kind of self-examination? I keep falling back to the idea of where my priorities should be, and why (or if) the things I've held as important are necessarily things that should even be considered priorities. 

10. Like I said, I rarely start the year with optimism. However, there’s always that flicker of hope that refuses to die. We all have dreams and aspirations. We all have anxieties we’d like to banish from our lives. Could 2021 be the year when things drift to the positive, and things will go our way? Will we be gifted with small pieces of individual balance to reward us for what we’ve endured? 

I suppose we’ll start to discover that in a few more days. 

Pandemic Narrative Part 15/Big Block of Cheese Day

If you don’t know the Big Block of Cheese Day reference, then you haven’t watched enough episodes of “The West Wing.” Quick description: There are some posts here on the blog when I have different things on my mind at once, so instead of deciding on one as a topic, I put together some shorter posts inside one longer one. I’m also tagging this as part of the overall pandemic narrative as well, since each topic is somehow related to Covid-19 and its aftermath. Because what isn’t these days?

THE ACTUAL PANDEMIC NARRATIVE PART

There are more than 9 million Covid-19 cases in the United States. By the time you read this, there will probably be 230,000 deaths. Our President is a liar, and anyone who believes him when he says we’re turning the corner and the military will be able to delivery 70 bajillion doses of the vaccine in time for Thanksgiving leftovers is too naive for words.

Since the last time I updated the narrative, Covid caught up with my family and knocked back one of my blood relatives pretty damned hard. He’s doing a lot better now, thank God, and hopefully will be done with all of it much sooner than later. It was maddening when he was in the thick of struggling with it, and all my family could do was wait and see what happened. The last I heard was he was hoping to return to work in a couple days. Fingers crossed he does, and that’s the end of it for him.

Minnesota is on fire. We’re currently experiencing thousands of new cases daily, which of course means more hospital beds are occupied, and tragically more people are dying. None of this seems to have any impact on the people who have succumbed to their Pandemic Fatigue or their Covid Anger, or the cultists who still feel this is a hoax and “refuse to live in fear.” Anyone out there walking around feeling emboldened by the armor of their ignorance who wants to blather on about how Covid is a hoax? Acting with caution and living in fear are very different. I hope things aren’t going to catch up with you and show you how seriously you should have taken this. Sadly, I think that will inevitably be the case with some. I just hope getting to watch your kid take a few hikes during his senior year of high school football will have been worth it.

SHIFTING LEARNING MODELS DURING THE PANDEMIC AGE

The state and the school districts have said since back in the summer that it was likely the learning models being implemented would change throughout the school year, depending on the spread or containment of the virus. Four weeks ago, our district was considering returning the hybrid students to a full-time model. Two weeks ago, they saw that couldn’t happen. Two weeks after that, or now, they’re arranging for the secondary students to begin a full distance learning model while the elementary students remain in a hybrid. Elementary could potentially change to distance learning as well, provided the Covid data being monitored locally ever necessitates such a change. 

Predictably, there are many people and families who agree with more careful learning models, as well as many who feel the amount of implemented caution is too extreme. Somehow (45) this has been bastardized into being a political issue. This is leading to a lot of raging comment threads on social media, many of which assign teachers as the most identifiable face of the school system and freely bash away at them (us) as if they’re (we’re) the ones making these decisions, instead of the elected officials and district administrators following the science. It’s really unfortunate that our community is struggling so much to come together at a time like this to and support each other through the unprecedented challenges we’re all experiencing. I would like to suggest to anyone who may someday invent a time machine that your best move would be to travel back to Harvard around the turn of the century, and convince Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend not to dump him. Then maybe social media will never have a pathway of coming into being, and everyone in the world will be happier and get along better for it. 

NANOWRIMO 2020, OR RAGING AGAINST THE EMPTY

I’m just going to say it: I’m coming off a bad week. Why was it bad? I wish I knew. There was no starting point when things went from their standard neutral to bad, but it sure happened. There wasn’t a lot of smiling or laughing going on, at least outside of the time I was with my students. Sleep was more of an interruption in the darkness than an escape, when it even came. Emotions ebb and flow, however. Yesterday was net positive, and today feels nice and normal. Bad days come, sometimes stretches of them, but they also balance out. Plus there are things people can do to fight back the negative. Those things are probably different for each of us, and I feel like I have a basic understanding of what a few of my things are. One of them is definitely reading a good book. Here’s the one I picked: 

It took one book for Justin Cronin to become one of my favorite authors. I met him at a book signing in 2012 for his novel THE TWELVE, which is the second novel in the trilogy that started with THE PASSAGE, a horror novel that, coincidentally, began as a story about a pandemic that started with a bat and decimated the population. As he signed my book, I mentioned I was a teacher hoping to be an author someday. He said he’d started out the same way, which of course I already knew.

Four years later when CITY OF MIRRORS came out, I was back for another book signing, but this time with a different story to share. Instead of buying my copy of the book at the signing, I brought my own, which my agent had given me as a birthday present a few weeks earlier after she somehow managed to score a copy of it before it had even been released. You might think that shouldn’t be any great trick for someone in the publishing industry, but for a high profile book like this was at the time, it was no small feat. I was absolutely blown away. When it was my turn in the book signing line, I told Cronin how things had changed for me since his last signing. He shook my hand, congratulated me, and asked what I was working on. Then he wrote this with his signature.

I know that reading a good book does something to my brain, like flipping a switch that primes it to narrate. I recently decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month again this year, so it seemed like a good opportunity to start reading a good long book and tap into that priming action. I picked CITY OF MIRRORS because he’s a really good writer, I’ve only read it one time, it contains a section that I would argue is one of the best love stories ever committed to paper, and above all it’s a horror story, which is what I’m going to be trying to write next month. I’m putting aside the middle grade work for a shot at adult fiction, and specifically horror. I’ve been looking for a good horror story to tell for a while now. When I started writing for real in college I wrote horror almost exclusively, but I still haven’t done it as a full-length novel, at least in adult fiction. I’ve had a number of conversations with my agent over the past year about taking on a project like this, and decided I had to go forward with it after she gave the concept her blessing.

I can’t say I’m really excited about it, though. I’m very excited about the story, but not so much diving into another round of writing a whole damn book in a month. First of all, it won’t be a whole book: Nanowrimo only requires 50,000 words in 30 days, and my draft should be aiming for something closer to 80,000-90,000 before editing, which would be really taxing to do in 30 days. I still win if I hit the 50k mark, and I will win at this because I won’t allow myself not to, but I’m okay with finishing the rest of the story in December.

See, I realized earlier this month that I feel better when I’m creating something. I finished revising a middle grade novel a few weeks ago, and noticed that the darkest part of October started soon after I was done with that, and continued to get more pronounced the longer I sat on the sidelines. Writing lesson plans helped, believe it or not, because there’s a certain amount of creativity that goes into that. Everyone has their own ways of proactively fighting whatever depression or anxiety they might be experiencing during these crazy pandemic days. I think my fight has to do with reading and writing, between keeping my head occupied, filling me with whatever collection of hormones are dumped into my system when the reading ignites that narrative response, and the feeling that follows the achievement that comes from writing something that brings me a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing that I seem to need that so much, but it’s probably good that I recognize it. 

Okay. That’s enough for now. Since I can’t start working on the new book until tomorrow, I’m going to go do some reading instead.

May 31: Pandemic Summer

I’ve started past summers by covering my refrigerator door in a colorful array of sticky notes, creating a massive list of goals, hobbies, and adventures meant to fill my summer break with experiences and accomplishments. This summer I’m leaving it blank. 

This coming Friday would be Track and Field Day at my school. In a lot of ways, that day is the emotional starting point for the end of the school year. However, because of the coronavirus and distance learning, our Track and Field Day is virtual this year. No sweaty day out in the sun. No kids dumping out their water bottles on each other. No Tug of War, or Fifth Grade All-Stars competition, or dunk tank, or subsequent happy hour which I probably would have gone to this year.

The beginning of summer break is a wonderful time, the launch pad of so much possibility, and so many things to do. Go see a movie in the middle of the afternoon, if you want. Meet up with a few friends for lunch somewhere you usually wouldn’t go and catch up. Enjoy the open time without any immediate responsibility, or at least less of it.

This year though, I don’t know how much it will even feel like a break, at least for me. I haven’t seen my students in nearly three months, and I won’t see them as a group ever again. I’m sure it will feel like summer, with the pounding afternoon sun and the humid air and the occasional storm rolling through. So summer, sure. But a break from what? My work day for the third trimester has meant sitting in front of my computer screen each day, which is what a good chunk of each day will be like as I work (and yeah, it really is WORK) to write one new manuscript and revise another. That was always going to happen. Anything I would have had on the Sticky Note To Do List would have been distractions around it.

But this year, what’s going to happen in the outside world? For the second time in 2020, the world has gone through remarkable change for the worst almost overnight just this past week. George Floyd was killed not even a week ago, and not for the first time we’re finding so much of our lives affected by the actions of one violent ex-cop. Tragically there’s no way everything that followed that won’t lead to a second wave of COVID-19 by July, and my guess is that by then one community demanding justice and another wanting to go up North every weekend won’t eagerly welcome another shelter-in-place order.

So in my little world, there are a lot of things that either I really can’t, or shouldn’t, do, as well as things that would be pointless. There won’t be the traditional countdown to the first day back to school in the fall, because there’s really no telling what the fall will look like. There won’t be any boiling afternoons spent in a dark movie theater to retreat from the excessive heat and the storm watches, because even if the theaters were open there aren’t exactly any movies out for them to show. There won’t be afternoons or evenings, or sometimes even mornings, wandering the aisles of Cub or Target for an hour, only to arrive at the check-out with a cartful of things I don't really need. Live music is pretty much dead at the moment, so the one concert I was excited about attending has been postponed for at least a year, to say nothing of how there wasn’t even a Summer Concert Series at the MN Zoo amphitheater announced. I didn’t even bother trying to pick an Official Driving With the Windows Rolled Down Album of the Summer, both because friggin’ 2020 doesn’t deserve one and because the last time I filled my gas tank was mid-March and it isn’t even half empty yet.

On top of all this — no State Fair. Maybe at least on the Fourth of July I can try to watch the fireworks from that show near my house …maybe they’ll allow that with social distancing…at least on the fourth I can watch the Hot Dog eating con…nope, that’s getting shut down for sure.

I don’t know. I mean, I fully expect the Second Wave to hit like a tsunami, but maybe before it does I’m being too cautious. A lot of people are getting sick, but a lot aren’t. NO, that’s the kind of magical thinking that ends up with people in the ICU. I’m not taking any risks I don’t have to, and if that means more time in the designated pick up spots in the Target parking lot instead of in the store, so be it. I’m walking around with an underlying condition or two here. I’m not taking any risks I absolutely don’t have to. 

Besides, there are still a lot of things I can do. There are dozens of books to read in my house, along with the two of my own I’ll be working on. In fact, I’m halfway through the new Stephen King right now and have an older John Sandford mystery I still haven’t read on deck. I’ve got miles and miles of summer dog walks ahead of me, along with sunny afternoons we’ll spend in our chairs on the patio. There are all of those shows on Netflix people talk about, and I’ll probably take the final technology dive into Disney+ at some point, to anesthetize myself with Marvel movies. I’m also taking on the summer project of catching up on classic movies I’ve never seen; I think “From Here to Eternity” is actually recording as I sit here and write this. I have a well-worn copy of Fallout: New Vegas at the ready for any night I can’t fall asleep, now that I don’t have to worry so much about waking up to “go to work” anymore. And as far as shopping? I can get pretty much whatever I need delivered to my house. To paraphrase one of my students from an assignment they wrote about living through a pandemic, there’s a difference between the things you want and the things you need.

Whatever happens, the summer of 2020 promises to be both quiet (personally) and dramatic (publicly). Let’s just hope there’s still a world left out there when it’s time to start school again in the fall. 

May 11: Summer Plans!

I haven’t left my house more than ten times in the past two months. As of yesterday, there are 74 miles on my car since I last filled the gas tank…two months ago, and nearly half of them were from driving out to my parents’ house for Mother’s Day yesterday. From a certain point of view, I have become one of the people Tommy Shaw sang about in the slightly better than mediocre Styx song, “Too Much Time on My Hands.” You’d think, especially during a month when I proclaimed a week and a half ago I was going to be productive, that I’d manage to get a lot, or at least a little, writing done. I’d appreciate it if nobody asks how that’s going. 

I hate to sound like this guy, but sometimes I am: My headspace has a lot to say about whether or not I’m able to get any writing done. I don’t mean words on a page; I could sit down and push myself for an hour and have a thousand new words to show for it. The problem right now is that when the emotional/intellectual/physical/spiritual drain of working from the teaching end of distance learning is paired with the constant, yet vaguely mild, presence of the existential threat to self and society that comes with living in the days of COVID-19, it’s a struggle to put what’s left of yourself into making those words any good. You want proof? Two sentences back I wrote a sentence that was sixty-three words long. I mean, who does that?

Writing good words is a singular feeling. If you’re familiar with the flow state, imagine riding atop the flow on a surfboard with perfect, unshakeable balance. Things come at you so fast you have to fight to keep up. I haven’t been able to catch that wave in months. Maybe in short spurts, but not with the kind of sustained effort it takes to get any real work done. 

Generally I’m okay with this. I’d like to be using this time better, but I know that in times like these self care and all that, blah blah blah, so I have to allow myself to let a few things slide to focus more on the things I’m being paid to do, even if I’d rather not. 

But. That’s all going to change relatively soon. In less than a month, the donkey fest that was the 2020 school year will finally stumble over the finish line and my summer, such as it is, will be open. To be clear, by open I mean I won’t have any distance learning to deal with, not that I think the economy is going to be fixed and I’ll feel safe actually going anywhere. I always do what I can to get some writing done during the summer, but this year I think it’s going to be different. 

I have two projects I want to work one, one writing and one revising. My school day during this remote teaching gig has had two sets of office hours built into my schedule, the times when I had to be available online so they were the more productive parts of my day: 9-11 AM, and 1-3 PM. It struck me today that maintaining that same routine during the summer could be exactly what I need to get some real work done. Two hours in the morning, a mental break to recharge, then two more in the afternoon, then the rest of the day to do whatever needs to be done, or just wants to be done.

Before that idea occurred to me, I was thinking how transitioning from school to summer this year was going to be pretty anticlimactic. Now I’ve got something about summer to look forward to again. I have to say, it feels pretty good.

Middle Grade?

When I began writing short stories for real in high school, there was no purpose or intent behind it. I just had ideas come and thought they were cool, and writing them into stories felt right. That habit carried into college, and even into the earliest years of my teaching career. Being surrounded by kids for most of the year presented me with constant inspiration for stories to tell about the innocence, trials, and comedies of childhood. Eventually I had enough stories to assemble as a sort of anthology, and made a half-hearted attempt at trying to get them published. Of course that went nowhere since I only knew a fraction of what I needed to about how to do it right.

The next logical step was to write a book. This was terrifying. I hadn’t written any piece of fiction much longer than fifty pages, so just the idea of trying to write an actual book-length manuscript was daunting. And the phrase “trying to write” is used very intentionally here, because I had no idea whether or not this would be something I could even do. It felt like someone with three years of noodling around on a piano deciding one day to sit down and write a symphony. However, over the course of one summer break, mostly between the hours of midnight and three a.m. (back when I was physically able to be awake that late) I managed to write my first book. I felt great pride in the accomplishment, and even greater relief in knowing I could. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t terrible, and it had a few moments I’d probably still be proud of now if I could bring myself to read it. Most importantly, I was able to walk away from the experience knowing I had successfully crossed a new threshold.

That year of summer book writing was followed by a few more. I started feeling more confident and started thinking again that maybe what I was writing was worth trying to publish and it was time to try finding an agent. Through a combination of hard work, patience, and plain dumb luck, I finally broke through and connected with an agent, someone I get along with who understands my writing, always sees how it can be better, and encourages me to do more with it. Right now, while we're on submission with one project and in the middle of preparing another, she’s gently encouraging me to explore a brand new direction. 

I never consciously decided to write middle grade fiction. The stories I thought up were largely inspired by the shenanigans and lives of the kids at school, so those ideas came naturally. Branding is definitely a thing for authors, so if someone is known for writing in a specific genre or age level, typically that’s the wheelhouse where they stay. I don’t remember a lot of details about the first time I spoke with my agent on the phone, but I remember her asking something about middle grade fiction, and if that was the direction I wanted to go for a career. “Because you can write anything you want,” she said, a statement that jumped out at me in a conversation that was jumping out at me as a whole. Did she mean “You’re so talented you would be able to write any kind of book you want”? She’d only read one manuscript that still needed a lot of work, so that didn’t seem likely. Or was it “You don’t have to stay in middle grade if you don’t want to, and I’d be able to represent you in whatever direction you wanted to go”? I hoped her meaning came from a little of each.

She and I have done a lot of work in the past few years, and we’ve had a lot of conversations about writing and publishing in general. Early this year we brainstormed up what hopefully could be a good idea for a middle grade series, for which I’ve drafted two manuscripts in just the past several months. Just as that idea is gaining traction, she’s got me thinking hard about trying something outside of middle grade. That's right: In just the past few weeks, for the first time ever, I'm seriously thinking about trying to write something in mainstream adult fiction.

The problem is I haven’t written anything with an adult perspective in decades, and I have honest questions about whether or not I can do it, at least to any degree of quality. Maybe I’ve settled into children’s literature for so long that I’m solidly entrenched in that lane now. Maybe I’ll try something adult that won’t ring true. For me to even think about trying this feels very much like the apprehension I had some twenty odd years ago, making the leap from writing short stories to trying to write an entire novel. 

Maybe that’s a good sign, though. Scaring myself by wandering into unknown territory could be an opportunity for growth. Having viable projects for middle grade and working on something for adult fiction could be like throwing more than one message in a bottle into the ocean at once, and waiting to see which might be discovered first. 

All of this speculation and overthinking is probably beside the point anyway, since there’s so little I can control about what happens at this stage in whatever kind of writing career I might have. I guess in the end it all has to come back to the writing. That’s really the only part I can control, and it’s the part of the process that’s always been the most fun. 

Day 23: 10 Years Later

My first blog post was on May 23, 2009.

A few things that have changed since then:
*I had a dog. Then I had a long and fairly painful period without a dog. Now I have another.
*I went from my early 40s to my early 50s.
*I started writing the blog as a way to keep my writer brain in shape during the stretches of time when I wasn't working on any kind of a project. The idea of ever publishing anything was little more than a pipe dream. Now I have an agent and a manuscript on submission. I'm almost always either actively writing something or planning what to write next. I suspect this shift is probably the biggest reason why my regular posting has declined so much in recent years.
*The number of people who read any typical post started in the single digits, then gradually climbed into the dozens and hundreds, then gradually declined to far more modest numbers again. Undoubtedly a result of my sporadic posting. I'm still thinking hard about what, if anything, I really want to do about this. Any final decisions on this could well involve conversations and advice with that agent. I know there's at least one more post that demands to be written later this summer, but after that....?

Much of what has been written here over the decade has, in one way or another, reflected who I was or what was important to me at the time, whether it was translated through something intentionally stupid or goofy I wrote, or something that reflected a crisis I had been trying to reconcile. In that way it's been very much like a journal I started keeping in my senior year of high school and continued to write in, over five volumes, well into my teaching career. The big difference, of course, is knowing that whatever I wrote here always had a potential audience. A private journal is much more vulnerable and honest, which is why it's probably for the best that it no longer exists.

It was important to me to have daily posts this month, since doing so would push the blog to the landmark number of 30,000 visits and ten years of writing. I don't know if I'm going to add any more new content this month, though. This time around hasn't had the same internal motivation challenging me to come up with something new. I'm hoping this is a good thing and means I might actually be reaching a point as a writer where I don't feel like I have to prove myself to anyone, which would be a nice evolutionary measure. I acknowledge it could just mean I'm lazy. Or just tired. Because it's May and I'm a teacher and literally only other teachers are ever going to be able to understand what a potent combination that is for pure, uncut exhaustion.

My big goal this month was to try and find a way to name every post after a song title, which I've pulled off up until now, but I don't think I will anymore. I will keep posting this month (at least providing Facebook links), but instead of publishing new content I'm going to take a small celebratory lap for reaching this ten year mark. In the place of new posts I'm going to dig into the blog archives for some of my favorites that either had big reactions when they first came out or didn't get the attention I'd hoped for at the time. There are a few in there I really like, and I think people who spend time reading here might enjoy seeing them if they didn't the first time around.

Maybe I'll still add some new content this month, if I'm inspired. But if not, look for those older posts in the next few days if you're reading this now. And thanks for sticking with me for this long.

Day 22: Writer in the Dark

I remember reading an interview with Stephen King a long time ago. He was telling a story of how he had once been walking through the grocery store, looked up, and wondered what it would be like if a pterodactyl were flying around in there. From that random moment, his story "The Mist" came to life.

I read "The Mist" and thought it was cool. I also had a text-based computer game version of it, which I had been excited about but ultimately proved too frustrating to play for very long. I thought the movie version of "The Mist" was great, even if it had arguably the most disturbing ending of any Stephen King movie ever made.

It always fascinated me to think of how a story that took on such a life of its own had started with just a simple "I wonder" moment for the author. A lot of the things I've written have started off in similar ways, with just a strong image or half a premise that I can't shake. For example: Back in the 17-18 school year, I had regular recess duty for the first time in many, many years. Most of the time I didn't mind it. Sometimes it was even a nice break in the day. The important thing was it got me back in the playground. Out at the south end of our school playground is an enormous tree, both majestic and gnarled with age. The roots of it come up out of the dirt like strong knuckles holding onto the ground for dear life.

Maybe it was because it had been so many years since I'd been on the playground to have the time to get a good look at it, but something about the sight stuck with me. About a year and a half after locking on to that image, I found a story for it and wrote a creepy middle grade horror manuscript based in a tree, in three weeks.

A couple days ago I noticed this:

Right beside the parking lot I use every day, wedged between branches in a tree I usually park by, just below a small hole that has a family of birds living behind it, there was this baseball just sitting there.
My first thought was how some kid had been playing with it, probably left it there and then forgot about it. Not a stretch since it's been my considerable experience that most kids are true experts at forgetting about things. But that same ball was in the same place the following morning, and the morning after that, after a long night of pounding rains and punishing wind.

I sat there in my car staring at it through the windshield, and I started thinking: It must be wedged in there pretty tightly to have survived the storms. It had been a couple of days since it appeared and hadn't moved, so it was clearly lost property now. Why would someone have jammed it in there in the first place? That part of the school grounds isn't even close to anywhere kids would be playing anything that would involve a baseball. Was someone missing it? Was it hidden as part of a prank? And if it was, did the baseball have some kind of personal significance to the person who lost it? If it did, what? And, more importantly, why? There had to be some real backstory to how that ball had ended up in the tree. There were also infinite other speculative reasons about how it happened. My brain started collecting them. Not formally writing down notes or anything, but just latching onto some interesting ideas and stashing them in the mental vault.

I guess the point I'm dancing around here, if I can make it without sounding to self-important and arty (because I still feel a little uncomfortable with trying to call myself an artist) is that I think moments like this and the reactions I have to them a part of what makes me a writer. There have been very few instances, if any, when I've intentionally thought "I'm going to write a story about this topic" and go from there. Usually it has more to do with noticing the weird little incongruous things that surround us every day, and considering them from a slightly different perspective.

Maybe someday one of those partial ideas related to that baseball will find an existence. There are a couple already swimming around in the soup of what my Big Secret Project is right now, so it isn't impossible. Not that even this means those ideas will ever come to any fruition, but they sure are interesting to play with and wonder about.

Day 19: Book of Hours

One of my favorite things about summer break is having time to read. I still need to find a book to kick off my reading binge, but there's another one I really want to finish off first. The problem is I've been reading this book for at least a year and a half now.

It's not that it's long. In fact, it comes in at just around 450 pages. There have been a few paperback novels I've read in a day when I've had the time. If I take a trip somewhere, I usually go out of my way to find a book to bring, and I usually have the time to finish it before returning home.

This book is just really, really dull.

I won't say what it is or who wrote it; as I writer who hopes to someday be in a position when I have to be concerned about other people being hypercritical of my work, I just don't think that would be a cool move. I will say the author is very successful, and the book is in the vein of something like The DaVinci Code. The main character is something of a historian who backs into a longstanding governmental conspiracy and is soon way over his head. Most of the chapters are only a few pages long, which seems to be structured to propel the reader forward. My problem is that I'm so unengaged with all that's going on I can't seem to read more than ten or twenty pages in a sitting.

This book has gone for months at a time, sitting on a table untouched and waiting to be revived. I have the hardest time abandoning books completely, and can only think of maybe ten times I've ever done it. It becomes a quest after awhile, even if I don't enjoy the book. That's what this one has become.

If I get to a place where I just don't want to read it anymore, I've started trying to figure out why that is. What is it, specifically, about that book that I find so numbing or bothersome, or even repellant? There have to be good lessons there in that kind of analysis. Here are a few things I've figured out about this one:

1. The main character isn't interesting. He doesn't really have any agency in the story. He's more like a pinball, bouncing his way through the story and only reacting to things as they happen to him. There were early attempts at a backstory, but they just didn't catch my interest. Plus I read that part more than a year ago, so I don't remember much about them. Which is also a statement.

2. He's "in love" with an old middle school crush who came back into his life through the events of the story. The author isn't giving me enough about her to make me share the crush the way I think I'm supposed to.

3. The short chapter thing doesn't always work. Yeah, sometimes there are mini-cliffhangers I want to see resolved, but there are too many times he's not giving a scene enough time to breathe.

4. He keeps telling me about why this conspiracy is such a big deal, and yet I don't really feel it. He hasn't shown why, other than having a lot of characters with a variety of loyalties chase around the greater Washington, D.C. area after each other.

I think I have about 100 pages left. In a perfect world, I'll be ready to start a new book on June 9th. It'll probably be some John Sandford crime story, which is how I've started many a summer in the past. He's not perfect, but at least he's entertaining. And I always finish his books.

Day 11: The Writing on the Wall

Back in February, I wrote a new manuscript. It’s part of a Big Secret Project my agent Carrie and I have been talking about quite a bit this year. The manuscript is shorter than what I typically write, and because the ideas came so blessedly fast, I finished off the first draft in three weeks. Carrie and I talked about it a few weeks after that, once she’d had time to read it. Happily we both felt pretty good about it. At the end of our conversation she said something along the lines of, “If you wrote it in three weeks, you can probably get the revisions done in three more. Does that sound about right?”

I remember thinking, “Ah ha ha, I sure hope you’re joking.” By way of comparison for anyone who has read the manuscript for FOLLOWING INFINITY: We worked through revisions for that over the better part of a year.

Between conversations I have throughout the day with different people and things I post on social media, there are likely a good number of people who might not be completely sure what revision work is, or at least how I do it. Since I need an idea to fill another one of these May posts, I thought I’d give you a brief look into how painstakingly frustrating this work can be.

First of all, let’s start some basic definitions:

Writing: Taking an idea and growing it into a story. This can be done on paper, on a screen, or just in your brain. I see creative writing as a mental activity, not a physical one.

Editing: Fixing mistakes. Getting rid of the typos and spelling errors, cleaning up the grammar, correcting any electronic formatting mistakes. Trying to make the work you’ve done come across as more professional and easier for people to read and understand.

Revising: Making hundreds, if not thousands, of changes to the original writing to improve it. This could be anything from deleting an unnecessary word to reinventing the role of a specific character to adding four or five brand new chapters. Remember that year of FOLLOWING INFINITY revisions? Yeah. New chapters and re-imagined characters all over the place there, to say nothing of deleted words. And characters.

So, moving forward with those things in mind, here’s a very small peek at the new manuscript, and a quick example of the work that goes into revision. For our purposes today, I selected a random paragraph, only chosen because I had already included an editorial note of my own.

I wrote the manuscript more or less as a full first draft, and only went back to do one quick edit before sending it to Carrie. Carrie is a terrifyingly editorial agent, which is actually a good thing, mostly because it keeps me from stressing about making things perfect before I send them to her. I want to her to see the best I can do, but I also know she’s going to find things for me to work on that otherwise never would have occurred to me. Ninety-seven out of a hundred times she’ll be right.

Here you see today's paragraph, pretty close to it’s original state:

This paragraph happens early in the story. It's about two boys, our narrator Kevin and his classmate/rival Charles. Since this manuscript is shorter than the length I’d typically work with it requires a lot of economy. For example, this paragraph has to do these things: help establish that the main character, Kevin (unnamed in this paragraph) has a lot of experience climbing trees; showing Kevin is being challenged by other boys acting as allies against him; showing that his competitor, Charles, is both fairly athletic but probably a less-experienced tree climber; illustrating that the boys have already climbed pretty high.

Now, that highlighted blue box? That’s an editorial comment I left myself. Something about the section I highlighted didn’t work the way I wanted. I usually don’t fix these comments as I spot them because when I’m proofreading during revision, my brain is focused more on finding what to improve than how to improve. Here’s the comment:

So we know Bradley is somewhere on the bad boy spectrum between being a simple jerk and a full-on bully; he isn’t cheering for Charles to be supportive as much as he is to get in Kevin’s head. More importantly, I want to show that Charles got involved in this more for the challenge of climbing the tree and less to put Kevin in his place. This is a moment that will need to establish a lot of groundwork quickly in defining these characters: Bradley, the mouthy punk who tried to climb the tree and failed is now supporting Charles because it’s the only way he has left to come out on top; Kevin is someone easily baited, which Bradley knows; Kevin is very aware of where Charles is during the climb, and it’s important to him to be the first to reach the branch they’re climbing for; Charles is friends with Bradley, so he could be a similarly antagonizing character by association, but in this moment he’s more focused on trying to achieve a goal than trying to win a race. Charles has a lot of internal motivation.

As I reviewed this, I noticed something else, and added this highlighting:

The first red section? It’s about climbing the tree, and Kevin comparing himself to Charles. The second red section? Kevin again comparing himself to Charles. This tells me that either I should move one of these sections to connect them as one continuous idea, or find a way to rewrite them completely so both sections are part of the same idea. Great. Another thing to fix.

The last sentence in the paragraph right now seems okay. It references an earlier moment when Bradley accidentally tore his hockey jacket while trying to climb, and foreshadows things to come by highlighting that Kevin and Charles are already pretty high up, even though they still haven’t reached their goal. So, one sentence out of six that doesn’t need any work. That actually isn’t such a bad batting average.

Just to give some resolution to this post, here’s a revised version of this paragraph which hopefully fixes some of the things I wanted to address. I say “a revised version” because it’s entirely possible, if not likely, that more changes will still be coming.

There you go, a little insight into the lunacy of the revision process. I hope some people found it interesting. One paragraph down, only about 312 more to do. Wish me luck!

Day 1: One Last Time

Today is the first in another month of daily consecutive blog posts I’ll be writing throughout May. However, it’s very possible it will be the last time I do this.

I didn’t write anything during Nanowrimo this past November, after doing it more years than not since, I believe, 2008. I doubt I’ll participate again, since the question as to whether or not I can write a 50,000-word manuscript in thirty days has been answered repeatedly.

This past December I wrote another series of daily posts with accompanying photos to tell an annual holiday story about Cinnamon, the demented Elf on a Shelf that has plagued me for the past five years. I doubt that will happen again, either. This year’s story ended in a way I felt was conclusive, and I don’t think there’s anything more to say.

This blog, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” is ten years old this month. The reason I started it was to give myself a way to practice writing outside of a narrative structure. Back then I was picking away at one manuscript at a time when I felt inspired or found it convenient; this lackadaisical approach kept me from being as prolific as I probably should have been, so blogging seemed like a good occasional mental workout for those less active writing periods.

It’s a decade later, and things are different now. I have this blog to write, I contribute to another blog about children’s literature, and I have an agent to work with. Having an agent doesn’t mean everything about developing a writing career happens at an electric pace, but it does require more time and more intentional focus than I’d been putting forth before. If you want to get the work done, Rule Number One is you gotta show up to do it.

So, because of all that’s changed over these ten years, I’m undecided about the future of this blog.

I’ve almost shut it down before. In fact, I was weeks away from letting it disappear when I signed with my agent, until she convinced me it would be better to keep it as some kind of minimal online presence as a writer platform. Lately the key word there has been “minimal,” since I’ve only published a handful of posts this year leading up to this annual May surge. This lack of activity comes from the time and creative energy demands of other writing projects (it’s been my experience that creative energy is often a finite resource) as well as a simple lack of things to say. Posting regular content would be a great thing for a blog, but if that regular content amounts to regular episodes of boring, there isn’t much point.

Eventually Summer Vacation, like so many actual summer vacations, is going to end. The day will come when I have a book (or books!) to sell, and I’ll be recreating my online platform as an author web page instead of just a blog. Once that happens, I don’t see this continuing. But that's still in the future. After the month ends, we’ll see what kind of form it’s going to take. I have some ideas, but a lot can change in a month. But for now, I still have the challenge in front of me to go another full month with different posts for each of the thirty-one days.

Except I am planning to cheat a little at the end of the month. Even though I’m posting every day, it won’t all be new content this year. As we get closer to the end of the month, I’m going to dig up and repost some of my favorite older posts, including a few that maybe didn’t have the audience I’d hoped for at the time, to mark the 10th anniversary. It’s also worth mentioning that if this May turns out to be like any of the previous Mays I’ve done this, my hit count will reach 30,000 page views at some point. To commemorate that benchmark, I’ll make the same offer here I made a few years ago: If anyone notices they turn out to be the page view that hits that mark, they should let me know it was them and I will honor some kind of writing-related request that the two of us can work out.

All right then. Let’s see where this month takes us.

Day 31: Somebody to Love

We’ve reached the end of another May, the sixth consecutive one I’ve written daily posts. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I chose this month way back when I started this since it’s so close to what can feel like the longest and most stressful month of the school year. I figured forcing myself to write something new each day would both distract me from anything unpleasant I had going on that would be better off left at school, and would add just enough positive pressure as I struggled to keep up with the pace to keep it moving along. 

I’m happy with how this month turned out. First, some statistics: Over the course of these 31 posts, including the carefully-worded one I’m composing right now, I will have written a total of 25,000 words. Not yet including anything that happens with today’s post, the May blog posts have had a total of 2,866 page views. By comparison, the first month I did this had a total of 681 page views, which was less than my four most popular posts from this month combined. In fact, the top three posts from this month made it into the top 10 most read posts, for a blog that has existed since 2009. 

I’m happy to see the month as successful as it was. After all, one of the reasons I spend as much time writing these posts is the hope that people will read them. In a lot of cases though, the motivation for doing this is to get something out of them myself. I’ve got one of these weird writer brains going on, where the words and ideas never seem to completely find a way to shut themselves off. It can become bothersome at times, so writing a blog has been a useful outlet when it comes to unloading and sorting through all of that. Sometimes you just need to clean house a bit, you know? If it works out that doing that ever gives someone else something to consider, all the better. 

And all of this is said without mentioning the primary reason I started the blog in the first place — to practice my writing. Looking back and comparing some of the earliest posts to the most recent ones, I think it was a good idea.

A lot of what I’ve written here this month has been birthday centered, which probably makes it difficult to convince people that I truly don’t get wrapped up in my birthday all that much. I do, however, spend a lot of time reflecting on my place in the world and where I am in life, and reaching a landmark birthday like fifty seemed like a natural time to do that. This doesn’t mean I necessarily figured anything out or reached any grand conclusions, or even have any better idea of what I’m supposed to do with life after fifty than I did with life before. It does make retirement start to seem real. And it makes me wonder a little about how much time I have left, and what the time will be like, and what I’ll be able to accomplish with it. 

Starting with June though? I’ll probably just start looking for a new dog. 

Day 20: Legacy, Part 1 - The Writer

Twenty or so years ago I was working on what would be my first full-length manuscript, something that most people reading this post have never seen and likely never will. Back then all I knew about the publishing industry was how small the chances were of ever seeing my work in print. About ten years back I was trying to get through the final weeks of a school year knowing a literary agent in New York was looking over something I had written. She eventually passed (it wasn’t even close to ready), but just by requesting it she gave me back the hope I had pretty much abandoned. I kept writing and continued querying. About half of the agents I queried requested to see my work, which, looking back, is actually a darn good percentage and should have made me more optimistic than I ever allowed myself to be.

Eventually I broke through and signed with the agent I’m with now. When that happened I figured things were going to come together quickly, and it was only a matter of time until a book was sold and my career was launched. I started making rough estimates about how many years of writing and publishing it would take before I’d be able to take an early retirement from teaching and begin to write full-time without having to worry about a mortgage or health insurance payments.

That was four years back, and I’m still at the same place. 

Am I frustrated about this? Yes and no. Yes, because of course I’d love to have a book on store shelves with a collection of great Amazon and Goodreads reviews. I know of other authors who found their agents after I did and already have multiple books published, and that inevitable envy still tweaks at me sometimes, no matter how hard I try to fight it off. No, because I now know how much work is involved at this level, and how much time it can take. It’s already taken me a lot longer to even make it this far than it has for a lot of other people, because I had spent so much time, decades really, of assuming the attempt wasn’t worth making since the goal seemed so impossible. That worked out for me in a way, because it gave me time to work myself into the writer I am now. It’s also given me a lot of time to think about exactly what I want to achieve with my writing, and what kind of legacy I want my career to leave behind. 

There were two events in the past week that had me thinking a lot about legacy. About a week ago, author Tom Wolfe died at age 88. I’ve only read about half of his books, which is more than enough to appreciate his capacity for brilliance. I think it would be fair to say that any list of literary titans from the past fifty years would rightfully include him. Last night I watched HBO’s adaptation of “Fahrenheit 451.” It wasn’t great, but revisiting the story got me thinking about how the prevalence of technology and the toxicity of social and political climates that favor the lowest common denominator have gradually detracted from literature as an expressive art form and a source of compelling and potent ideas. The problems that defined the society portrayed in that story aren’t so different from some of the problems our country is facing right now.

I’m turning 50 tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll be writing well into my 80s like Tom Wolfe did. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be writing anything that future generations will consider important enough to memorize and preserve as one of humanity’s finest works. However, the informed perspective that comes with age and experience gives me some ideas about what I hope to accomplish as a writer in whatever time I’ll have to accomplish it: 

*I want my name to be recognized equally for the strength of the storytelling and the consistency of the written voice.

*I want my writing to matter. I want to know it meant something to the people who read it. It gave them things to think about, and maybe influenced how they see their world.

*I want to feel pride in everything I do, knowing it was the best I was able to produce.

*I want to produce something more than the kind of books people finish reading, set down, and stop thinking about an hour later. I want to know people were transported by something I wrote, that they reached the end and felt slightly disoriented as they tried to re-orient themselves to being in the real world.

*I want to produce a few of those touchstone lines, the ones that people latch onto, mediate on, and apply in their own lives. 

*I want to look back at the decisions I made regarding my career without regret or doubt.

*I want publication to arrive in a time window that will let my parents enjoy seeing it happen.

*I want to eventually produce a warts-and-all piece of literary fiction that shows a true depiction of education as a profession.

*I don’t expect I’ll ever be earning the kind of money that will enable me to build that 200-seat movie theater in the basement of a brand new house, but I want to reach a level of professional success that would allow me the choice of retiring earlier than I normally would, even if only by a few years. I would like to know I had reached that benchmark.

Will I achieve all of these goals? Probably not. But it’s okay to hope and dream about them, and to use them as motivation. I’m at something of a crossroads with writing at the moment; without getting very specific, I believe steps are being taken that are at least in the right direction, whether they result in any kind of dividends or not. I hope they will. I’m fairly optimistic they will, actually. However, there’s no way to know for sure.

For the time being I’m just ready to keep moving forward, knowing I have good people helping me and supporting me as I work toward my goals, and continuing to hope for the best. Everything else will take care of itself when the time is right.