Never Forget

Her name was Connie.  We were sixteen. I carried her photo for years.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and in many ways is still the standard against which I judge everything I see, and not just women.  Her smile was light and warmth, a flower direct from God to brighten this dreary world. Her giggle was soft and sensual, reminding us that it's good to be alive. Her adorable little button nose, her perfect skin, those deep, dark eyes that never seemed without a hint of mocking yet almost-innocent laughter...

Her birthday is December 12th. Her phone number, back before Alabama had another area code, was 2541. I can recite all ten digits with little hesitation, even now, thirty years later. I still remember the little scrap of paper torn from the edge of a notebook sheet with my kindergarden-ish scrawl of unevenly sized numbers; I carried it in my wallet for over a decade. I took it out now and then to feel the worn grain of the paper, and stared at the smearing graphite when nothing else could express my frustration.

I'd known her since we were twelve and the boys had tried to save the girls from wild dogs in the woods at camp, and she'd scornfully told us the howling was farmers' dogs nearby. We'd met at church social skates for years. At another camp at sixteen, we were the oldest there, and a natural couple. She told me I was handsome, funny. She told me how she got the scar on her breastbone running for the bus with a pencil in grammar school. We played footsie under the tables. I collected a bouquet of wildflowers for her off the lake, in a camp john-boat.

When that magical week was over and we were about to leave, I folded her into my arms and held her, standing in the sunlight on the lawn, and I heard someone say "I love you." It took me a moment to realize the voice had been mine.

Understand that this wasn't news to me; I had already discussed it with my best bud, who helped me collect the flowers.  It was just a stupid thing to say. She hardly knew me; yes, a week at camp had been fun, and yes, I knew I was head over heels, but I wasn't silly enough to expect she would be.  You have to give these things time. I knew that, but some prankster in the back of my throat just had to push out the phrase that was doing pirouettes in my brain.

She looked up at me like a deer caught in the headlights. I do remember that moment, though having played it over and over for three decades has likely distorted it a little. Even so, I don't delude myself into thinking it was a sweet smile, or a look of relief.  She was shocked.

But what she said was "I love you, too."

Now, why would she say that? Maybe, because it was true?

Well, yeah, maybe. But also maybe because it was the standard reflex response when you don't know what else to do at that rather awkward moment, when you're just hugging the fellow who has made a fun week away from normal life feel a little magical, and you want to enjoy it for a few more moments and maybe express some genuine gratitude before you get back to your your real life, with a boyfriend and whatever else. I don't blame her for what she did to me with that moment of careless confusion. It was an accident.

I still have letters I never sent. Don't get me wrong, I sent scores. I called. I even convinced her to go out to dinner with me once, but there comes a point when you need to take a hint; beyond that, a suitor becomes a stalker. She didn't return my calls and letters. I poured my heart into those reams of notebook paper, but I don't know if she read them. Eventually, I stopped harassing her with them and saved the postage, but I couldn't stop writing them. Pathetically impassioned please are still just pathetic when the recipient is merely annoyed.

She never knew the tears I wept across my grandmother's lap for the love I wasn't allowed to give her. She never knew the hearts I broke because mine was no longer mine to give. She had a baby, got married, probably went on to a normal life. I wonder if she ever even realized what she missed.

As Wesley said in The Princess Bride, "This is True Love. You think this happens every day?"

And yet, I am a better man for it. I managed to love again, in a less hormonal, more mature way, but quite sincere. I got my heart broken again, smashed and ground and scattered like broadcast planting. I played hermit for a while.

And I managed to love again.  For all the teenage drama of this post, I am happily married, and raising a son we carefully decided to bring into the world, even at my age. I can still love, still trust, and still accept that my lovely, witty and charming wife is human.  She is more beautiful approaching forty than most men will ever win, better educated with a GED and unfinished degrees in writing and criminology than most college graduates, and more practical, generous, and understanding than a schmekel like me deserves.

And she writes with me.

She has her own stories; family hardships, a failed marriage, male porn under the toilet seat to make a dense man close the lid ... She understands the value of my devotion, and is patient with my cornucopia of faults.

Why would I share all this with the world?

Because I'm a writer. It's what we do - I'm just more blunt than most.  When you read my stories, you shouldn't assume that a tale of rape is a personal experience, or any more than is one of murder - but believe the emotions.  They come from a real life with actual joy and grief, and a keen and honest eye that records those feelings, those moments, for later use.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” - Robert Frost
That's what I want in the books I read. That's what I believe readers deserve from the books I write.

That's what they'll get.

Nose to the Wheel

I work a day job in cubeville, which sometimes demands all hours of the night as well.

My wife, as a full time homeschooling housewife and mom, has it even worse.

The 11yo daughter is sick and napping in front of the TV. The wife has been ill, and just got up from her nap.  The 2yo boy was up a while before her, in a foul mood. I think something bit him. He finally settled a little, when I bribed him with fortune cookie and wonton chips, which he insisted we dump out onto the table.

I've had no opportunity to unload the dishwasher for the wife, or to throw some hay to the horses, or clean the latest deposits of goose and chicken shit out of the garage, or to bring in the grazing goat in and put out the next one.  I need to clean up the pile of hay and bird droppings I swept out a couple days ago, but may not manage before dark.

Well, tomorrow's Saturday.  Maybe then.

But I do want to sit and play World of Warcraft with my wife and daughter at some point. I'd like to spend a little time with the insufficiently snuggled Great Pyr pup, who's the size of a truck but still goofy-clumsy.

Then there's this writing thing.  We try to crank out a couple thousand words each, every day. We constantly edit. She's sending me links for new agents to query. I try (I do try) to post to this blog once a day. I'm trying to read and critique the work of friends, and of strangers as well on http://critters.org.

 Let's think about this.  Generally, people need eight hours of sleep each night. I need more; being ill lately, we need even more, but lets stick with eight for the sake of argument.  I work at least eight hours a day.

(The wife is currently "playing" with the 2yo, technically 21 months, and he's calling off shapes and numbers correctly more often than not.)

So, sixteen hours of my day are gone off the top, and usually it's more like eighteen or nineteen.  Then we add in the time for basic maintenance of living. An hour for a morning shower and dress, breakfast, hay for the horses; an hour for lunch, during which I sometimes handle some emergency shopping; an hour for supper, including some time to sit and chat as a family.  There's usually a couple of hours in the evening dedicated to maybe a movie as a family, or some Warcraft, or some other activity we can do together.

Keeping track? At the very least, we've spent 23 hours of our day.  It doesn't look good for the book.

We all know those minutes and hours never fit so neatly into the given timeslots, though.  I shave out time for trips to the bathroom, and coffee breaks, and posts to this blog.  I frequently steal hours here and there by eating at my computer, or using the wife's smartphone to check Twitter in the grocery store.  

But often enough, I push the chore off and grind through a delightful hour of pulling my hair and shuffling words, knowing that tomorrow is Saturday. I'll sleep an extra hour; I'll get those chores done, unless I manage to get completely absorbed in NOT having to spend my time at my day job, and write chapters in a new book.

Tonight, I'll stay up late and write then as well.  It's the one hobby that I don't feel is a waste of time. It's the one thing I love that feels productive, and creative, and satisfying.

So maybe one of the chickens runs in the back door every time we come in. She's a tiny bantam, smaller than a fat pigeon. We give her corn in the house, which just encourages her.

And I write a few lines of blog as she clucks around my feet beneath the table, and look forward to working on editing for HUSH, and smile as I finally get up to throw hay to the horses and finish unloading the dishwasher.

See you in the bookstore.

The Rest of the Story

(And many thanks to Paul Harvey for the phrase. If you haven't heard any of his commentary, I recommend it.)

Yesterday I poo-poohed happy endings. Give me grief and misery! But sometimes a lighter tale can be delightful, as Paul Harvey so often proved.  c.f. here.

It's a tale of a very mundane event with a quiet happy ending, and quite worthy of a short story if someone were so inclined. But why? A little boy's memory of getting stuck in the snow on a mother and son drive doesn't sound so great, but there are special circumstances. Therein lies the crux of the matter.

For him, it was likely the only time it would ever happen.

Don't get me wrong. I do like feel-good movies. I like happy endings, and I love inspirational movies as long as they aren't too saccharine.  I am not inspired by mundane events, however, unless there is something about them that makes them special.

It doesn't take much. Good writing can turn any moment into an epiphany, or an iconic memory, or a symbol for something grander.  If you'll forgive the hubris, I reference a poem I wrote for my daughters about blowing a bubble. The rhythm is perhaps too complex and easily misread, the phrasing might be too contrived for your taste, but it does illustrate my point. Blowing a bubble is something simple and cheap and easy enough we do it to entertain the children, but there is plenty of symbolism to be had.

Happy is good. I love it when the hero wins the girl. I just want him to prove to me he deserves it first. That's usually easiest done by showing me he can respond nobly to a bad situation.

Happily Ever After

...and they ate ice cream, and had babies and lived happily ever after.

The End

Hm. I'm not inspired to go out and buy the book. Heck, I don't even want to watch the movie. I'd rather subject myself to 2am infomercials pimping potato peelers that let you pull your own teeth, or at least make you want to.

On the other hand, if they're sharing a small pot of greens because that's all they have, we tend to watch to see how fairly they share it. 

If they must hide their only child because the soldiers are coming to kill the children, we wonder if this one might survive.

If they sacrifice themselves, both dying in futile gestures to save the other, we rail at the injustice -- but now we're involved.

Happy is nice, but it doesn't sell the print, and it doesn't make us remember the story or buy a copy for friends. Don't get me wrong, there are exceptions, but in general, even Disney movies have villains and injustice. 

If my heroes can make it through a book and walk away at the end healthy and happy and sane, I am relieved, but I wonder what went wrong. When they stagger away broken in body but not in spirit, supporting each other in their grief for those they lost, I admire them. I honor them. I remember them. I want to be them, though I thank my stars I don't have to go through the hell they've endured.

That's the point. A good story is always about character and conflict, and nobody walks away unscathed. If the character is untouched, we do not love them. At best, we can pity them, but they have not earned our devotion.

And again, of course, there are exceptions, but those just demonstrate the rule.  People who survive lightning strikes and falling out of airplanes without parachutes do not convince the rest of us that it's safe. They amaze us, because they beat the odds.

Break your heroes. Even if they are angry, your readers will feel something.  If you do it well, they'll curse you with their tears, but praise you with their wallets.

TANSTAAFL

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." -- Robert Heinlein

Even if you don't have to cough up cash, someone has to pay for it; and if you don't honor the debt you incur, it costs you face and reputation. You may not care, but there's still a cost, always.  Even if you just pull up wild onion by the road, it costs time and effort and sunlight and water.

You have to pay your dues.

I see people, even friends of mine, giving advice all the time. It's usually pretty good advice. I just read Denise Tompkins' blog post about synopses, and it was great.  I spoke with her the other night about the professionalism of her blog voice, how much I enjoy it, how right she usually is, and we laughed about the way a great bit of writing sometimes seems like the swan from the line of ducklings. We sweat and grieve and waffle, then finally put it out there and wait for people to point and laugh, but often the result is actually good.

I'm no expert. This blog is about our efforts to learn, to sink or swim in the world of modern publishing, but I like to think there are useful, pithy bits now and then.  I have no qualifications worth including in a query; my degrees are computers and ancient language, my job is telecom, and I've not had so much as a short story actually published and paid (technically not true, but I assure you the technicality doesn't buy gum.)

Yet I write. I offer my apparently baseless opinions. I query our book with confidence, knowing that it still has so much improvement to be made.

I'm paying my dues, and learning what I need. I'm patient, and I don't give up. In the meantime, I'm writing, polishing the book we've finished, working on the next, tossing in a few lines to others now and then, planning for the day when my backlist is long enough to earn a living.

I'm enjoying the ride. In the meantime, I borrow experience and contacts from dear friends like Denise who's plowing ahead with her Nitecliff Evolutions, and with Raising Cain, which sounds utterly engrossing.

Good luck, Denise, and thanks for the visit. It recharges my batteries to know that talent and perseverance can and do, in fact, make it in today's market.

Hiatus

Attending personal matters this week, apologies for anyone who was actually expecting daily posts.

Will try to get back into the swing asap.

Humans is the Craziest Peoples

It bothers me when people I like say things I can't reconcile. I don't want to hurt their feelings, insult or embarrass them, so I end up trying to just shut up and ignore it...but sometimes it gives me ulcers.

We've all seen it. Normal, likable folk will do something, exhibit some common human foible, and we twitch. In the hope I won't inadvertently wrong someone, I'll try to anonymize an example.

An editor and writer acquaintance who calls herself obsessive recently mentioned (in front of a broadly mixed audience including professional peers) some trouble she habitually has with a couple of homophones. That's common enough - you know people who confuse its/it's, they're/their/there, to/too/two or any of a hundred others. This was a much less common case, one of those nasty ones where the words end in -eet and -ete that stump us all sometimes.

I very briefly tossed her a couple of ways to know which to use, word associations and visual reminders. I only did that because it's the kind of thing we all need, I'd had that very problem, and many of us might appreciate the tools.  Believe me, I'm not shy about grabbing a reference when I realize I'm unsure of something. Simple enough, but her response in front of an audience was to flippantly dismiss it, claiming inability to understand or remember it, apparently intending to just live with the handicap...as a professional editor.

This is a known career writer and editor, blithely dismissing a distinctly professional foible in front of potential clients and peers? Ok, she is a smart, established career woman with a known reputation, and anyone who knows her should dismiss it as a moment's distraction (I hope), but to me it's like a professional programmer saying "pfft, what do grammar, punctuation and spelling matter to a computer?" If you know anything about it at all, you know it matters a lot.

It's like a professional carpenter saying "Wow, I only brought a sledgehammer. Oh well, it really doesn't matter."

It's like a biology teacher, asked whether a squid is a mollusk or a chordate, responding with "Like I care. Go look it up," before going back to a magazine. Anyone else would give such a response, it should be expected - but that person in that situation maybe should not. Not knowing is fine, is only human. Not caring when it's so obviously relevant to what you profess is a little harder to swallow.

I call myself a science fiction writer. I love it when people ask me about odd stellar phenomena, obscure theories, quantum mechanics interpretations or likelihood of life on other planets. Sometimes I may not be in the mood to discuss it, but I don't want my potential audience to believe for a moment that I don't *care*.

I do care. I sometimes use "it's" when I should have said "its", or "that" when I should have used "which", but I care, and if you point it out, I'll fix it. If you suggest rules to help me decide, I'll likely tell you it's absorption in the story, not ignorance,  but I'll try very hard to catch it in the editing.

I don't want my baby to be ugly because of blemishes, but if the problem is just dirt I could have easily wiped away, the fault is truly mine.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've been looking over some of my writing, and editing the mistakes that creep in when you're concentrating on moving scenes along, rather than being grammatically correct. It's time for a cup of coffee and some humble pie.