The Thunderbirds of Stull

When I was in college, there was a series of urban myths built around the town of Stull, Kansas. The story usually involved a friend of a friend who had come to grief in Stull. A disappearance, a murder, a Satanic ritual in the Stull Cemetery, or sometimes just a deeply unnerving feeling experienced while changing your tire by the side of a lonely, rural highway. Sometimes we traded them like campfire ghost stories, especially the more ridiculous ones. The deeply troubling ones, the ones that seemed plausible, however, crept under our skin and stayed there.

These days, I drive through Stull every week or so, going between home and various appointments. I don’t like to drive Stull Road at night, as silly as that is, but see above, for the stories that crept under my skin.

One of the first things I noticed when I started regularly passing through Stull was the absence of any but the freshest of road kill. I might see a freshly splatted possum or a deer carcass from the night before, but when I drove past a week later, the possum would be gone and the deer carcass picked down to white bones. If you’ve done a lot of rural driving, you know that’s not standard. Dead raccoons swell and split on the shoulder, waiting on the arrival of a highway cleanup crew. It can take months for a dead deer to sink into the ditch with its desiccated hide draped over bones like a mortuary tent. In the environs of Stull, however, roadkill mostly disappears before it rots.

I’m not prone to superstition, but it did raise my hackles a bit, until the day I spotted a golden eagle excavating the corpse of deer that had barely begun to attract flies. She ripped her way into its belly, tore out some bloody piece of flesh it’s better not to think about, and flew away. After that, I began to watch more closely, slowing down and searching the skies and tree tops above Stull. Soon enough I discovered a second golden eagle, this one a little larger and with a bit more white among its feathers. He was drifting on a thermal, scouring the roadside for an easy meal.

I’m not a photographer, so I don’t waste my time trying to capture them that way. Instead, when time allows, I like to drive up and down the gravel roads around Stull, hoping for a glimpse of them. My greatest sighting so far has been the pair, rarely seen together, perched side by side on a telephone pole. Driving by, I knew they were watching me back. I have seen, too, what I suspect is their nest. A great jumble of branches balanced in the top of a black walnut tree that stands a few miles south of Stull.

The wingspan of a mature golden eagle runs about about six to seven feet, and when they’re hunting, they’re fast, with incredibly sharp eyesight. Would-be Satanists beware, the thunderbirds of Stull are watching you.

Brain Tug of War

The human brain is a strange thing. I assume they’re all strange, even though the only one I know intimately is my own. Part of its strangeness is the battle between wanting to write all the time and never wanting to write again. The last two years have been a perpetual tug of war on that front. I got sick, and then as a result of getting sick, I was injured, and because of my injury, I ended up having to move. There was a whole raft of things related to my mother’s estate that I had to deal with. My dog got sick, then died. Even though I wasn’t sure I was ready, I took in another dog who desperately needed a permanent home.

In the middle of all that stress, I started to feel like I would never write again, and part of my brain simply accepted that. That part began imagining a life where I would get a job at the turnpike tollbooth near my house and maybe go back to playing Zelda in my spare time. The other part of my brain insisted it was ready to go back to writing, but it only manifested that by writing random paragraphs about characters and stories I’d never thought about.

The thing about tug of war is that eventually one side has to win, either through trickery or through stamina. In October, I had a vague idea for NaNoWriMo, and I thought having a deadline might help me get back into the rhythm of writing. I made a few notes, so that I wouldn’t forget my idea, but then I got up the next day and started writing. The next day, I wrote some more. This is why I’m generally not interested in books or movies about writers. It’s a bit boring reading about someone writing, isn’t it?

At any rate, between October and February, I wrote a book, which definitively answers which side of my brain won the tug of war. The book went to my agent, and she sent it to my editor, and now we all wait to see if it’s worth a damn. The important thing, at least, is that having finished a book, I think I might finish a few more.

Meanwhile in reading, I’m not remotely close to catching up on my TBR, but I’ve been getting some reading done. Apparently I’m in the L’s.

Good Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Today I was reminded of another winter day almost ten years ago, when I was out walking my dog in the early evening. It was cold and slushy, so I was looking for the clearest route home, which turned out to be the parking lot behind an apartment complex that had been plowed. As we walked through the lot, I saw a cell phone lying on the ground next to an empty parking space. Generally speaking, I believe in good deeds. If I’d lost my phone, I would appreciate someone picking it up and getting it back to me, instead of leaving it to be run over.

I was surprised to find that it didn’t have a passcode, but that made it simpler. I called the number that seemed in heaviest rotation on the phone, figuring that person could help me. A girl answered, and when I explained what had happened, she passed me to her boyfriend, the owner of the phone.Far from being grateful or pleasant, the boyfriend, who hadn’t even noticed his phone was gone, swore at me and accused me of stealing his phone. I asked him why he thought a thief would call him on his phone and repeated that I’d found it in the parking lot.

“What do you want me to do with it?” I said, completely over my good deed at that point. Foolishly, I imagined that he would tell me his apartment number and I would put the phone in his mail box.

“I’m on my way to Kansas City. I’m gonna be at the Applebee’s on Metcalf,” he said.

Okaaaaay. What I really thought was Who the hell drives all the way to Kansas City to eat at Applebee’s? Who drives anywhere to eat at Applebee’s?

“So you need to come over there and turn over my phone or I’ll call the police.”

He really said that! Turn over his phone! I couldn’t help but think of the the saying No good deed goes unpunished. For the first time I thought of why that is, and I had to conclude that unfortunately a lot of people are not prepared for kindness and don’t know how to do gratitude. Why? I’m not sure. My theory about this guy is that he was a terrible person, so he expected everyone else to be terrible too. What a sad way to go through life.

As for me, I opted out of having my good deed punished. I certainly wasn’t driving anywhere to deliver a phone to some jackass. As I stood out in the cold with my dog, there was a temptation to power down the phone and throw it into one of the apartment complex’s trash dumpsters. I’m not inherently an evil person, though. More Chaotic Neutral, really. So I said, “There are three empty lots at the corner of 19th & Tennessee. I’m going to throw your phone in one of them. It probably has enough battery power left that you’ll be able to call and find it, if you get here in the next 2 hours.”

I hung up without waiting to hear what he would say. I didn’t answer when it rang. My dog and I walked on to the corner of 19th and Tennessee, and just as I said I would, I threw the phone as far as I could into one of the empty lots. Then we walked home.

Later, at bedtime, I took the dog on the same route, out of a sick curiosity. At the corner, I could see two people walking around in one of the empty lots, using a cell phone as a flash light. Reader, it was the wrong empty lot.

A long hiatus at its end

Two years ago, I was overwhelmed by a lot of things. Writing, career, family, health, dogs, personal stuff. In order to keep going, I gave myself permission to let things slide. I figured as long as I was keeping myself and the dogs alive–safe, fed, with a roof over our heads–I would let everything else go, including social media and newsletters and my blog. Permission given, whoooo, I let a whole bunch of things slide.

Those two years have been good, though, because they’ve allowed me to reassess what I’m willing to let go and what I want to hold on to. One of the things I really want to let go of is Facebook. As a corporation it’s awful, but also almost all their user interfaces are terrible, too. Among the things I want to hold onto are my blog, because unlike social media, I’ve always felt like my blog really belonged to me. It’s my content, presented in the way I want, with control over who can interact with it. The real question now becomes how do I want to handle having a private place for us to talk books and writing? I don’t know yet. I’m considering doing a members only aspect to this blog, or possible a Patreon. Still thinking through that, but definitely something, because I want to be able to share things I’m reading and working on, without it being open to public consumption (and bot harvesting).

After a year of serious personal upheaval, I’m back to writing, too. I’m working on two novels, hoping to get a first draft of one of them finished by the new year. I can’t figure out which one will reach the finish line first. The only way to answer that is to keep writing. So I suppose I’d better do that, while the dogs are napping.

It’s supposed to be a reading chair, but the dogs don’t read

Small miracle but a big feeling

There are a lot of literary prizes in the world, but not that many awarded on the basis of readers’ votes. This is why one of my favorite second place finishes was when All the Ugly and Wonderful Things came in second in the Goodreads Choice Awards in 2016. Nearly 28,000 people voted for my book, and it beat out such big name authors as Jodi Picoult, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. My mind was boggled that so many readers voted for my book.

This year, sadly, The Reckless Oath We Made didn’t make the first round. Then something amazing happened: readers wrote my book in. Enough readers that it moved on to the semifinals. You still have about 12 hours left to vote in the 2019 Goodreads Choice Awards. You could even vote for The Reckless Oath We Made, if you wanted. It would be an even more astounding little miracle if it moved onto the next round.

Even if I don’t make it to the next round, however, I feel like I’ve experienced one of the things that writers don’t talk enough about. We talk about awards, we talk about reviews, we talk about advances, and we talk about the disappointments and frustrations of publishing as an industry. So rarely do we talk about that small piercing feeling of joy in community that comes from connecting with your readers, and hearing from them that they connected with your book.

For writers like me who are extreme introverts with mental health issues that make appreciating ourselves difficult, it’s a huge feeling to know that you’ve stitched this fragile thread between your work and its readers, to know that there are people out there who are nodding along as you tell your stories, and they’re passing those stories onto others.

So while it feels like a little miracle that my book garnered enough write-in votes to end up in the semifinals of one of the few really big reader awards out there, knowing that my people have found me is a big deal. Thank you for the part you’ve played in that.

Not every bad choice is a mistake

It’s possible you ended up here because you read my essay about sex work. Or it’s possible you’re here because you read my new book, The Reckless Oath We Made. (Or my last book, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things.) Whyever you came, you may be thinking about bad life choices and mistakes.

Whether you came here to judge me or to sympathize or to say you’ve been there, what I most want to tell you is that not every bad life choice is a mistake. Sometimes the only choices available to you are bad, worse, and worst. In that scenario, the best choice you can make is a bad one.

Sometimes those bad choices bring good things. They’re not all mistakes. I never felt like the choices I made around performing sex work were mistakes. They brought me here, where I am alive, succeeding at my chosen career, and have people who love me. May all your “mistakes” be so beneficial.

The characters in The Reckless Oath We Made are also in situations where all they can hope for is to make the least bad choice available. Those choices may look like mistakes from the outside, but that doesn’t mean they won’t bring good things. So if you’re here to process your thoughts about your own choices and “mistakes,” welcome. If you’re here to lecture me about my choices, you’ll likely leave disappointed. I’ve had plenty of time to evaluate the choices I’ve made in my life and I’m okay with them.

Where lightning strikes

My new book, The Reckless Oath We Made, is nearly here. In just one week, it will be on sale everywhere, but even now it’s out in the world. People have advance copies to read, and if you’re a Book of the Month member, it’s one of the August selections.

I’m starting to hear from people who’ve read both All the Ugly and Wonderful Things and The Reckless Oath We Made, which is a little scary, because people can’t help but compare the two books. The verdict? They’re very different books.

The funny thing about having an unexpected bestseller like All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is that it creates expectations. Publishing wants me to write another book that is somehow exactly like my bestseller, but different. Readers who’ve only read that one book by me expect that all my books will be like that one.

The problem is that I’ve never been interested in writing the same book over and over. There are authors and genres that specialize in recreating the same sensations and feelings over a series of books. In fact, that’s one of the big selling points for a known author with a particular style: you always know what you’re going to get.

It’s true that I frequently revisit certain themes in my writing–poverty, drugs, mental illness, dysfunctional families–but I like to investigate those themes through different characters, different points of view, even different styles. I suppose I could try to recreate the feeling behind ATUAWT, but I don’t see the appeal. Lightning may strike the same place twice, but why would you want it to?

So if you pick up The Reckless Oath We Made expecting it to be exactly like All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, you might be disappointed. If you come to it looking for a new story with new characters, I think I can show you something interesting and moving. Does The Reckless Oath We Made have poverty, drugs, mental illness, and dysfunctional families? Oh yeah. It also has a lot of other things: knights, a waitress in distress, a prison escape, suitcases full of weed, a castle in the Flint Hills, love, loyalty, a heartbreaking betrayal or two, and even some medieval dirty talk.

You still have time to pre-order it from my local bookstore. If you do, you’ll get a signed hardcover first edition and some bonus book swag.

The new book approacheth … slowly

Elephant pregnancies last approximately 95 weeks, and so I often think of my novels as baby elephants. They take a long time to gestate, they’re always a lot bigger than I think they will be, and once they’re loose in the world they’re adorably awkward. Or something like that. My new book is not much different. It took a year to write, a year to revise, it came in many tens of thousands of words over my goal, and when I think about it I’m both proud and a little scared.

I sold my new book back in June, but after some protracted debate about the title, I can finally send out the official “baby” announcement! The new book is titled THE RECKLESS OATH WE MADE, and it will be published by Putnam (an imprint of Penguin/Random) in the fall of 2019. Exact “due date” to be announced at a later time.

I am extremely excited about this book as it marries together a wide variety of my interests and concerns: poverty, health care, mental illness, medieval French literature, Middle English, sword fights, the Flint Hills, drugs, dogs, redheads, and guys with bad haircuts.

On this day: ghosts and hope

August 9^th has been something special to me for quite a long time. When I was 24, August 9^th was the day I arrived in Japan to start my adventure teaching English in a Japanese high school. I spent my first day participating in the nationwide commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.

I was a long way from home, and I spoke to my grandfather that night to try to calm my nerves. He had always been reticent to talk about his experiences in World War 2, but that night, separated by thousands of miles, he talked about his own time in Japan. He arrived there in late August 1945, with orders to help rebuild Yokohama, which like much of Tokyo had been destroyed by US bombing raids. (We think of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as extraordinarily destructive, but the firebombing of Tokyo destroyed half the city and killed 100,000 people. The firebombing of Yokohama killed 35,000 and left every major building in the city destroyed or damaged.)

Until the war, my grandfather had been a farmer, and for much of the war, he was a radio repairman for Navajo codetalkers in the Pacific Theater. Following Japan’s surrender, he was repurposed again as an engineer and construction supervisor. While I was in Japan, I went to Yokohama, where I was able to visit a grade school and a hospital that dated to 1945, and almost certainly would have been reconstruction projects that he oversaw. Sadly I wasn’t able to meet one of the Japanese people he worked closely with, as he had passed away a few years before.

In Japan, I taught at Nagaoka High School, which was the alma mater of Admiral Yamamoto. While I wasn’t teaching, I wandered the countryside and wrote. I wrote so many things, including first drafts of two different novels. Japan is the place where I swore that if it was possible to write books, sell them, and get paid for the work, I would do whatever I could to get there.

It doesn’t hurt that when you’re snowed in somewhere between the Japan Sea and the Honshu mountain range with only 3 television channels, you have plenty of time for writing. The first winter I was in Niigata Prefecture, it snowed over 40 feet. No, that’s not a typo. Snow fall was really in excess of 480″. It snowed every day for four months, anywhere from a couple inches to dozens of inches.

When I learned that All the Ugly and Wonderful Things would be released on August 9, 2016, I was happy, even though it was too late to share that joy with my grandfather, who was the most bookish adult in my life as a child. That day will always carry the ghosts of those who died in Nagasaki, but it also holds a lot of powerful memories for me, including the bond with my grandfather, and now the day my publishing career was well and truly launched.

On this day I often think of the resiliency of humans, and our capacity to rise above obstacles and limitations. I think of my grandfather, far from his wife and newborn son, charged with a task that he was wholly untrained for. Handed a set of blue prints and assigned a Japanese translator and a crew of men, he helped build schools and hospitals. I think of those men, too, and their families, living in the aftermath of a devastating war. My grandfather was part of an occupying army, and yet those men treated him with respect and invited him into their homes, where he shared the modest wealth of his rations and their hope for a better future.

So many things in life are not easy. There is pain, suffering, disappointment, but there is also joy, success, and the bond we share with other people. I hope we can all remember that today.

Celebrating the end of winter

(If you’re curious a what good old fashioned Nagaoka snow storm looks like, here‘s some footage from 1963 that’s even worse than what I experienced.)

Lift with your legs (and your soul)

I have been rather scarce these days, because I’ve been completing a serious revision on my next book. So often, people talk about writing as a mental task only. Soft work for soft people. The people who talk like this have never wrestled 300,000 words of chaos into a coherent story that will fit inside the covers of a book, and make people who read it laugh and cry. Writing is emotional labor, and intellectual labor, and physical labor. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

 

The printed manuscript weighs only eight pounds, and in its electronic form, it weighs nothing. The first few times I lift it, only testing its heft, but before it’s done, I will press, curl, and squat it millions of times. I will lift it until every muscle in my body sings an aria of pain. My shoulders have locked up, and my arms are burning with twenty years of nerve damage caused by this work.

 

Lift with your legs, that’s the advice about furniture, but when it comes to stories, you must lift with your whole body, including your heart, your viscera, the slippery goo of your brain.

 

At the end of this telling, my fingers are raw, my eyes are red, and veins in my legs have burst in protest of the punishment. There is no longer any writing position–sitting, standing, lying down–that doesn’t hurt.

 

So when they tell you that writing isn’t hard work, nothing like ditch digging or fire fighting, show them your wrecked back, your ruined hands, your rheumy eyes, the raw spaces between your flesh and your soul.