Crazy Times & Resolutions

So this year we spent the holidays in Florida. It was a great vacation, one near family, one spent mostly outside, and one in which we met new friends at several family gatherings. The upshot  –– at a time when the COVID variant omicron rages –– is, in hindsight, predictable: a couple members of our crew tested positive.

The good news is our clan members’ symptoms are mild. (“Cold symptoms and body aches?” I told my wife. “With my sinuses and my old man’s hockey back, that’s my permanent state.”) I tested negative and flew home to Massachusetts

late Monday night, thinking of a significant change COVID has had on the world (and I’m probably late to the game in facing this realization) is that you now need to seriously weigh your health risks before seeing people or attending events before doing so much of what was once part of everyday life because you could now find yourself ill or quarantining.

Our close-contact exposure has us cancelling upcoming domestic trips. This is part of our collective new reality –– the need to weigh the risks of exposure; it’s something many of us probably did not do prior to March 2020, a true new reality.

Crazy times that aren’t ending soon.

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Resolutions . . .

. . . as we head into the new year, here are mine  –– short and simple:

3) Fall in love with a new author. 2021 was the year of Megan Abbott, for me. I’ll be on the lookout for a new author to read widely.

2) Improve fitness. I’m avoiding putting specific goals here. But the more I exercise, the better I feel, so . . . 

1) Outline more effectively. I'm finishing a novel right now that has an ending I did not see coming until I was halfway through, which, if you believe in the no-surprise-for-the-writer, no-surprise-for-the-reader method, is excellent. However, if you try to keep three balls in the air, which I do, it's terrifying and can lead you wasting lots of time. It's something I'll continue working on in 2022.

Happy (early) New Year to all.

A week or a lifetime?

My calendar says I last posted two weeks ago. The newscycle says time is no longer linear (if it ever was).

I sat glued to the TV last week in a way I have not since Sept. 11, 2001. I think I (and every American) was catapulted back in time about two hundred years. I find myself saying (perhaps naively), “We survived 1968” far too often of late. It’s a way for me to speak life into my hope that the sun will come out Jan. 21, and I’ll feel the ship, although still wobbly, straighten and stop taking on water. In short, for me, it’s a way of moving beyond.

All of this leads to the writing topic at the forefront of my mind: Deciding whether or not to discuss contemporary politics in a crime novel. Ezra Pound famously said artists are the antennae of the race. That speaks to a writer’s responsibility. I love reading novels and poems that tackle weighty societal issues. However, this week, I’m reading Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me and enjoying the absolute escape of the whodunit before falling asleep. I tell students in my Advanced Studies in Rhetoric class on day one that “fiction is universal; non-fiction rarely is.” Can fiction be universal, if it dives deeply but truly into one society’s political issue? Perhaps going deep enough and honestly enough will allow the issue to resonate for readers. And perhaps some readers wish to experience a mystery through a historical or societal lens. I have few answers but many more questions.

The events of this past week –– watching the United States Capital be overrun, seeing a presidency (further) implode; knowing 68 arrests (as of this writing) were made but that had the domestic terrorists been people of color there would have been mass carnage; and worrying about what might play out Jan. 20 –– has me wondering how much my characters should be impacted by (or aware of) the political landscape when they meet on the page. How much social commentary is too much?

I know this: If a decade ago I’d have proposed a political novel with a plot ending with the events taking place last week at the United States Capital, you wouldn’t have bought it.

A week in slow motion

I greatly appreciated Rick’s Tuesday post. Tuesday, for me, dragged on and on and on. I’m usually pretty good at keeping myself busy. As I mentioned in my last post, my mother has read four or five books a week since COVID isolation began. (Be nice to my mother. We need readers like her.) I haven’t been that voracious, but I’ve read a few –– I’m enjoying Megan Abbott’s YOU WILL KNOW ME and Adam O’Fallon Price’s HOTEL NEVERSINK –– and I’ve lost 40 pounds since COVID began.

But Tuesday didn’t feel like a productive day. Taught two classes over ZOOM. Met with students. Lots of pacing.

And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that is what most writers do, isn’t it? Pace?

In actuality, the waiting keeps us going.

Wait for the next idea or story to emerge. Wait for the rejection. No, the acceptance. But still waiting. Waiting is part of this game we all long ago decided to enter and to which we have dedicated blood, sweat, bourbon, and tears. And what to do while we wait? Write the one that shows up, even if it’s not the one you hoped for. There really is no other answer.

And for that reason, a frustration I’ve always had about this business is that so much of what happens is out of my hands. An agent pitches your book. A publisher decides whether or not to read it based on the agent’s pitch. It’s a product-based business that only tangentially revolves around the product.

“Your previous sales numbers aren’t good.”
“Okay, but do you like the new book?”
“Your previous sales numbers aren’t good.”

You can’t wait for sales numbers to change. You write the one that shows up. So Tuesday, if nothing else, I wrote a few pages –– and paced long into the night, waiting.