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Hello folks! It’s been a while since I’ve done an update post on personal things going on, so I thought I’d go ahead and hop into one.

The move into the new home has gone well, although depressingly there are still boxes that aren’t unpacked. It’s been a headlong sprint from on thing to another. September I was helping the Ozark Book Authority (a non-profit started by my friend and author Brooke Johnson) prepare for their Harry Potter Celebration.

In October I finally started my new job and spent most of the month learning as much as I could and helping OBA prepare for a Stephen King Celebration event. My wife and I also managed to snag tickets to a very early showing of Doctor Sleep. And we just got back from a trip to St. Louis to see our favorite band Ludo perform their 2nd annual HalLUDOween show, which was a blast.

Coming up in November, besides Thanksgiving, we also have Ozark Book Con on November 9th. This is OBA’s first convention, but I’m very excited. They’re working extremely hard to make this an event someone would be proud to attend — they have been looking at other cons and doing everything they can to avoid the pitfalls and mistakes those (in many cases larger) cons have made. And they have some amazing TOP TIER TALENT showing up for their first show. Jackson Pearce! Mallory O’Meara! Mur Lafferty! Tobias Buckell!

I’ll be volunteering at this event, as I have with most of their functions, but I gotta tell ya, I’m incredibly intimidated. I’ve been following Tobias Buckell since probably around 2005? I was in my freshman or sophomore year of high school, for sure. Getting to meet him after all these years has me very nervous. Like, I’m not typically good at talking to people? And I’m going to do my best not to sound like a complete idiot. And I’ve been following Mur Lafferty since 2011 — I found her my first year as a teacher, just after graduating college. Mallory O’Meara’s book Lady from the Black Lagoon is an incredibly powerful history book and memoir that ALSO is about one of my favorite eras of film, and my wife and I have followed Jackson Pearce since she was doing her daily vlog on YouTube.

These are all people that have made a big impact in my life one way or another. To get to meet them is…well folks, it’s scary. Exciting, but scary.

Point being, November and December are very likely to be busy as fuck as well — BookCon, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas and New Year’s. It’s gonna be like rolling in a barrel down a hillside to the end of the year.

But enough of all of that, what have I been up to in the meantime.

Writing

I started October working on a short story. I had this idea that I was going to pump out short stories for venues for the latter three months of the year and really try to get something published. But then I read a thread by an author — I think maybe Tade Thompson, but I’m not sure — that talked about how they used to pursue short stories until they did a cost benefit analysis and realized that focusing on novels was more likely to get them where they wanted to go anyway. They said, if your novels are successful, venues will approach you to write short fiction for them.

Seeing that perspective made me realize that, yes, I do want to focus on novels. I’ve been too afraid to approach novel writing because I didn’t feel like I was good enough. If I couldn’t consistently put out short fiction, and I couldn’t get short fiction published, what made me think I could tackle a novel. And I realize that’s not how this works at all, but that’s what was in my mind: I would know I was ready to write a novel when I finally got a story published. Then I would know I was at publishing level quality.

Talking with Brooke a few weeks ago, and hearing her talk about her own book, and having talked with her during the drafting of all of her books, her excitement was infectious. She talked about her book and the next idea she had, and that got me to talking about my idea for a book that I’d started piddling with back in May or so and set aside. I went home and started working on it again.

Right now, I’m trying out a take on Tobias Buckell’s outlining method that he wrote about in his post, “How I Ended Up Writing a 21,000 Word Outline.” I’m not trying to go that deep, but I am basically writing out a scene-by-scene summary of the book so that I can get an idea of how I want things to play out. It helps me to see the overall structure and pace of the book. I also started with a character sketch for the main character — a piece that was written in first person to just to get the vibe of the protagonist’s voice, personality, history, values, etc.

I’m still scared because this idea could be stupid, or done before, and I’m tackling some themes and ideas that are very big and ambitious and I’m afraid I don’t have the range, as the kids say, but I’m going to try. Worst thing that happens is it goes on the pile of practice novels and short stories.

I was hoping to have things ready to give NaNoWriMo a shot, but as I mentioned, September and October have been nuts, and November is shaping up to be similarly wild, so I’ll just keep plugging away at things.

If you follow me on Twitter, or want to start, reach out. Having a cheerleader and/or writing buddy can help hold me accountable so that I actually stick to getting work done and don’t slack off or get distracted reading Twitter.

Reading

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Holy moley I’ve been on a reading kick recently.

As I’m sure you remember, I created a list of DC comic book trades in order of events as they happen chronologically in the DC universe, leading up to the major timeline altering events like Infinite Crisis and such. Well, I’ve reached the point where — SORTA SPOILERS NOT THAT IT MATTERS MOST OF THIS WAS ERASED WITH FLASHPOINT AND THE NEW 52 — Batman dies in Final Crisis and has been dead (technically actually lost in time because comics), Dick Grayson has taken over as Robin, and the Green Lantern line was building up to Blackest Night. I hadn’t read any Green Lantern ever, so I started picking up some (though not all) of Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern stuff, starting with Rebirth and making my way up to the big event itself.

Johns is a frustrating writer because he’s made choices with characters and story beats that I think are…ill-advised at times…but he’s SUCH a good writer. This run is no exception. I ended up getting all of the Blackest Night tie-in books, and I’ve been slowly making my way through those. Next I’ll get to pick up Teen Titans again — I’m getting close to Flashpoint.

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Besides that, I read Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s We Cast a Shadow. It was a very interesting read. It’s set in a near-future/alternate history US where black folks, and dark-skinned folks in particular, are treated with excessive scrutiny, discrimination, and over-policing. I know what you’re saying, “So nothing’s different?” And basically? No. There are little flashes of future tech — a self-driving police car that started patrolling the protagonist’s neighborhood when he and his (white) wife moved in, ghettos and poorer neighborhoods are literally walled in to keep those folks separate from the rest, etc. — but for the most part, the book could honestly take place in an alternate history present day.

The story’s actual focus is on the unnamed protagonist’s son, who has a few birthmarks that the protagonist believes is basically the boy’s blackness from his father’s side showing up. He’s afraid the marks will grow, and the boy will eventually become a dark-skinned black man. With the horrible way that they treat dark-skinned folks, he wants to get the money to put the boy through an experimental medical procedure called “demelanization” — it’s basically plastic surgery to bleach someone’s skin and reconstruct their face to make them look white. But he’s having trouble moving up in the law firm he works at — his race is holding him back — so he begins making alliances in the office to try to push his way up the ladder.

The book is tonally very odd. All of the above sounds horrifying, right? And it is. I found it on a list of horror recommendations by black authors. It’s a dark, depressing book. But the tone is actually pretty light-hearted and humorous. The protagonist is funny, and corny, and makes goofy observations about his daily life, often self-deprecating, sometimes sarcastically assessing those around him that annoy him. But, he’s also a very pro-establishment, go-along-to-get-along type. He scoffs at the idea of black liberation. He looks down on folks darker-skinned than he is. He thinks that if he can act white enough, look white enough, and distance himself from his culture growing up as possible, he — and his family — can eventually be safe and protected, excluded from the hate that shapes so much of the society he interacts with daily. This juxtaposition — between the humorous tone and the horrible things being depicted, between the narrator’s self-hatred and the anti-racist message of the book — is simultaneously compelling and dizzying. The narrator is obviously and wildly unreliable, biased in terrible ways, but while his actions are often pretty reprehensible, his motivations are heartbreakingly understandable.

It took me almost two months of chewing on this book before I could effectively put any opinion on the book into words, and even then, my perspective as a white man from the South is probably best taken with a whole shaker of salt as I am not someone that actually has to live the very real experiences depicted in this book. This book is a satire, but much like Get Out (which is what much of the marketing compares it to) any exaggerations present are…only barely.

I read some other things, too, but I’ll save those for another post because I have lots of thoughts on them as well.

Wrapping Up

Anyway, that’s what the past few months have been like for me. From packing, moving, Harry Potter, Stephen King, Ludo concert, and now to Ozark Book Con, 2019 has been super busy, but it’s all been good things, and I’m very grateful for it all.

Hopefully by the next time I write one of these types of updates, I’ll have started on actually drafting the book, which I’m calling The Cracked Men for now. But right now I’m just focusing on the notes, making sure the characters all make sense and work, and that I’m setting myself to hopefully thread a delicate narrative needle.

‘Til next time!