December Update

Dear Reader,

December is nearly over and I haven’t managed to get my fingers on the keyboard to write a single blog entry. In fact I owe an apology for my lack of activity of late. I haven’t set pixel to paper since October and that’s not the sort of rate of correspondence I’m hoping to maintain. I will say that I’m still getting used to a new job and there have been a trio of holidays to contend with – Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Yule to name names.


Regardless, there is news from the writer’s desk. As of this week I’ve completed the second edit of my forthcoming novel, Time of Death and it has been sent back to the publisher. As of the present, the expected release date remains September 2011. I’ll provide updates as they become available.

So, the work goes back underground. Steadily growing and evolving into the piece that will emerge into the sunlight when September rolls around. For those of you who write or are thinking about writing, the process so far has been pretty simple. The first editor focuses on larger edits, finding confusing passages or missing information, honing the language, and punching up the verse. The first editor is your General Practitioner, listening to the heart, taking the blood pressure, and temperature maybe writing a prescription or two as needed. The second edit is more surgical and the focus shifts. Your second editor is likely to look for errors in consistency and dates.

Beyond this round of editing lays a final edit by the publisher and then galleys before September. I’m reminded of a writer’s conference I attended a long time ago where I had the good fortune of hearing Margret Atwood speak about the process of writing. During the conference, I sat in on a session with a science fiction writer (whose name I can’t recall at the moment) and the subject of editing novels came up. His comment to the aspiring writers in the room was to remember that by the time you’ve completed editing your novel you’ll be so tired of it you just want to let it go. Personally, I’m not sure that’s an accurate depiction. I’ve edited Time of Death six times: twice myself, once with Kelly playing editor, once with Kelly’s sister as an editor, and two edits with the publisher. I’m not sick of the book yet and I don’t see myself getting sick of it. Sure, I’ve still got another edit and galleys to go but I can’t see getting sick of the manuscript before it’s published.

Working the Soil

Dear Reader,


For those of us who enjoy gardening, or at least seriously dabble in the subject, fall isn't just harvest time - it's also the beginning of the next year's planting. As trees shed their leaves we dig the soil for the tubers and bulbs that will herald the arrival of spring and the height of summer. Though we've a very small amount of planting space, we spent yesterday evening out in the gusty wind, digging through the leaves and preparing beds. Into our landscape went a hundred Asiatic 'naturalizing' lilies, twenty-five Tigrinum lilies, eighteen alliums, and three peony plants all in the space of an hour and a half of hard digging and clearing. When we lived in Shelbyville, that amount of planting and hard work would have disappeared into the landscape without making a visible impact. The differences between a five acre plot and a few hundred feet of planting space are appreciable.

The parallels between writing and planting have probably been mulled over a hundred-thousand times: seeds of ideas, fertile imagination, and all that kind of stuff. I can see the parallels, they're obvious. The most striking to me, though, is the act of burying something and hoping it will spring into glorious bloom when time and weather are right. The author sends off a manuscript, tucking it into the mail (electronic or otherwise) and it's gone from sight - all that remains is the hope and only time will tell if hope will come to fruition or ruin.

That's the feeling I'm confronted with as I put the final chapters of The Cinder Girl together. With each paragraph I wonder if what I've put together is right and good enough. I fret over putting my hard work in its furrow. There's still the hard work of editing to go, the covering over of the seeds, and after that there will be waiting through the long, harsh cold of submission and rejection. This is where the gardener and the writer must be most alike - both must have faith and patience.

Sammy Terry

Dear Reader,

Recently, while searching the web for Halloween paraphernalia, I stumbled on a small piece of my childhood. As a kid I remember wanting to stay up for the late-late show. I believe every town large enough to have a local television station had (or has) a late night purveyor of B-grade horror flicks and in Indianapolis, it was Sammy Terry. He occupied the television schedule from midnight until two or three, filling the time with double features like "The Creature from 50000 Fathoms" and "The Bride of Dracula". It was a mark of manhood when I could outlast my brother in the face of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (I'll always have a soft spot for the scaly fellow for that very reason).


Reminiscing about brotherly torment aside, though, the particular piece of my childhood I encountered was Sammy Terry's MySpace page. I will repeat that - Sammy Terry MySpace. Unfortunately, repetition doesn’t make it seem any more real.

Sammy Terry being on the Internet seems - wrong. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from opposed to the idea. In fact I'm thrilled to see he's still active and has the kitsch sense of humor he always brought to his show. Maybe it's the pixelization of all my old memories that lends a surreal quality to seeing Terry on the web. Cherished things are best viewed in subdued light.

I close my eyes and I'm back in the tiny first-ring suburbia ranch house where I grew up, laying on the shag carpet and listening to Terry's ghoulish laugh. The TV is turned down so that it won't wake the parents as Sammy's coffin creaks open and the devilish MC rises to bid his fans and victims a goooood eeeevening. Then there'd be the send up of the evening's features with a good send up of the first monster to darken the screen. During the intermission between features, George (the chattering and suspiciously rubbery spider that took the role of Terry's co-host) would put in an appearance, reminding Sammy of some pertinent humorous line. Though I'd be asleep half way through the second feature, I wouldn't dare turn the television off. The staying up was the thing.

Years later Elvira, Mistress of the Dark would bring a new look to the late night horror genre but there'll always be something special about Sammy's late night antics. Through his show I saw some of the early masters of the genre and some of the great (and infamous) films of the forty's, fifties, and sixties. The world is a better place for your being in it, Mr. Terry.

October's Bright Blue Weather

Dear Reader,


Tonight we're going to a weenie roast, or at least our version of one. We'll sit by the fireside with a couple of friends torching a few franks and marshmallows, eating smores and poking the embers, and enjoying the clement weather while it lasts. In the fall I love campfire cookery. It lets me play at being a cattle-drive cookie, tending the cook-fire while the roughnecks are out working the heard and riding along on the chuck wagon to the sound of clinking pans and rattling leaf springs as I cross the untamed prairie. The weenie roast gives all the glory of a fall night by the fireside without need of hardship or horsemanship, what a deal.

A poem for the day.

October's Bright Blue Weather

O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,

And flowers of June together,

Ye cannot rival for one hour

October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,

Belated, thriftless vagrant,

And Golden-Rod is dying fast,

And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When Gentians roll their fringes tight

To save them for the morning,

And chestnuts fall from satin burrs

Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie

In piles like jewels shining,

And redder still on old stone walls

Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things

Their white-winged seeds are sowing,

And in the fields, still green and fair,

Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,

In idle golden freighting,

Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush

Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,

By twos and twos together,

And count like misers, hour by hour,

October's bright blue weather.

O suns and skies and flowers of June,

Count all your boasts together,

Love loveth best of all the year

October's bright blue weather.

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885)

My Mayberry

Dear Reader,


Wednesday, September 22nd we drove into Mt. Airy, NC just ahead of an autumn thunderstorm that had been dogging us since we crossed the West Virginia state line. For a couple of hours we'd been driving in and out of downpours. In one mountain valley the weather would be clear and sunny and in the next pouring rain would make the going treacherous. The final run of road was kind to us, though, and we managed to beat the rain to our hotel on the outskirts of town. We checked into our mediocre hotel room, unpacked the few belongings we brought along for the trip, made a list of the things we managed to, and road-weary we set out to reconnoiter and find dinner in the land of Mayberry.

The drive into town was uneventful if you don't count my fatigue inspired driving. We passed the town water tower, the hospital, the fire station, and the police station before finding a parking spot in the gravel lot beside the post office. I'd just turned the car off when the rain we'd outrun in the mountains caught up with a vengeance. It fell in a straight torrent and we sat listening to it pound the rooftop while we debated what we should do.

The road makes you tired; especially nine hours - a large portion of which was spent driving across the uninspiring landscape of northern Kentucky. Still just outside, mingling with the raindrops, was a town that I'd only witnessed through the sepia-toned episodes of a television show I personally consider an emotional cure-all. Almost every work-related trauma I've suffered has been healed in no small part through visits to Mayberry, NC. I bore the rain to retrieve umbrellas from the trunk and then we set out to get our first real look at America’s most iconic small town from under the brim of an umbrella.

What did we find? A tourist trap complete with Andy and Barney paraphernalia being hawked from countrified storefronts? Maybe we found busloads of wide-through-the-middle Americans clogging the sidewalks while they took snapshots of their snot-nosed kids in front of the Andy Griffith Show opening-themed statue? Actually, none of the above.

Don’t get me wrong, Mt. Airy has made plenty of hype about their native son (according to a local news station fifty thousand visitors will be in the little town today). I kind of feel like it's fitting that they do. In some ways we're all products of where we grow up and if the place makes the man is emblematic of the place. Things get a little more complicated when that man in question is famous like Andy Griffith and the persona that is being honored is fictitious like that of Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Mayberry. Still, without the influence of his hometown, Griffith wouldn't have begat Taylor and through the TV lens and the twisted genealogy I've just outlined, the town benefits from its native sons (both real and imaginary).

Walking down the streets of Mt. Airy you'll encounter various establishments that are mentioned in the television show. There’s a Snappy Lunch Café, there’s a Bluebird Diner, and there’s even a soda shop that claims to be the inspiration for Walker’s Drugstore. Even during these troubled times all of them seem to be doing fine. Maybe there is safety in the shade of the long shadow Sheriff Taylor has cast over the collective imagination.

However, I'm departing from my story about what I found in Mt. Airy. When we stepped onto the soggy sidewalks was a little different than the television rendition of the small town but at the same time, very similar. Mt. Airy is a rugged little North Carolina town. From the post office steps you can see the weathered peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. On the day we arrived, the ghosts of rain clouds swept down the valleys and thunder rolled off the mountain sides. We walked along Main Street (its actual name) at eight o'clock and every store was closed. We strolled under along the awnings, window shopping like people do in Mayberry. There were kitsch storefronts as I mentioned before: The Snappy Lunch, the Bluebird Café, Opie's Candy Shop, and a few other themed stores but something struck me. Somehow, in spite of the theme, the town managed not to become a theme park. It remained a living, breathing town independent of what American culture would make it into.

We turned down a side street and found the Trio Bistro and Bar, the only place in town to get dinner. Sure, Trio is a chain but it's one of the better ones and literally it turned out to be our port in the storm. Good food and drink go a long way toward soothing the road-weary soul. Tired from nine hours on the road I sat down over salmon and bread and some time before dinner ended I realized I'd really made it. This was Mayberry at its core - outside was wet and cold but inside was safe, inside was warm, inside I had the person I loved most in the world and together we were okay no matter how hard the wind blew. We saw the museums and ate at the soda fountain, hearing stories about Andy Griffith and the things he did when he was a kid…but I found my Mayberry before any of the festivities began. That's the thing I'll never forget about this little trip to the center of America's heart.

The New Normal

Dear Reader,

This was my first week working from home (other than as a writer). It was a strange experience, something akin to playing hooky even though I spent probably more than eight hours a day hooked to my PC. I think the reason it felt like misbehaving was that those eight hours were spent trying to hammer out the basic stuff we all take for granted when we go in to an office for the daily grind. There were server issues to handle, email transitions to be made, and telephone machinations to be considered - all from the quiet sanctuary of my home office. When I used to drive into an office in the morning I would have just dropped by the IT guy's desk to make mention of any issues. Later in the day he'd shamble in, mutter at the monitor, climb around under the desk, excuse himself to go shake chicken bones at the server, and viola I'd be fixed up. Now I've got to call across a time zone and crawl through the red tape before I can get in line to get service. I'll call it progress because that makes me feel better.


I did visit the old building on Thursday. I needed to box up a few things and pay a visit to one of the people who are still working out of the place. It felt a little like returning to a murder scene. The steady decay of shutting down is progressing in earnest now, even the company name has been removed from the building's façade. I walked around the hallways, visited my old office, and after rattling around a little headed home. This is normal, now all I have to do is get used to it.

Lighten Up

Dear Reader,

Obviously the last few months have been something of a downer. It's ironic that enjoying the company of your coworkers and the job you're doing exposes you to the possibility of great disappointment and heartbreak. Pablem advice says do what you love however, doing what you love contains within it the possibility of tragedy. No bored button-presser ever laments losing the button they press.

Regardless, the point of this missive isn't to continue lamenting the state of the economy or job market. I thought it would be good to lighten things up.

"You see, Colonel Murphy, we're absolutely safe as long as this safety is engaged - why, if this little switch was in the off position we'd all have been vaporized..."


And then they were.

Later Hank would discover it actually was the cute little nicknames he gave his girlfriends that prevented his ever having a successful relationship.

Now Billy understood why his parents kept Uncle Buck locked in a trunk in the attic. It all made sense, but it was far too late…

They all laughed at Tom's little red yacht. He heard them snickering and pointing at the club. He saw the women roll their eyes and he caught the snide remarks the men made at the marina. They all thought it was so funny. They stopped laughing shortly after he gave Jarvis the order to open up with a full broadside. Yes, when the smoke cleared, Tom was the only one laughing - a high-pitched maniacal laugh that he'd keep up all the way to the padded cell at Belleview.