For My Baby Sister, Andrea C. Rock-Logan January 9, 1976 – August 21, 2023

This is how I remember you.

My Sister’s Tune

by Bert Rock

“Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is…”

– William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

Short and bright is the morning of youth,

when our bodies and minds are pliable

to life’s tumbles and bruises.

We sail, soar, and stride through our early years,

ignorant of the earth to which we are tethered.

No one gets out of life untouched,

by the madness of being human.

Long is the twilight of age,

once our debt of innocence has been paid.

My little sister is gone.

Of us, only she brought the music of a heartbeat to the world.

Three heartbeats, each so beautiful,

Orion, Alexandra, and Christopher.

I remember my sister’s tune,

So light, and playful, a flute on the breeze.

Her sound will echo in our hearts,

until our own sunsets are upon us.  

Fuck Your Second Amendment. Children Are Dying

“School Colors” original artwork by author (2009)

Spoiler alert: this will be a didactic rant, but I don’t care.

“When did murdering kids in their classrooms become a political issue?” – Steve Kerr

Children are dying. That sentence should be the end of it, but it isn’t.

Republican congressman and senators should have to walk a gauntlet of all the grieving parents of children shot to death in classrooms.

I remember in 1984 there was the San Ysidro Massacre in a McDonald’s restaurant killing twenty-one. I was thirteen at the time. I recall hearing it on the news and the newscaster saying they’d found a child wrapped around their bicycle after being shot. I never got that image out of my head whenever someone mentioned McDonald’s.

As of May 25, 2022 NPR reports that there have been twenty-seven school shootings this year.

Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, how many children in their classrooms have to be slaughtered before a republican congressman feels something? How many parents have to lose everything before republican fathers do something? I suppose it’s okay with them since this doesn’t happen at their kids’ schools.

The best way to protect school children is to label them fetuses, then republicans would give a shit. If protecting the children meant power over their mothers, republicans would do something.

Republicans will again do nothing. They dare not stand up to the NRA. You can argue about whatever legislation was passed if any and it won’t matter because it’s still happening. It is clear that no number of children or people dying will move a republican senator or congressman to agree to sensible gun laws. They are cowards.

Disagree? Prove me wrong.

Democrats keep trying to enact laws that could save lives and republicans shoot them down, every time. It’s the same song and dance we’ve seen year after year. Thoughts and prayers mean shit. You can tell me all you want about law abiding citizens being infringed upon, then I say infringe on them. Infringe on me if you can save a child from having their brains blown out in a first-grade classroom.

Fuck your rights, children are dying.

For Ukraine – People of The Sunflower

by Bert Rock

Original photograph by author

Once again history rolls out the red road of war.

A tyrant sends forth his tanks and his guns

and the lives of his people to sate his bloody thirst.

Putin is an evil coward.

He poisons his own people when they vie for truth,

he infects citizens everywhere with lies and vile ideology.

He is a toxin on this earth, a radioactive sludge.

Ukraine is not my country, but they are my people.

They’re our people because they are people.

Once again, history gives us heroes, like the woman who faced a Russian soldier,

And offered him sunflower seeds to carry in his pocket,

So that the invader would have flowers for his body when he died.

To the bravest comedian in the world, Ukraine’s President,

If I could turn my words into bullets, I would give them all.

His is a noble fight.

Defiance is universal, a language all its own,

It is love for the sovereignty of one’s own soul.

It can be deciphered in the squaring of the chin,

or standing tall in the face of your oppressor, no matter their size.

I do know that much, if little else.

Look them in the eye and let them know that you stand before them.

Win or lose, you stand.

The sunflower is one of nature’s strongest creations.

It absorbs radioactive isotopes from the ground, making it safer, cleaner.

Perhaps that is what they were created for.

When the war is over,

the people of Ukraine will turn their faces toward the sun again.

They make the earth a better place for being here.

Click the link below by Kristen M. Stanton to read more about sunflowers and their amazing capabilities.

What I Learned in This Year of Madness

2020

In years to come those four digits will become a slur, a curse, an excuse, an utterance of camaraderie or a begrudged toast. It will be a call back to a time like no other.

2020 was a year of madness the world over. It was a year of fire.

No life was untouched. Some got burned more than others, but we all felt the flame. Race riots, militias, quarantines, and lockdowns for a plague killing hundreds of thousands of people and a country set on fire by the man elected to protect it. What a fucking year.

When one looks back at this time they can add, “In a pandemic,” to everything they say.

“I went to work…in a pandemic,

I went to school…in a pandemic,

I cared for family, I wrote a book, I traveled, I parented, I taught, I loved, I lost, I dealt with pain, extreme back pain and heart pain and the pain of past-trauma-while-living-through-a-fresh-new-national trauma, a worldwide trauma where the numbers of dead kept climbing and climbing.

I grew in a pandemic.”

I survived.

We did it all while our country was at war with itself and our president told us to drink bleach.

Take that ‘Greatest Generation.’

“2020.” Drop the mic.

What will we say years from now?

2020 is perfect vision, 2020 is hindsight, knowing now what you did not know then.

What did we learn?

I’d say we learned that human beings are weaker than we thought, but that we’re also stronger.

We found out a lot about ourselves. We learned about our frailties, our strengths, and we learned a lot about our vices.

Maybe the most important thing we learned, was who our true friends were.

Despite all the rage, fear, sorrow, and hate that inundated our daily lives, I learned that 2020 is the year when I loved more than I have ever loved before…

I told stories to a 5-year-old, every single day.

I have never made up so much on the spot in my life as I did for him. In the summer, at the pool while cities were on fire we floated and looked at the shapes clouds could make. Or we were fighting sea monsters in the deep sea, or we were the sea monsters. We were superheroes, and supervillains, we were pirates searching for sunken treasure. We went on walks and searched for the perfect stick to be a sword, or rocks that could be valuable gems. Every day was a quest, every walk an adventure.

There really is magic in the world. It’s in the expression on that 5-year-old boy’s face when he says, “You gave me an idea!”

I do not know what he will recall years from now when he looks back on this time, the time he knows as, “The Sickness.” Perhaps those stories helped to keep the wolves of fear at bay, for all that was going on in the world around us.

I thought the stories I told would help protect him from the world and all that was happening,

But it was he who saved me.

The Other Soldiers

“There’s nothing wrong with a little agitation for what’s right or what’s fair.”

–   John Lewis

I dedicate this post to the distinguished Congressman John Lewis, may he rest in peace.

In 1967, the late U.S. Representative, John Lewis had his skull fractured because he was marching for the right to vote. He endured much more violence as one of the original Freedom Riders, being beaten at times with baseball bats, lead pipes, and chains – all for the right to be treated equally. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, was arrested/jailed or beaten 29 times before he was assassinated because he was asking for black Americans to be treated with the same respect as white Americans. How many people have died to satisfy the frail egos of white men?

These are just two prominent examples. These are two of the greatest of American men. They did more for this country than I could ever do. I would need several lifetimes to scratch the surface of their contribution to this democracy.

So many people have sacrificed their lives, their livelihoods, and their bodies to attain that famed American dream, and to make it possible for others. To make life easier for those after you, or those around you, is the most beautiful thing.

Right now, that dream is a nightmare for the men, women, and children locked up in cages at the U.S. Border. All they wanted was a chance at the dream–to live your life on your own accord. This is really all anyone wants.  

How many people have had to march, petition, protest or demand equal treatment to white men? Racism is not dead, it’s paved in our roads, and sidewalks of our streets. It requires constant vigilance by those who would truly make this country great, men like John Lewis and Dr. King, women like Maya Angelou and Angela Davis to name a few among so many others.

●●

American history in the last century and a half has seen a lot of change. So many freedoms that were hard fought and won by soldiers who fought in the name of democracy. We have cemeteries full of men who died on actual battlefields to serve this country, but I am not going to talk about them right now. This is about the other soldiers.

The other soldiers I am talking about have also died for the freedoms of their fellow Americans. They did not carry guns, though they’ve been shot at. They did not storm beaches, hills, or bunkers, but they fought hard to gain ground. They are the men and women who have taken to our streets to march for what’s right. They are the ones who have conquered the American hearts, defeated unjust laws, and helped to move our country closer to that dream for which it was intended. They are still fighting today.

We should honor these warriors who stood up and who stand up when they see something wrong. Where would we be now if they did not say or do something about it? They have fought the good fight with their words, their arts, their movements, and this land is better for it. The fight is not over.

We should have a parade for these soldiers of justice,  like Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in United States history. He was assassinated. Then there’s soldiers like Matthew Shepherd, a 21 year old who was savagely beaten and tied to a barbed wire fence and left to die with a fractured skull – because he was gay. Rebecca Wight, a lesbian shot to death on the Appalachian trail, then there’s Brandon Teena, a transgender man raped and murdered in Nebraska, or Amanda Milan, a 25 year old transgender woman stabbed in the neck in New York City. These are only a tiny fraction of the names of people who have been murdered for having the courage to live their lives in the face of so much adversity.

I have never had to worry about living my life by anyone else’s leave. I have never had to apologize for being me. Those who have had to fight stigma day in and day out for who they are attracted to, who they love, the color of their skin or who they pray to are far braver than me. I salute you.

●●●

I take no pride in the color of my skin. Being white is not an achievement. I did not study hard, or put in the hours working and making sacrifices in my life to get to the goal of having a lighter pigment. Nothing in our lives as white men came harder because of the way our society views white men. Too often, we allow the oppression, or are dismissive of it. White noise is the white silence in the background, the sound of our indifference.   

Now, I am not ashamed of being white, because I can’t be ashamed of something I had nothing to do with creating. I had no more choice in being white than I did in being born on earth. But the skin I was born in has benefits, and those benefits have come at the cost of others’ rights. I acknowledge this fact.   

You don’t need to hide behind robes and ridiculous pointy hoods to be a white supremacist. You can wear a uniform with a badge. You can wear business suits, ties too long, and an orange vanity mask. You can wear the title of congressman, senator, businessman, or president.

White supremacy isn’t just about keeping people of color down, it’s also about keeping down, or away, those who don’t fit into the very narrow mold set by those who hold the power. As if America were a theme park and the Democracy Mountain ride had a sign that said: “You must be this tall, this white, and this heterosexual to ride.”

Most corporations, businesses, and establishments in America are white owned, white operated and white managed. Of the 500 corporations that make up the Fortune 500, there are only four black CEOs.  

If I were black, yes, I would be proud. What black people have had to endure in this country is an unimaginable burden to bear. If I were gay, I would be proud, for anyone in the LGBTQ community has had to endure a vastly tougher road than I have. If I was Native American, or Jewish, or Asian American or any other person historically marginalized, I would be proud.

People are dying all over America from COVID 19, and we have people who would rather fight for the flags and statues of dead traitors who thought it was their right to own other people. Honoring the confederacy is just the racist’s wet dream to keep alive the hate it stood for. I say tear them all down.

Let’s make new statues to those other soldiers who fought and those who continue to fight today to make this country truly great. Honor those who still march. Protesting, or as the late John Lewis might say, making “good trouble,” is what America is all about. Standing up when you see something wrong, and saying something about it. It’s about letting your voice be heard, no matter what your voice sounds like or where it comes from.

I hope that one day we won’t need these other soldiers. I hope the time comes when we don’t need to have marches for rights, because they will already be had by all. America is only great because of the people in it, and it’s up to us to make sure that is true for everyone.

Regarding the Idiotic Mask Argument

“Facts do not cease to exist just because they are ignored!” – Aldous Huxley

I’m not a doctor, and neither are you, if you don’t believe wearing a mask will help against COVID 19. That being said, I get that people don’t want to wear masks. Nobody wants to wear these things. They are annoying. I can’t wait for the day that I don’t have to mask up, glove up and sanitize every single thing I’ve come in contact with at the grocery store. The amount of OCD diagnoses that are going to come out of all this will be interesting to see.

I would love to go to the bar again, to watch football with my friends, or basketball or baseball. Heck, right now I would happily watch golf with my friends if it were safe. (We all know watching golf is not safe, it’s a gateway drug. First, you’re dabbling in the PGA tour and then before you know it you’re mainlining CSPAN and then it’s over.) I want to go back to normal, as we all do, but now is not that time. We will get there, or at least to some form of normalcy if we take the proper precautions.

Wishing this away or calling it a hoax is not only dangerous, it’s extremely disrespectful to the men and women who are working day and night to save our lives while the dead pile up all around them. Right now, Death is filling his coffers, getting rich off our ignorance, and the abominable failure of our president.

We Americans take great pride in our founding fathers’ words, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and rightfully so, but as it turns out, you need to be alive to have liberty and to pursue your happiness. Flouting the guidelines by the medical experts isn’t just irresponsible, it’s laziness. The anti-mask crowd likes to squawk about their rights and free speech, but this isn’t about that. They’re lazy. They don’t want to have to change a single thing in their lives. Imagine what that mindset would have been like during WWII. What if the great women of this country then had said, “Nah, I don’t want to build airplanes for the war effort. It’s my right to stay home and watch TV.”

The world would likely be vastly different if that had happened. It is going to be different this time, because people who are too lazy to put a mask on or observe the kindergarten level guidelines to help stop the spread of infection are killing others.

If you think wearing a mask infringes on your freedom, try thinking of the people your decision will affect. Chances are you or someone you know has diabetes, a heart condition, or some other medical condition that thanks to advances in medicine has become relatively livable. People can live with these conditions because of doctors and scientists.

Doctors, scientists, and nurses are the heroes now. All the rest of us have to do is get out of the way.

Think about all the years of school that someone who gets a medical degree has to go through. If you want to be fully licensed as a medical practitioner you have to go through 10-14 years of schooling. You have four years as an undergraduate, then four years in medical school and then three to seven in a residency program. That’s 10-14 years of your life spent in the toughest of schooling programs and all so you can get out and help others.

How about we help them now? We can by doing the following:

  1. Wear a mask. (If you get a black one you can look like a bandit and wouldn’t that be fun?)
  2. Observe social distancing, (It’s a great excuse to not hang out with people if you don’t want to. “Sorry man can’t come over, COVID.”)
  3. Wash your hands and sanitize frequently touched surfaces. (No not that frequently touched surface!)

These things are not difficult. Asking you to wear a mask is not asking you to storm a beach under machine gun fire. Social distancing is not being deployed in hostile territory. It’s not that hard.

I think of all the times I’ve ever heard someone talk about how veterans fought and died for our freedoms in America, and they did, well now it’s our turn. We can honor them by taking up this chance to fight for our own freedoms, and by that I mean, the freedom to be alive.

Wear a mask. For those who still don’t want to, I’m sure there’s a refrigerated trailer with a spot waiting for you…or your mom, or your dad, or your grandparents, maybe an uncle, or an aunt, or a cousin, a neighbor, or a friend.

The Names

"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change, 
I am changing the things I cannot accept." - Angela Davis

GEORGE FLOYD BREONNA TAYLOR AHMAUD ARBERY DION JOHNSON RAYSHARD BROOKS TAMIR RICE WALTER SCOTT PHILANDO CASTILLE MICHEAL BROWN ERIC GARNER TRAVON MARTIN TANISHA ANDERSON LAQUAN MCDONALD GEORGE MANN EZELL FORD ERIC HARRIS PHILLIP WHITE MYA HALL WILLIAM ANDERSON TYREE CRAWFORD ALONZO SMITH JANET WILSON TONY ROBINSON RANDY NELSON DAVID JOSEPH AARON BAILEY RONELL FOSTER DARRIUS STEWART BILLY RAY DAVIS ALTON STERLING MARY TRUXILLO RUMAIN BRISBON PAMELA TURNER CHRISTOPHER WHITFIELD ERIC REASON DOMINIQUE CLAYTON BRIAN KEITH DAY DYZHAWN PERKINS NATASHA MCKENNA KEVIN HICKS INDIA KAGER SANDRA BLAND WILLIE TILLMAN DEMARCUS SEMER SAMUEL DUBOSE TROY ROBINSON TERRENCE CRUTCHER ANTRONIE SCOTT BETTIE JONES KEVIN MATTHEWS FELIX KUMI JAMAR CLARK JUNIOR PROSPER LAMONTEZ JONES RICHARD PERKINS MICHAEL NOEL ALTERIA WOODS SYLVILLE SMITH FREDDIE BLUE JONATHAN SANDERS BRENDON GLENN DANTE PARKER TERRILL THOMAS JERAME REID LAVANTE BIGGS AKAI GURLEY CLARK MARTIN LUTHER KING JR EMMET TILL…THERE ARE SO MANY MORE BECAUSE THE NAMES KEEP ADDING UP KEEP PILING UP KEEP PAVING OUR AMERICAN ROAD WITH THE OLD STONES OF SLAVERY AND PAIN OF PEOPLE WHO WANT TO LIVE FREE BUT THE ROAD IS WRAPPED AROUND THE WORLD AND THEY ARE CHOKING.

On White Privilege

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I am a white man and I have white privilege. I didn’t ask for it but I got it. All of us who are white have it. It is our inheritance bought by slavery. 

Racism is a monster, a hideous creature that thrives in darkness, and it has been hiding under all our beds our whole lives. To ignore racism or deny its existence is to feed it the way a child sneaks scraps under the table to the dog.

White privilege is not about being born wealthy, but then again, it is. It’s not about your money, your station, or your opportunity. It’s not about you.

It’s a different kind of wealth, one we all got whether we wanted it or not – the wealth of establishment.

The dictionary defines the word, establishment as such:

  1. a constituted order or system.
  2. the existing power structure in society; the dominant groups in society and their customs or institutions; institutional authority
  3. the dominant group in a field of endeavor, organization[1]

Establishment sets the table and the rules. Here in America, those rules were written by white men for white men.

I’ve heard people say they know underprivileged white people, so they take issue with the term, ‘white privilege.’ Yes, there are poor white people. Poverty is a terrible thing, a crushing force that presses people down. Historically, the poverty felt by people who are not white is disproportionately worse than those who are white. Poverty is like a dirt road in the rain. It is a hard slog that can stretch on for a lifetime. However, for anyone in America not born a heterosexual white male in the last several hundred years, that dirt road in the rain is set at a steeper incline.  

Yes, there are white people wrongfully killed by police–police brutality is a major issue, but white people don’t have to fear the police because of the fact that they are white.

Nobody chooses the color of their skin, but centuries of racial domination have left white people’s skin unfettered by the manacles of history. White people benefited from slavery then, and we benefit from it today.  

White heterosexual men don’t have to march for equal rights.

White heterosexual men don’t have to ask the Supreme Court for permission to marry, or to vote, or to attend a good school, or any school. Straight white men have never been excluded from joining the armed forces, the police force, or the court.

You’ve never heard someone introduced as, “The first white heterosexual male…” head coach, quarterback, NFL owner, commissioner, broadcaster, journalist, doctor, CEO, pilot, police chief, lawyer, judge, astronaut, dean, congressman, senator, mayor, governor, or president. No one has ever had to say those words.

When we are indifferent to inequality and the injustice caused by racism, we let that monster grow. It is up to us on our own whether we feed it. I say drag that monster out from under the bed and throw it into the light, watch it shrink under the sun and you’ll see that it’s really just a cockroach and that’s the best it could ever be.

White privilege is real. It is the byproduct of a terrible and evil thing. Just acknowledge it. None of us can ever understand the pain it has caused, but we can try. We can listen.

When we listen our hearts will stir and then we can do something about it. We can change the establishment. We can vote.


[1] Definition provided by Dictionary.com

Where It Hurts

America – June 4, 2020

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I generally write fantasy fiction, but right now, it is difficult to escape reality when reality is so desperately in need of escaping.

About forty-six years ago, when I was three or four years old, my mother tells that if I’d fallen, scraped my knee, or otherwise came to her crying she would ask me, “Where’d you get hurt?” Rather than show her whichever part of my body was in pain, I would take her by the hand and walk her to the exact location I was in when the injury occurred.

I grew up in Colorado Springs, when I was in second or third grade; I sat with a girl, A.B., at my homeroom desk. I still remember her eyes and her smile. She was beautiful. We were good friends, as good as two kids no older than six or seven can be. We drew each other hearts, giggled a lot, and shared sweet smiles. I was a little white boy with buckteeth and she was a little black girl with good penmanship. We were children who shared innocent affections, until one day the teacher separated us. Other white kids in the class had started talking. They called her names. They called me names too. 

I didn’t know what their words meant so that night, I asked my father. He was well into his bourbon, his eyes glassy with that liquid haze. When I asked him what the ugliest word in the English language meant he snapped to, and sat up straight. I was in trouble. My father said, “You ever say that word again and I’ll knock your fucking head off.”

Moments later, he asked me where I’d heard the word, and I told him about A.B. and what my classmates were saying. My father, a Vietnam vet who’d come from an affluent family back east told me that it didn’t matter what color someone’s skin was because, “We love who we love.”

As long as I live, I will never forget that moment. As long as I live, I wish I could forget this moment, the one we are all in now.

Compared to other countries the United States of America is a toddler. It is the child of a time in history, when people landed on these shores fleeing tyranny. Yet, in our quest to be free, we became tyrants ourselves when we wiped out the people and culture that was here before us. Then we became enslavers, and mortgaged our humanity for free labor. The unbelievable world of pain brought by that may never be healed entirely. The tyranny of that pain has endured through centuries, and it is not yet dead.  

We cannot continue to overlook or undervalue the fact that white Americans have benefited from hundreds of years of oppression.

As a white man in America today, I can interact with the police without fearing for my life. I can shop anywhere without fear of being seen as suspicious. I can vote without issue, and do so many things I have taken for granted because I am not suffocated by racism. I can simply live my life, so many cannot.

I had a collapsed lung once about twenty years ago. It was awful. It happened spontaneously and subtly at first. After a few minutes, I started to feel difficulty breathing and after a while, I drove to the ER because I could not breathe fully. I have no idea what it’s like to be a person of color of any kind, but I imagine it is something like having only one functioning lung. It’s hard to do things when you cannot get enough air. It is hard to live that way.

White privilege is the air we breathe.

Our forefathers destroyed the native peoples of this land and purchased their own luxury with the blood and sweat of black men, women, and children. That happened and we cannot erase it. In doing this, they created a caste system that has endured in the halls of academia, our government, our courts, and our minds. What is happening today in America is a part of that story. Regardless of whether or not we were alive when it began is irrelevant. We are alive now.

America is a beautiful country, but we have scars. We have open wounds, and they will not heal until we let them. We need compassion. Though we cannot change our past, we can grow beyond it. We have to acknowledge it, the damage it has done and continues to do. We have to stop hiding our scars, or pretending they are not there. Let them be known, understand them. We cannot change our skin, all we can do is live in it.

If America’s mother were to ask you, “Where’d you get hurt?” take her hand and walk her to the sidewalk Trayvon Martin died on, the spot in Charleston, where the grass felt Walter Scott’s body fall, take her to Cleveland, where Tamir Rice was gunned down, or the street in St. Anthony, Minnesota where Philando Castille was shot in front of his son and girlfriend, take her to the shoulder of the Loop 101 in Phoenix, where Dion Johnson was shot in his car, take her to the street in Minneapolis where George Floyd gasped for air, and begged for his life before he died.

Take her to all these places, and then take her to the many, many, many more. Show her where they all died and say, “That’s where I’m hurting.”

2020

This is not a war, but it is a fight. Humanity is uniquely bonded through a single event as this. We are all affected. We are all at risk. So this is one time we truly are in it together. Everyone. So, love the people you love and maybe listen a little more to the people you don’t. We are going to get through this. Follow the scientists and the medical experts. This is what they do, this is their time. My best to everyone. Be safe, be smart, and be sane…as best as you can.

The Art of Perseverance

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
― Winston S. Churchill

I have a map on my wall of my world I created back in 2008. I look at it and the several updated versions that I have tacked up around it every time I sit down to write. Every month I go to the bookstore and take a picture of where my books will one day go on the shelves. Ever since I caught the fire of writing in my soul, I have never stopped. I never will. I cannot imagine what I would do with myself if I did not write. It is the thing that wakes me up in the morning, most mornings. Sometimes it’s the need to pee, or that I have to get to work so I can continue paying for a roof and the comforts of a place to write.

Going months and months on end without hearing a single word from any agent that I have queried, or literary magazine or contest I’ve submitted to can be depressing. Tack on events such as: having your car keys, and your wallet stolen, your writing notebook stolen, (full of a year’s worth of ideas you wanted to keep), getting a rejection letter, having a bird poop on your head as you walk to your car in the morning, the coffee grinder breaking (that was almost the last straw) and being stung by a scorpion on the tip of your middle finger. Is the universe trying to tell me something there? All of these happened in seven days last month, starting the day before my birthday. No joke.

Note: people tried telling me that bird shit was good luck, but I remain skeptical.

Through a week of comical and not so funny happenings and all the other things that have happened in my life in the last few years, I write. As you do, as anyone who has the passion to do anything that has taken their hearts captive and won’t release them until we die. It is a beautiful thing, having that thing that drives you.  

Then sometimes, through all your swinging at the world you finally get a hit, you at last make a mark. Even if it’s just a little mark, only one that you can see if you look in the right light, you know you hit it and maybe that’s all you need. Back in April of this year, I submitted to a contest one of my favorite stories, The Wandering Oak. It’s a origin story of sorts for the main character in my first novel, Mother Made of Iron, for which I am still seeking representation. I got the news recently that The Wandering Oak finished in the “Top 2 percent,” and received Honorable Mention in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future 3rd Quarter 2019 Contest. The contest features writers from around the world and the anthology has been around for 35 years. Though my story is not being published in their anthology as they have finalists and semi-finalists to publish, I am posting it here on my website in the Fantasy & Other Fiction section. I hope you will read it and maybe even leave me a comment or two.

I got a hit! It’s not a big hit, but I can see it, and that’s enough to keep me going. Happy writing to everyone!

Writing the Storm

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”    – George Orwell

Being an unpublished writer is working two full time jobs and only getting paid for one. Add to that a couple of the following things: being part of a writer’s workshop and/or a writing friendship with someone who you share your work with, and they share theirs. The value of this is immeasurable. Writing is solitary work and sometimes you need to have your work looked at by someone you trust. So now, you have two full time jobs and a part time job, and again, you’re only getting paid for the one. (If you are being paid for your writing on the side, more power to you.)

Throw in your query submissions for the book you spent the last several years writing, rewriting, writing again, and then revising another time. Assuming you’re going for the traditional publishing route, you have to find literary agents to query. You have to research what they are looking for, what they like and don’t like. You have to write query letters tailored to each specific literary agent. Write a synopsis then, which is a one to two page description of every major happening in your book. You have to distill all six-hundred pages into one or two.  

Once you’ve done the above, you have to deal with the rejections. They will come if you’re lucky. Every one of us will get some rejections, but many agents you query will never, ever respond to you. It’s like offering your hopes and dreams to one of those machines with all the stuffed animals packed in and you have to lift them out with some impotent claw device. No matter how many quarters you put in you’ll never get that fucking stuffed hippo. Querying is another job.

Okay, so what? Every writer who ever wrote a book has gone through this right? Yep. I am not special and neither are you. This is what we signed up for this is the writer life.

So now, you’re working basically three full time jobs as a writer (not including your current writing project / short stories / outlining / drafting / brainstorming and researching for your next one). Then add maintaining a social life and relationships with friends. If you’re a parent, add one job per child. I have no children, but I’ve seen them up close, I’ve seen what parents have to do, at least enough to have an idea that it’s crazy. How anyone can be a parent and also write is miraculous, kudos to you. If you are a single parent and you’re working and writing, you should get a medal and you should probably stop reading this because your house may be on fire.

Add to all this the fact that nowadays if you’re an author or an aspiring one, you need a social media presence. You need a webpage and/or a blog. Agents want you to be known already. You have to have followers and friends and people who might potentially buy your book if it gets published. Maintaining a social media account can be exhausting. You find things you agree with and things you don’t, you find things that you never imagined anyone would broadcast and yet there they are. That’s the way it works now, as I’m sure you know. As it turns out, Twitter and Instagram are the top two social media platforms for writers.

Oh, don’t forget to read. Read as often and as much as you can. That’s crucial. We have to keep an eye on the competition right?   

Also, we need to exercise. Go out in nature, run, jump, and play and do something to burn off those extra calories and keep from dying too young. We can’t survive on coffee alone.

Okay, now add some tough times or some pain, or a surgery recovery, a death in the family, a resurgence of childhood trauma or whatever else life might have in store for you. Anxiety, loneliness, and depression over the aforementioned rejections all come with the territory; the other stuff is extra. Speaking of trauma, if you are afflicted with an incurable loyalty to a perennially doomed sports franchise, that takes time too.

Now, if you live in America and you tune into the news and are concerned about what’s happening you have to carve out time for that as well. It can be challenging to keep from getting derailed by the maniacal orange crusted hobgoblin who goes around starting fires everywhere he can just to see what will happen. Keeping up with the Trumpster fire and not sinking into despair is another part time job. But, if you’re a fan of the lunacy, well, I guess keep writing your manifesto. But do us all a favor and show it to someone before you do anything. Maybe take it to a writer’s workshop and get some feedback. Writing is thinking and vice versa, and it doesn’t hurt from time to time to consider a little revision.

Writers, whether we know it or not, and whether or not we embrace it, are the voice of our time. Some of us will be heard and some of us will not. Our duty is to write our part in the long and winding scripture of humanity. Regardless of your genre, if you write articles for a local magazine or political commentary, fantasy, erotica, horror, or good old-fashioned fiction, we are all a part of this world and our voices should be heard, at least by someone.  

We’re In the Game Now

“Confidence is going after Moby Dick in a rowboat and taking the tartar sauce with you.”
― Zig Ziglar

I have a new respect for bloggers since I started writing for my website. It keeps me busy. Before, when I was writing my book I was more static, stationary in terms of where my writing mind was. Now, I have to be able to move from one thing to the other, be it writing about writing or working on a fantasy story or something else. As a blogger, I’m still “filling out” so to speak. I enjoy it, but the freedom of it can be daunting.

I spent so much time every day writing my novel, which I am pitching to literary agents that I rarely, if ever, peeked out of that world to write anything else. Now, a little over a year away from finishing the book and working to get it traditionally published, I have found new latitude to play with as far as writing goes. I think blogging, or at least attempting to, has improved my writing agility to some degree. It has given me better range.

Some days it feels like I’m typing my life into some great, yawning maw of obscurity. It’s a bit frightening. To think all the work you’ve done, all the time you’ve spent and words you’ve strung together over the years might be for nothing. It might be a tad dramatic to say as much, but I think the fear itself is legitimate. But isn’t this what every writer ever has had to go through? Is this not what I trained for? Am I not entertained?

I remember when I got my first rejection from a literary agent, I was telling a friend about it, and he said, “You’re in the game now.” He’s right. It took me a long time to get to that point, where I was ready to throw myself into this massive Thunderdome* of literary proportions, but here I am. “Two men enter, one man leaves?” No. It’s not that easy.

Writing is like being born or dying, you do it alone, and it’s painful. Querying though, that is something else entirely. Being a writer is a funny thing. You spend most of your time in your own head, up in the clouds or down in the dungeons but rarely with everyone else around you. Then, when you’re done putting what you’ve seen on paper, you have to become an outgoing introvert. You have to ask a stranger who has never been to your world to enter it, understand it, and be your champion.

The game has changed over the years, even in the years I’ve been writing, training, and honing my ability to get to this moment. I don’t know for certain if it’s better or worse, harder or easier, it’s just the way it is. One thing I am sure of though, is that it takes a certain kind of mettle to keep going. Whether it’s straight out bravado, confidence or insanity I don’t know. Whatever it is, I have it and so does everyone else who knows what I am talking about.

Fifty years ago, writers typed their manuscripts on a typewriter, had to go through them page by page, make their edits, and then retype it. When he was writing, On the Road, Jack Kerouac famously taped a string of pages together to feed into his typewriter so he could continuously work without stopping to put in a new page.

Back then, once the edits were done and their book was ready, the writer had to mail it to an editor (actually put the manuscript into an envelope, take it to the post office, and mail it.) There was no world wide web then. There were no bloggers, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. In those days, social media required people to be, well, social. You had to go places and meet people. Back then, there wasn’t anything but a newspaper, magazine or a book that would connect the minds of writers with the rest of the world. There was just a man or a woman in a room tip-tapping the keys and slapping ink on paper. Nowadays we can post content on our websites by phone. Back then, you had to physically go to a phone, not carry one around in your pocket.

Today, there are so many platforms to post your work, whether it is your writing, your art, or random thoughts and observations. It’s a great way to get your words out there and I am glad for it. I came a little late to the social media game though, and it is still an adjustment for me.

I wonder how well Shakespeare would have done with Twitter. He wouldn’t be able to send sonnets, he’d have to settle for haikus.

Shakespeare changed everything. He brought common English to the elites of the world and made it legitimate. He brought high art to the common folk. He united the people of the streets with the people of refined society and their lofty heights. He tied heaven to earth and now we all have the same language, though our economical demarcations remain.

How would the world be different if history’s great authors, poets and playwrights had social media? What would T.S. Elliot be like on Facebook? How about Van Gogh on Instagram? Had he been on social media, a man like Charles Bukowski might have ruled the world.

In today’s arena of self-published authors, it is a little intimidating trying to publish through the old ways. Getting an agent is not so simple. It certainly is not as easy as I had initially thought it would be. This has been quite the learning experience for me. Then, how often is something as easy as you thought it would be? I may have to self-publish. It is a thought that has occurred to me. I am still holding out for the traditional way, which is a testament either to my stubborn resolve or to a fear of the unknown. It’s still too early to tell.   

Every day on Twitter or Instagram, I see new notifications of authors who have published their novels and hold up their brand new, shiny books for all to see. There may be more writers in the world now than there has ever been, and that makes the Thunderdome decidedly more crowded. There’s more competition, more fellow writers vying for the page. That makes it harder, yes, and easier for my voice to get lost in the clamoring cacophony of voices. That just means I have to be sharper, I have to be better than I was yesterday.

Writing is exercise for the soul. It can make you stronger, deeper and perhaps more fit to be human. In the end, having more writers ultimately makes for a richer world, and maybe that is enough.   

If you enjoy 80’s pop culture references and movies as much as I do, then click below for a treat. Thanks for reading! *Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

Happy Birthday America! Now Sit Down, We Have to Talk

Independence Day

“Our lives begin to end the day we remain silent on things that matter.”

 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Around the world, about 225 countries have a day they claimed their sovereignty in one form or another. More than 160 of them celebrate that day annually. 243 years ago, America became an independent country. It was the rise of a new nation. We claimed our freedom from our English parent with the rousing words, “All men are created equal.”

All people are created equal, but they’re not all treated equal. That is true of the human condition the world over throughout all time. We have it all here. We are a country of contradictions. We fought for our freedom from an oppressive monarchy and wiped out the people who lived here before us. We enjoyed our freedom as we took it from others and forced them into slavery. In some states, men can marry men and women can marry women. All over the nation people of every creed, color or religion can work together, live together, love, hate the same things, and argue without killing one another, usually. We can get better though, and I believe even through these times we live in now, we will.

America is a great country. I believe that with all my heart, but I also know it tends to be greater if you’re white, if you’re male and if you’re heterosexual. Even greater if you’re rich.

We are a complicated people. As we celebrate our freedom today, little brown-skinned children, whose parents were seeking a better place for them to grow, rot in cages in Texas and Arizona. In some parts of this great nation, a woman who is raped must not only live with the terror of being raped, but the sentence of the life growing inside her. In America today, a man or woman of color who gets pulled over runs the risk of getting shot to death, even if they run away.

No heterosexual has ever had to hide that fact. No straight man has ever had to worry that his liking women would get him beat up, ostracized from his family, or murdered. People want to be free to determine the course of their own lives and to do so without fear.

America is a great country. I love it, but my love is not blind. We have problems. We are not perfect and what country ever is? Loving requires open eyes. We have been the hero at times, and at others, we have not. We are going through a tough time as a nation and it is at times such as these that we need to think about what we are doing, about what we are allowing. I love this country for all the things that it can be. I believe we can be better. We’re by far not the worst place in the world, but that shouldn’t stop us from improving. Yes, we can be great. If we don’t look at ourselves honestly, see where we were wrong in the past, and where we’re wrong now, then how can we even be good?

When the idea of something is greater than its reality, raise the reality to meet the idea.

Some people might be angry with what I’ve said here, yes. I understand that. I don’t like looking at my flaws, I certainly don’t like them pointed out to me. I don’t think anyone does, but you don’t strengthen the foundation of your home by ignoring the cracks. You see them, you point them out, you see how deep they are and then you fix them. We have been great, yes, but only for some, now let’s be great for all.

But this blog is supposed to be about writing right? It is. All of it is. Writing is thinking. Thinking is freedom. When a person can think for him or herself, then they can act for themselves.  

Naming something is a form of writing, even if you never put a pen to paper. When you assign a word to identify someone, you are naming and you are writing that name in your mind and in the mind of everyone else who uses that name. 

When I was in second grade, I had the nickname, “Chip.” School kids loved it. I hated it. I was teased and taunted, and not being much of a fighter at the time, I decided to handle it a different way. I went to my mom after school one day and told her I wanted to be called “Chad,” instead of Chip. I made my case and to my surprise, it worked. The next day, my mother and I went to the school and told the officials I would go by “Chad” from then on. We were only changing my nickname, my legal name, which didn’t seem to fit me then, would not change.

For twenty plus years, I was Chad, and Chad was an angry, narrow-minded man. I moved to Arizona where I met a woman who was into East Indian meditations, Zen meditation. I was attracted to her so naturally I decided to try it. I had a lot of unresolved issues at that time and I didn’t know what to do with them, or in fact, how to identify them. Meditation changed my life, and I changed my name again, (though not legally). I was editing myself and I didn’t know it.  

I meditated every single day. It was tumultuous time for me mentally. I had a narrow view of the world then and my place in it. Despite the meditation I was still stuck, trapped in a room where the walls closed in. I couldn’t get out of it. So I did every kind of meditation, cathartic, dancing, and sitting in absolute silence. I watched my ego dissolve to some degree then. I was hungry to learn more so I submitted my name and my photo to an ashram in Poona, India and received the name, Kranti Chaitanyo. The name was meant to be a message for me, its meaning; “Revolution of Consciousness.”

Asking people to call you by a different name several times in your life is, of course, a bit drastic and a little ridiculous. But for me, at that time in my life, I felt it was necessary. As strange as it sounds, I never felt like me. So I took the message of that strange name to heart and changed from Chad, to Chai. The meditations helped me become more aware, and helped me to identify my anger and how I was projecting it onto others. I learned to take ownership of my pain and to learn from it. None of this was easy.

I went by Chai for about ten years. Then I went to college, where I rediscovered my love of writing and took all the courses on it that I could. When I graduated and began working in the professional world, I was ready to accept the name I’d avoided my whole life, the name I was born with, Albert. As I rewrote my name, I rewrote my life. A constant work in progress, but one for which I could be proud.

What does my changing my name have to do with America or writing? Everything. Each and every one of us here lives a journey uniquely American. Regardless of how we got here, whether we were born here or brought by our parents or moved here seeking a better life. Our lives are written in the story of this country, now and forever.

For so many years, I was not free in my own head. despite all that meditation, despite all the ways in which I’d learned to examine my thoughts, my feelings and my impulses I was still so often a little kid stuck in a room. Writing made me free. It makes me free.

Writing is the sword to slay monsters. It can break the chains of the mind.

Our ideals must be continuously earned. Freedom, like consciousness is an ongoing exercise in staying awake. I had to become independent from my past self, and even from my projected future self. We are in constant rebirth from the moment we come crying from our mother’s wombs. We write and rewrite our lives every day.

We are all America, and each of us has to fight for the freedom to be ourselves. Sometimes the best freedom is escaping your own mind, or getting away from bad habits, the thousand tiny strings that tie us to where we were and keep us from being where we want to be. Freedom is not letting something or someone else define you. Only we can determine who we are. Freedom isn’t a song, or a salute, it’s the heart of every living thing. Freedom is being alive.

We are all America. This is our time to acknowledge our failures, our shortcomings, look our fear in the face, and move forward. Freedom isn’t afraid. Freedom is about being knocked down and getting back up again. It doesn’t matter how many times we fall, or how many times we fail, we have to get back up. Just get the fuck back up.

We are all America. Freedom is always do or die. It’s when the odds are against you, when all signs point to failure, that’s when you get back up. Independence is not about winning and losing, it’s about standing up when you want to sit down. It’s about rising to that moment when you think you can’t do it, that you can’t make it, or that you can’t be the one.

You are the one. We all are.   

Flying Words

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” – Ray Bradbury

In the early 1980’s when I was in fourth or fifth grade the teacher showed a film titled, Legend of the Boy & the Eagle (Disney, 1967)*. It’s the story of a young Hopi boy who’s banished from his village and befriends an eagle that teaches him how to hunt. One day he returns to his village but is rejected and mocked by other boys who tie eagle’s feathers to his arms. The Hopi boy flees to a high cliff. When he jumps, he changes into a golden eagle and flies away. It’s a beautiful story and one that has stuck with me all my life. I remember rooting for him in the movie. I dreamt about that film for years. When I was a child, my big take away was that a boy could transform himself into something else and rise above the world he knew.

Some days writing is like setting out with a wide smile on a world of adventure. Other days it’s like getting in a boxing ring with one arm and facing a guy twice my size. All I can do is hope for the best.

What am I going to write? Why am I going to write? Am I going to tap the keys for another fantasy, poetry, or story about a lost childhood? What difference will it make with all that is going on in our world today? What am I going to say that will matter against all the wars and divisions among us? How can I have an effect on the political, racial, or ideological walls that separate people? They say love is the universal language, well so is hate. There’s a lot of both in the world, and each one tugs at the ears of writers to listen. How does my voice find its way in the world?

Being a writer is like being a cartographer for the human soul and mind. Whether we write fantasy, romance, horror, or non-fiction, we are all marking the way to some collective truth for others to find.

Sometimes I think of all those writers who came before. For them it seems, in any period, the world was as it is today: full of doubt, full of confusion and war, but also full of grace and insurmountable love. What would they write about today? My guess is that it would be not that different from what they wrote before. Writing is the constant sharpening of the mind and the self against the dulling forces of time.

I am just a grain of sand on the vast shore of humankind and I know it. All writers are. Despite the futility, the writer, that grain of sand, stands up and tells a story. He or she knows that everyone else has his and her own story to tell. Yet they tell it anyway, knowing all the while that deep down that maybe no one will listen. It might be that only a few will even hear it. Maybe they will love it or they might hate the story, but all the writer knows, and what is important, is that there’s story to be told. It has to come out.

According to data reported in 2017, 7.53 billion people currently live on earth. That means that there are (more or less) seven and a half billion minds out there thinking thoughts, making observations and dreaming when they go to sleep. For any zombies reading this, that’s a lot of brains. For the sake of the metaphor in the above paragraph, it’s also a lot of grains.

There are more people alive today than ever before. Isn’t this how it has always been? The world is full of people, and the number is always more than it’s ever been before. There are always people making war, making love and writers around to document it all and everything in between. There are good writers, and bad ones and some who never get read. What happens to the written word once it’s been read? Does it dissipate like a trail of smoke or does it plant itself like a seed somewhere in the garden of the reader’s mind?  

All these people and all the various cultures have points of view and traditions that differ from one another, but there are two things that ring true no matter where you go; love and hate. We see this in the headlines every day. People doing great things for others out of love, and people doing terrible things to others out of hate.

Where is the love in your story? If you’re writing, it’s in the words. It’s in every easy flowing paragraph or thought and in all the mind-crushingly painful lines that you labor to get down.

As I’ve said before, I believe you write what story sits down with you to write. I believe in this wholeheartedly. However, that does not change the fact that I sometimes question the stories that sit down with me.

“Really?” I say to the pregnant woman in a suit of armor who wants me to write about her again. “The world has gone crazy. You want me to write about you?”

“I’m a pregnant woman in a suit of armor,” she says coolly. “What else are you going to do with me?”

Sigh. “Point taken.”

So, I write fantasy, and generally whatever else comes to mind. What else is there to do? I just have to keep going, keep tapping away at the keys because that’s what I love. Even when it’s hard to get out of bed to write or to work or to do anything, and regardless of whether or not my work is rejected or rejoiced–I have to keep going. This is no different from any other writer who ever kept trying.

It’s love that makes me write. Love of words, love of stories, and humanity itself (and probably a love of my own voice too). Sometimes love inspires me to write about certain things or certain people. Even when I write something full of anger or sadness love is at the source of it. Love may very well be what makes this blue marble spin on the black tile of space.

Or maybe writing is just a way of showing love for oneself. It’s not the kind of love that comes with putting oneself above others, but loving something forgotten, or rather someone. Maybe I write for the little boy I once was, that kid buried under so many layers and years of self-doubt and loathing. In some deep cave, I found him hiding in his mother’s closet, afraid of the basement and giants. With a pen, I can give the boy something to hold onto and crawl out of the dark. With writing, he can become an eagle and fly above his fears.

*If you want to see the video, click on this link to see the ending of the film, Legend of the Boy and the Eagle (Disney, 1967)

The Character of Setting

When you write about a place you give it life. Perhaps the best way to ground a story is to focus on where it takes place. Steinbeck spent pages describing the California countryside in The Grapes of Wrath, Neil Gaiman sets the story of The Graveyard Book in (you guessed it) a graveyard. I can think of no better example where the setting of a story becomes a character. The setting in that book is alive despite itself. It offers beauty and dread and in this writer’s humble opinion, the story would be lost without it. One could spend days discussing the various uses of setting in literature regardless of genre.

I have always felt that the surroundings the characters of a book find themselves in are tantamount to adding another character to the scene. In Carolyn Forche’s prose poem, The Colonel, the setting stands out as a stark reminder of the situation in which the speaker in the poem finds herself. Stucco walls with broken bottles embedded in them to “scoop the kneecaps” of would be intruders, and the razor wire on the walls, all serve to provide the reader with the sense that the speaker is in a dangerous place. But it’s more than that, it’s as if the dictator’s compound itself looms as a shadowy henchman over the speaker. It makes the implied threat to her real at all times.  

Wherever we go, if we take a look around and notice the uniqueness of our surroundings we might see that even the buildings or mountains or trees appear to have their own sense of personality. I live in Tempe, Arizona. On McDowell and Priest Roads there is a park known as Papago Park. Red Rock Mountains rise from the park at the peak of the hill crested by McDowell to overlook Phoenix. Aside from the amazing sunsets, if you look from the western side of the mountains you can see a face in the rock. It looks like it could be the face of a gorilla or maybe Jabba the Hut melting. I’ve never been able to drive by without noticing it.

What does the use of setting say about the following short pieces based in downtown Phoenix? 

Barrett drives home from the mental health clinic through the familiar streets of Phoenix. The clinic sits behind a dusty, barren lot surrounded by a chain-link fence between railroad tracks and an old factory. Shanty huts made of anything scrounged from dumpsters are stuffed into underpasses like broken childhood dreams. A woman walks down the dimly lit sidewalk as the sun closes its eyes to the world. She stops at a motel with more boards in the windows than glass, wearing a gray gown fit to her form. Down the side, from armpit to ankle, her dress is cut like a knight’s tabard. It gives a side view of the woman’s naked body underneath. Seeing her reminds Barrett of another woman who used to go to his clinic.

The first time he met Grace, Barrett and her case manager conducted a home visit. Grace was a woman in her thirties with a face of sixty. The smell of cigarettes leaned on the nostrils when she opened the door. A cockroach sat in the open on a wall. Grace reported that she took her medications, for the most part. She was wearing a gray dress with a hole cut in the crotch, where the mid-morning light died in her pubic hair. Inside the apartment, a thin mattress sagged on the floor under a weight Barrett could not imagine. There was one chair but no table for the social security checks that paid for the apartment.

“Have you been saved?” Grace asked Barrett.

Surprised, he answered, “I’m not religious, Ma’am.”

She smiled and said, “I’ll pray for you.”

The examples above, I believe, show the use of setting as a means to express a sense of loneliness or hopelessness in someone’s situation. The trappings of poverty or wealth can convey so much about a person in a story. Who they are or what they do can sometimes be decided by their surroundings.   

Below is a different example.

Barrett locked up the clinic for the night and parked his car a few blocks from work. It was Friday, the end to a long and trying week. He was ready for a beer he was ready for twelve. He walked by the old psychiatric center where he used to take people when they were psychotic or suicidal. It had been closed for years and now had a fence around it promising a smart new restaurant or nightclub. The area around it had been gentrified. Where before Barrett would have seen a dive bar, a drive-thru liquor store and a strip club he now saw a coffee house and a trendy spot where people could drink craft beer and play shuffleboard. Downtown was confusing now, there were tall buildings where before was only sky. Smiling women walked together down sidewalks dotted with lamps. The night was young and full of fun. The light of possibility and youth danced on their cheeks.

The setting above shows something quite different from the two before it. Ironically, all these are composites of real parts of Phoenix that are all only a few blocks apart.

Setting is important, and something that I try to give due respect to, though I have been guilty of overwriting it. The characters should still be the focus in the story. I say that for myself as well as anyone who might benefit from it. Too much exposition and not enough character development can stifle a story. As writers, we all have to find our own balance.

Have you ever walked downtown at night and really noticed the various buildings? High rises and squat, rectangular shops are like people in a crowd. How do they fit in a scene? Maybe they are innocent bystanders to the characters in a story. Or maybe they are witnesses who stay silent at the scene of some tragedy. They stand around, apart from one another, nobody speaks–they just stand there knowing. Buildings in cities do not look each other in the eyes. When something happens, they just stand there. Silence is their dialogue, perhaps saying, “This is how it is. This is how it has always been.”

The Living Word

I love writing dialogue. It is where the people in a story really come to life. I mentioned in my last blog, “The Journey,” how writing dialogue and action can ultimately change the course of a scene, a chapter or even the whole story.

How many times have you had a conversation with someone that was so deep it stays with you long after? Even if the conversation was short, I remember instances when I met someone and what we talked about, the gist of it has never left me. Though we may not remember all the words, they create a form that remains in time where that conversation took place. The words then are like a ghost that lingers where a moment was shared with another human being.

We’ve all had trivial or even seemingly meaningless conversations throughout our lives. The “How are yous?” and the “Good mornings,” and all the little bits of dialogue with strangers, or people we see every day. These moments of shared words have meaning too. These tidbits of conversation are like the spaces of blank page between scenes. Everyday words with others give us the space for the important, soul moving talks to grow. We need it all to complete the stories we live, and the ones we write.  

What an incredible creature the tongue is. It tastes our food, keeps our lips from being dry, it can signify disapproval with a simple protrusion from its little cave. It can be used for pleasure when invited to play with another person to whom we are attracted. Mainly though, we use it to fit sounds around our thoughts and push them out of our mouths to be understood, feared, adored or obeyed. It’s like having a miniature god to control, one who obeys our commands only some of the time. Without it we would have no spoken word, but with it, the ability to say anything. Words are used to create, convey, or destroy. It’s how we use them that matters. Where would humanity be now if we’d never developed the ability to use these sounds that that somehow make sense? What would the world be without them?

I’ve heard it said that you need other people in order to be human. I think that might be true. Talking can reveal a new sense of being. Words spoken aloud when alone are like puffs of smoke. They may linger for a while, they might even be good to hear for ourselves, but they dissipate quickly without others to hear them. Words spoken aloud with another person are like tiny strings that tie us to one another, even if they are meant to drive us apart. Words matter and they have form.

When you’re writing, how many times have you had two characters speak in a scene when one of them says something you didn’t expect? Aren’t we as the authors supposed to have total command of the words our characters speak? I think yes and no. there is something to be said for just letting the conversation play out. I like to put two characters in a scene and let them go. Much of what I write in such moments is ultimately cut, but in my opinion, it’s the best way to get the most authentic conversation out of the people.

We create our characters from some primordial pool of our imagination. On paper, we set them upright, and give them a face, and a name, and motives by using little black letters set in a row. Yet, I believe that aside from the actions they take, it is in the moments when we let them talk that we learn the most about them.  

Conversation between two or more people is a living thing. Sometimes when I write dialogue I just play it out, I try to go where the characters’ conversation goes and they reveal themselves even more. I have had moments of dialogue reshape entire chapters. It can be illuminating and frustrating, just like talking to a person. Dialogue is alive. It becomes its own character, and that character has a place in the story. 

The Journey

“A story should entertain the writer too.” – Stephen King

I am only talking about my process here. Maybe something will be amusing or helpful to another writer, if so, I will feel fulfilled, and if not, I thank you for reading.

To my good friends I am not known for my spontaneity. The phrase, “a man of routine,” has been uttered about me a time or two. I like to cook a giant crock-pot full of food so that I don’t have to wonder what I will eat for lunch during the week when I’m at work. Sometimes I do cook the same thing several times before changing it up, but that’s only because I love my own cooking. I generally get up at the same time every day, around 5:30am, I eat the same breakfast, and I drink the same coffee.

It’s not that I’m opposed to change, but the goal for me is productivity. Time is valuable, and I try to use it to the best of my ability and write as much as I can before I have to leave for work. I eat the same thing because it takes no deciding, and that leaves me more time to devote my thinking to whatever it is I’m working on at the time. Writing is an adventure. It’s like going on safari in my mind. Having certain mundane things taken care of is like packing enough water and a first aid kit when you go on a hike. I like to have all the nuts & bolts taken care of so I can enjoy the journey, after all, safety first!

The Stephen King quote above puts into words something I have always felt. It is so important to be surprised, moved, saddened or even elated when you write. I have felt them all as sit at my computer and tip-tap out the fate of people only I know. That happens because when I write, I think of it as an experience the characters and I are having together. Of course, I don’t mean to say that I am literally unaware of what’s going to happen to the people in my stories, but there have been many times over the course of my novel, Mother Made of Iron where I was legitimately surprised.

When I write I try to maintain a level of curiosity and wonder. I do plan certain things, but I would not call myself a planner when I write. Nor could I ever get away with saying that for anything else in my life. I don’t know where things are going to go all the time. I may have a general idea and a structure of sorts but it often works out differently than originally planned. This may explain why it took ten years and two attempts to get the book right.

(I did mention this is not meant to be advice right?)

Music for me can be a great medium for spontaneity. I will often listen to music when I write, as I am sure others do. No words, just music, words get in the way. Typically, I listen to soundtracks of movies or whatever music I come upon that moves me to write. I once wrote eighty-seven pages from listening to the 55-second intro to Metallica’s, Unforgiven 3. It’s a haunting piano piece that I challenge anyone not to be inspired by.

I love how dynamic writing can be. Whether you stare at a sunset, a mountain, or the face of a beautiful woman, words come marching in. I never know what is going to happen when I sit down to write. Sometimes I have an idea, I know where I want to go but not how I’ll get there. The map is never finished until it’s finished. The journey is the joy.

When I was writing my novel, I had watched the movie, Lucy, with Scarlett Johansson. The music in that movie is amazing. I found clips of it on YouTube and listened to one particular clip, “Melting Into Matter,” by Eric Serra, which is all of 3:31 seconds and wrote an entire chapter of my book listening to it again and again. It was so moving, and the imagery that came to me when I listened to this beautiful piece of music added a kind of beauty to the character’s story line. I get this from music all the time.

Certain types of music belong to specific characters I have found. The music I previously mentioned was for only one person in my novel, “Faunie.” She was originally meant to be only a minor person in the story. What she became, and what she is still becoming grew beyond my imagination.

Through the combination of dialogue, action and a healthy dose of music Faunie turned into one of the most significant characters I’ve ever written. When I started writing out her scenes, I had no idea what would happen, but she has since become so real I miss not writing her right now. She owns a special place in my heart, this girl with a black wing mark on her arm. I hope to introduce her to people one day.

The Write Time

“A writer is working when looking out the window.” – Unknown

What is wrong with taking time away from writing? Nothing, it is not a bad thing. It can even be, at times, necessary. You can’t do one thing too much without reaching a point of exhaustion. I write every day, generally speaking, but there are times when that’s just not possible. Life has to be lived. We have to work, we have to relate to others, take care of those who are important to us in whatever ways we do. Mothers have to be mothers, fathers have to be fathers, and friends have to be friends.

Time away from writing is not the same as not writing however. Each and every single one of life’s experiences and moments we live, whether they are shared with others or by ourselves are subject to later material. Our minds are like refineries taking in our senses and memories and turning them into potential fuel for stories. The refinery never shuts down, never stops.  

I once got into oil painting, deeply into oil painting. I mean that both literally and financially, (it’s not cheap to paint with oil). I got so into it that I didn’t write for probably a year. I had no idea what I was doing, had never taken a class save for the typical art classes you take in high school. I enjoyed it, like writing it got intense–I would sometimes spend up to eight hours painting and could get so lost in it that I wouldn’t eat until I felt I was going to pass out (something I had only ever done with writing).

Being creative feeds me. I eat at work almost non-stop. I might as well have a feedbag strapped around my neck so I can graze endlessly throughout the day. On average, I have three meals at work from 8 to 5 and snack on whatever I can find. When I am at home, writing, I hardly stop at all to eat. As I typed that last sentence, it is 9:32 pm and I’ve eaten twice since I got up at 5:00am.

I am no visual artist, but I had fun doing it while I did. I think in some way it made me a better writer. Exercising my creativity with different skills only makes it stronger. When I first started painting, I did so out of grief. I was going through the breakup of my life at the time and after spending years of writing, I felt that words would not do the trick. I picked up a brush and filled my small apartment then with drawings, easels and canvases and the ubiquitous smell of oil paint and turpentine based cleaner. I took a few classes at my local park recreation center and learned a few things. One day in 2008, I just stopped and put down the brush to sit at the keyboard again. I haven’t painted since.

I still dabble in drawing sometimes, but the painting days are over, at least for the foreseeable future. It wasn’t long after I’d stopped trying to channel my inner Van Gogh that I came upon my idea for my fantasy novel. Once that hit, I was in full-blown creative mode for ten years straight, writing like a man possessed, because I was. Taking a break from writing may or may not work for other writers. Only the writer can determine that for her or himself.

We don’t know what will happen in life, so there is always a risk, but in my case at least, I feel it was necessary. Taking a step back is scary though, I must admit. However, I had exhausted myself and I needed to refuel in a way that fed me differently. The creative side of my soul is a ravenous creature. It stopped eating for a while there, and had I not fed it with visual art it might have gone mad and eaten me alive. If I don’t put words down, or if I am unable to get the time to write for more than a day or so an irritable restlessness boils up inside.

Like some kind of fiend, I have to sate it or it will consume me. Writing a line here or a paragraph there whenever I can keeps me sane.

One of the greatest gifts anyone ever gave me was a Moleskine notebook. I have carried one around with me ever since. It fits in my back pocket and has saved me from forgetting an idea so many times I could not begin to count them. So often, it has helped me, in many ways. Before I start a new Moleskine, I “bless” it with a number of quotes from other authors on the topic of writing itself. The current one I carry around starts with the quote below, which I believe says everything I’ve said in this blog, only she says it better.  

            “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” –Virginia Woolf

The Other Look

“The only kind of writing, is rewriting.” – Ernest Hemingway

Revisions. The quote above says it all. The beauty of revision is it is exactly that, a re-vision, looking at something again with new eyes. How comforting is it to know that you can redo something as many times as you need? If only we could do the same in life. Personally, I’ve never written anything just right in the first go.

When I first started writing my fantasy novel I belted out over a thousand pages, it was over 200,000 words, and none of it is in my completed work. I had to take another look at it, a hard look. The story wasn’t alive. It had no breath. I’d been typing away and throwing ideas down without giving my characters life. It was devastating to have done so much work and have to leave it behind. The real story wasn’t with the character I wanted it to be with, it was with his mother.

Three years later and I have a completed novel. When I made the decision to focus the story on my previous character’s mother and her story, the world opened up to me. It was amazing. Since finishing it, I have been on the query path, still on it. This is not yet a success story in the traditional sense. I am not an award-winning novelist. I don’t have my own Master’s Class on YouTube. I’m just a guy who wrote his book twice over ten grueling years. I regret nothing.  

I feel fortunate to have taken that honest look at what I was doing, at what I was missing in the story’s original form. Now I have my main character, Izra Moonborn, and though the first book is done, she still occupies my time as no other woman ever has. Since finishing, Mother Made of Iron, I have written a novelette, a sort of origin story for Izra titled, The Wandering Oak. It is out on submission now with a contest and my fingers are perpetually crossed. If I had never taken the honest accounting of where I was in my storytelling, I don’t know where I would be right now. It’s hard admitting you have to rethink things you were previously so sure of. You really have to love a story, love the characters in it to put yourself through that.

Izra’s story was originally a short scene in my first conception of her character, no more than a few pages. Then she went from being in a scene to being in several, then it was a prologue and that prologue turned into a 600-page novel, and one for which I am proud.

There is another side to revision though, and it sneaks up on you sometimes. I have revised stories so much that I rewrote the story right out of them. A balance has to be struck. This is why I think it’s good to have a workshop to go to, or at the very least, another writer friend who understands what you are trying to accomplish and how difficult it can be. Other writers and time away are great for the work. Having spent a few months away from my book after I finished writing it gave me the opportunity to see it with some fresh eyes. There were moments when I found myself saying, “Wow, I wrote that?” It’s nice to find a line or two where I was pleasantly surprised. Then of course, there were the other times when I said, “Wow. I wrote that?” (DELETE)

Second, third or fourth drafts, I think we all go through them to some degree. Time away gives us a chance to see the good and find the bad. Both will be there. Stephen King says in his book, On Writing, that the second draft is where you take out, “all the things that are not the story.”  

In the end, all writing is world building, and all writing is word building. All of us who write are really just kids on a beach trying to make books out of sand. Use the words, build the world, and when you’re done building it, fill it with living things.

Wilderness

Limits, we see them posted everywhere throughout our lives. We see them physically, in signs on the road, or in places, we are not supposed to go. We grow up with our parents saying, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that,” and then there are limits that we apply to ourselves, “Oh I could never do this, I could never do that.” Some boundaries are good to have, some we need to get over in order to grow. What about your imagination, or your ability as a writer, do you know what those limits are? (Hint: you should not.)

What stories can or should you tell? I believe whatever story sits down with you when you get to the business of writing is the story you tell. It’s good to know what your limits are in terms of how much you can carry, how many people fit in an elevator, but when it comes to creativity the word ‘limit’ has no place. If a pregnant woman from another world wearing armor sits next to me, or a Korean dictator, a boy afraid of the Devil, or my father, I don’t ask questions, I write.

Don’t let the lack of knowledge on a topic deter you. When in doubt, research. We live in the information golden age. The more you learn the more you can relate to your chosen topic, or not, but you’ll likely know where you stand. If you still have something honest to say about it after you’ve done the research, then go for it. When a story has your ear and won’t let it go, you write it down, no matter what it is.

In my opinion, the most important qualification for writing anything is truth. The author has to be honest with their readers. Even if you write fantasy, horror, crime fiction, or children’s books, just be true to it. Whatever you write is going to be a part of the human story, even if there isn’t a single human in it. Stay true to the writing and the why, the reader will know when you lie.

We can’t worry about what will or won’t get published. I say that as much for my own good as anyone else’s. Writing is hard, but when it has a hold of you, it’s as necessary as breathing. Technically, I’ve written three books. The first one was to see if I could string a story long enough to call it a “book,” I did, but it is terrible. I wrote the second one out of spite and anger fueled by my political and social sense of justice. It was better than the first one, but also terrible. Unless I someday dust off those old manuscripts and try to breathe new life in them, they will be old book-bones in a chest. I didn’t know who I was as a writer yet. I also wrote an awful, didactic epic poem. One-hundred-and-fifty pages of iambic pentameter later, it too sits in a box gathering dust. My third novel is fantasy fiction and I have never been more in love with writing than I was typing away for a decade on that book. I worked my full-time job, kept strong relationships with other humans, and wrote as much as eight hours a day, every day. That story and the characters in it simply would not let me rest.

Twenty years ago, I would have laughed if someone told me I’d be writing fantasy fiction. Back then, I was going to write the next literary masterpiece though I stuttered and struggled to write consistently. Now, I write every day. I have further to go, and I am not by any means satisfied or finished trying. But I know my voice and I write with confidence because I know who I am as a writer. There’s something to be said for that.

Writing is exploration. It is a walk alone and unarmed in a wilderness that creates itself as you go. Like going on a hike, you start on a path that is worn and well known. Keep putting one word in front of the other. Eventually, you feel the pull to veer off the path and see what you can find. Explore. There are times when you might get lost, but more often, if you let it, you get found.

Holding Up the Universe

Story. What is there without story? What would we be if we did not indulge ourselves in the tales of others from far off places, times or even worlds? What would life be like if we never had books or film? We would be ants. Our lives would be an endless droning from one task to another without question, thought, or care for anything but the task itself. No disrespect meant to the ants of course. I have no idea what stories they might tell each other. Perhaps they huddle together in their homes after a hard day of work and talk of giants who block out the sun, or warn of others who harness it to burn them. Who knows? The point is, without the element of story life would be a bleak affair.

I think of all the stories that I have heard in my life, how many still have an effect on me. One of my earliest memories is of my grandfather telling me a story that changed how I saw the world itself. I was five years old and I would never look at a thundercloud the same from that day forward. He gave me my imagination, or at least, he lit the fire that keeps it going. I believe that we need story. Stories make us human, make us relate, depend on, and trust one another and bring us together.

A film came out in 2009 called, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, directed by Terry Gilliam, who also wrote the script with Charles McKeown. In the movie there is a scene that has stuck with me ever since. The movie is beautifully and brilliantly done. I recommend seeing it. One scene that I truly enjoy is one where Dr. Parnassus, (played by Christopher Plummer) is visited by The Devil, (Tom Waits) in a place where ancient monks deep in the earth constantly tell stories to keep the universe intact. Without them, Dr. Parnassus states, there would be no universe. I love this concept, it is so beautiful. I also believe it bears some measure of truth.

The human mind is the most amazing thing there is. I remember a few years seeing an article saying that scientists had mapped the neurons of the human brain and that it looked very similar to a picture of the known universe. You can read more and see the pictures that inspired me here: https://www.crystalinks.com/brain.universe513.html. I find it truly fascinating. I like to imagine that this proves that we are capable of amazing things, and that the possibility we hold within our minds is ever expanding and not limited just to the corporeal world we know. I think the same applies when it comes to stories. There is no limit to the human imagination.

I have friends who are expecting their second child any day now. A little galaxy is growing in my friend’s belly. Galaxies are growing in bellies all over the world. When her first child was born, I couldn’t wait to tell him stories. I am the kooky uncle who spins tall tales and yarns at a moment’s notice. I have known this little person since the very first day he was born. I remember the first time I saw him. He looked like a little wizard in a white robe with a tiny orange hat. That little guy has inspired a number of stories from me. Mostly, he has inspired me to come up with stories to write down and tell him and that is kind of magical. If I can make him laugh or wonder, or think then my job as a storyteller is fulfilled. I don’t know if I can hold up the universe with any of my tales, but maybe I can entertain a galaxy or two.

The Gauntlet

Every day, for ten years, I would get out of bed, turn on the laptop, start the coffee, and sit down to write. I did not need an alarm. My characters woke me. It was as if they were all crammed into my little apartment, tapping their toes and leaning on broadswords and axes waiting for me to get up. My every spare thought was spent on my world, and the lives of the people in it.

In 2018, I finished my book, Mother Made of Iron. I’d been through all the edits and revisions, the moments of bare-faced self-doubt and crippling questions of my choices in life and survived. After writing and writhing around in the world I’d created, it was time to promote it. I had to find representation. I started researching literary agents and drafting query letters to send them.

Today it is 2019 and it has been one long year, and one short year of actively querying agents. I am still going, and why shouldn’t I be? It’s only been a year. It was a long one yes, but then, I am not a patient man. It’s been a short one because how many writers have gone so much longer? I’ve heard the stories, some authors go through hundreds of rejections – hundreds. Some have waited twenty or more years to finally be published. Why should I feel special? Of course, I do feel special; like I should have been published already, but it’s that dab of necessary narcissism that probably keeps me from giving up. Despite the denials, I have come to appreciate the journey even though my folder of query rejections continues to grow.

Years ago, I started a practice where I would go to my local bookstore in Tempe, Arizona and take a picture of where my book will go on the shelf. I do this every couple of months. Between Patrick Rothfuss, and Rena Rossner, my debut fantasy novel will one day live. I take those pictures because I have to, because this process is not easy. Every writer has to go through the gauntlet of rejection. Some get through it quicker than others and some don’t. I’m still in it. The point is to keep going. Do not listen to doubt. Do not give up. Do not stop writing.

One thing that has helped me get through this query process with my fantasy novel, is writing something other than fantasy. Despite my desire to jump right into book two of the intended series, Mother of Light, Father of Shadow, I had to stop and address things that I had to write in this world, more specifically, my world. I write fantasy because the genre saved me growing up through difficult times in my life. I don’t particularly relish going over the things that made me turn to fantasy but that’s where the writing is telling me to go, and I go where the writing takes me. Most of the time, it takes me to lands where dragons sleep under the earth, but sometimes I have to walk back from a scorched childhood to find my way home.

Writing brings me places I never knew existed and some I wish never did, but I am kept warm by the fire it creates. Like some modern day caveman, I hunch by its flame to scrawl the contents of my mind on this digital wall.

Words On a Page

My First Blog

I have been writing for more than twenty years now. In 2008, I came to a crossroads of sorts as I was trying to write the, “great American novel,” but as I wrote, fantasy elements would appear. At the time, I thought I had to be a “serious” writer. I’d had a great teacher in college and I’d taken all the literature courses. I’d gone to the Cannon Beach writer’s retreat in Oregon. I’d won a few minor awards for poetry in my college’s publication. I was determined that my work would one day be studied in college courses and sign books with a glass of bourbon in my hand like a Poet Laureate I once met, I was serious. So, when a fantasy element or magical realism popped up in my great American story, I deleted it. I was killing my own imagination despite that reading Tolkien, Brooks, Weis and Hickman and others got me through traumatic and difficult times as a kid. I learned from those authors how to use my imagination, and here I was as a writer, avoiding it.

On December 12th 2008, I had taken the day off work solely to write, I was working on my great “literary” debut when I felt like someone was holding me under water. This pressing need to write some great piece of literature was suffocating me. I stopped typing and made a guttural sound, as if the caveman in me had woken up and wanted to smash something. “Fuck it!” I said. “I’m going to write what I want to write.” As I spoke those words, I became free.

There I sat, at the kitchen table, my dogs looked at me as if I was losing my mind and in a way, I did. My mind opened to itself and I felt like I could see the world from where I was sitting. By the time I was done that day, I had drawn a map, written a creation story, came up with main characters and the names of gods and goddesses. I was writing, really writing. For me, “really writing,” means that I actually had something to write. I couldn’t stop it. I had discovered a new world, one that was real and had people in it, animals, land and oceans.

From that moment on, the people in this world I was creating woke me up every day. It was as if there was a tall, northern woman dressed in armor tapping me to wake up and get to the computer and start writing. Every time I walked my dogs then I could hear the little girl with the crow’s feathers marked on her arm asking me when I would get back to it. At work I couldn’t sit in my cubicle and work without a knight and his barbarian friend drinking ale and constantly poking at me to tell their stories.  

The writing took over my life and I loved it. It got me through every awful, stressful day and every wonderful one. You can call it the muse or creativity or whatever word makes you feel right, I had a story to tell and it was alive. Ever since I finished that book I’ve been chasing that very same feeling. I still need to publish it, which is an entirely different chase all its own.

I have not gone back to that world but a few times since, writing what amounts to be a few short stories and a novelette. I miss it, and I will return, but I had to embark on some other writing, the kind rooted in this world, carved in the rock of my soul. All of it is important, all of it serious. I may never be read in textbooks but everything I’ve written, be it fantasy or memoir and everything in between, is no less important than the great literary pieces of the world. Those works, the “great American novels,” and the classics, they teach us about humanity as a whole, and that’s crucial. For me, writing has taught me about myself, it is the roadmap to my soul. I would be lost without it.