While “what happens in Frisco STAYS in Frisco” I will share the following sequence of Wednesday night texts from a good friend and colleague of almost five years, unedited:

ME: Did we lose you?
HIM: Jiffy saute g’day HDTV
HIM: No
HIM: Sarah heftier jiggly
HIM: Fuck
HIM: Tree grey hoots
HIM: Fucjir I can’t tyie
ME: Where the HELL are you man??? That looks like a serious good time in progress!!!

I’m not going to lie, “Sarah heftier jiggly” became something of a theme and a mantra for the rest of that night. Was this a person, a place, an event? I won’t tell you the answer, but I will say it’s none of those things and all of them. And maybe the best auto-correct fail I’ve ever been a party to.

Enigmatic tales of late night adventures aside, it was a very productive meeting and it managed to have a bit of a theme. On the flight out for the east coast team we saw the movie “Moneyball” staring Brad Pitt and written by Aaron Sorkin based on a book by financial writer Michael Lewis. It’s the story of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane trying to change the way the game of baseball is played from the foundation up. Surprisingly, for a movie about baseball, it’s not a “baseball movie.” It’s a business movie. A very VERY good business movie, and if I was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences I’d be voting for Best Picture and Best Actor without a moment’s hesitation.

While I won’t give any of the specific details away, I will share the finer points that a group of consultants in the financial industry took away from a viewing. This was the theme of our regional kickoff session, and I imagine these lessons are going to be very much in my mind as I move forward for the coming year:

1. The goal shouldn’t be to buy players, the goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.
2. In order to score a run, we have to get on base. Do we care how we get on base? No, we do not.
3. We get paid to get on first, we do not get paid to get thrown out stealing second.
4. Sometimes we have to learn to play a new position. That’s not hard, it’s INCREDIBLY HARD.
5. They aren’t paying us because of the player we were or the player we could be, they’re paying us for the kind of player we are today.
6. The first guy through the wall always gets kicked in the teeth, always gets bloody. Always.
7. Losing is NEVER fun. We hate losing more than we love winning.
8. No one will remember setting records or great games or even a winning season if you don’t win the last game of the season.
9. How can you not get romantic about the game?

I don’t play baseball, but I do play the business equivalent of a full-contact sport at a professional level. I feel very good about my team this year, and I think there’s a very good chance we’ll win the last game of this season.

The other thing I did in my down time last week, was try to edit the first chapter I posted up in my last two posts. Editing is hard. Tracking your changes and writing up WHY you changed things is BRUTALLY hard.

I’ve gotten about the first third of the first half done. It only took me the better part of four hours. I’m 100% committed to getting this post done, but I recognize it’s going to take longer than I had initially expected. I’m guessing that it’s going to take the rest of the week and I also want to actually continue writing the next chapters too. So, to accomplish that I’ve decided to re-invest the rest of my writing time this week to finishing up the next two chapters and THEN going back and finishing the edits on Chapter One. It’s not how I thought I’d go through it, but I’m afraid of running out of steam if I don’t actually commit to more chapter writing and less poking at the one I already have on paper.

So, expect at least two more chapter posts this week, and hopefully the edit post will go up before (or during) the weekend. One of my “emails but doesn’t comment” readers asked if it was a romance novel like my mom wrote, and the answer is no. There are romantic moments in the first third, but they are counter-balanced by some very unromantic moments, and a theme that is not about how everything works out in the end.

After the third chapter I’ll post the synopsis of the book and the cover letter I stick on it before shipping it off to a slush pile somewhere. As a bit of social experience, I’ll post up the rejection letters and my reactions to them. I have a different perspective on rejection letters than many aspiring writers, and I think actually talking about the nature of rejection and how it may not actually be a personal attack on the author is worth putting into its own post one of these days. I figure I’ll wait until I have a specific example to work from. Shouldn’t take much more than six to nine months after I send it off, which at the rate I write should be just enough time for me to get it written.

[Word Count: 1055]

Someone else asked if it has a happy ending, and the answer is no, but it doesn’t have an unhappy ending either. As it’s a story about life, and life is a story that won’t end until the last of us succumbs to the Zombie Apocalypse (or comet impact or religious tribulation or what have you), it doesn’t end cleanly with anyone riding off into a sunset. Happily-ever-after is the province of fairy tales and fantasy novels. I love both of those things and aspire to write them, but this is not either of those kinds of stories.

Growing up, I spent years believing that if we loved enough bad things wouldn’t happen to us. I grew up and discovered that bad things happen no matter how much you love someone. This story is about bad things that happen and the fact that people can love each other in spite of (or even because of) the string of tragedies that make up a human life. If you live a life without ever experiencing a tragedy, then you never bothered to live at all. The people in this story live a lot of life and earn whatever love that comes on the other side.

In this post I’ll put up the rest of the raw and unedited first chapter, and in my next post I’ll post the same for chapter two. After that, I’ll post my editing process and you can all see how I trim sentences and change words and generally whack back the unruly beast that is a draft into something a little bit more tame and readable.

     The old truck rumbled to life and the radio crackled alive a moment later.
     “...more attention to the troubles of the White House just a week after Bernstein and Woodward’s book hit shelves, and less than two weeks before arguments over the secret tapes are made before the Supreme Court...”
     She cranked the dial over and tried to find anything that wasn’t about the nation’s obsession with Watergate. A few crackling bursts later and she found the station out of Birmingham that played rock and roll when it switched to the overnight pattern. Lynyrd Skynyrd jumped out of the speaker, singing a love song to everything she was ready to drive away from.
     “...Now Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you?..”
     She left it as it was better than nothing and pulled out onto the dirt road heading into town. It took less than two minutes to get to the gas station on the corner of 4th and 4th, directly across from the post office and next door to the diner where she worked. The station closed up the same time the diner closed down, almost three hours earlier, but Bailey knew where the switch was for the pump, and she stuck a ten through the mail slot to cover the tank of gas that would get her at least two-hundred miles down the road.
     “Why Dixie girl, what on the good Lord’s fine earth has you out at this time of night?” Mrs. Little’s voice rang out from her front porch across the street and directly behind her as she was faced her pick-up. Bailey was barely able to contain the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard shudder that ran through her at the sound of it. Town busybody, terrible gossip, and Sherriff’s Wife, Eugenia Little took her self-assigned job of mother hen to everyone in a ten mile radius seriously. Her home on the corner between the town hall and the county jail just happened to give her a wonderful view over everything that might be happening that was worth repeating in hushed tones to the women at the rotary or the beauty parlor.
     “Evening Mrs. Little,” Bailey defaulted to her waitress manners and gave the older woman her best welcome-to-the-diner smile, “just getting some errands done before the heat of the day tomorrow.”
     “Why would you be pumping gas at this time of the night dear? One of the boys will be around tomorrow to help you, doesn’t matter if they sweat in the sun a little.”
     “I’m running over to Gadsden tomorrow morning, early. I figured I’d fill up now and leave Earl a note in case I’m late for my shift. You know how those doctors can be.”
     Given how many times she’d been over to the hospital when her Grandma was sick, trips to Gadsden had become a staple of Bailey’s life. She figured it would take Mrs. Little a few hours of working it over to realize that Bailey hadn’t had a good reason to go to Gadsden in the last two years.
     “Well...” the busybody’s face clouded over for a moment with an intuition that she wasn’t getting the whole story, “you just be sure you don’t leave poor Earl hanging. You know how busy it is on Friday mornings.”
     If by ‘busy’ she meant ‘two farmers and a deputy who drank his thermos dry before midnight’ then sure, anything else would be a serious stretch of the imagination.
     “I will Mrs. Little, you have a good night now.”
     Bailey hung up the nozzle and flipped the pump off, then crossed the street and unlocked the diner with the key under the flower pot next to the door. She opened the cash register and took out a twenty and three tens, then wrote a quick note on an order pad:
     “Earl, I took fifty out of the register to cover my final pay paycheck. If there’s more than that, please give it to Randy and tell him to pay the utility man before he spends it on beer. If it comes to less than that, we’ll just call it even or I’ll tell Jane how you run your hands under the girl’s skirts when we’re getting stuff out of the back. – Dixie”
     Below that she wrote in big block letters “I QUIT” just for clarity and then posted the order note on the line where the diner owner and full-time cook would be sure to see it first thing in the morning. Her grandma once told her that “some bridges you cross in life, some bridges you burn.” For all the times she’s been pinched on the ass to earn a dime tip, this was one bridge she wanted to burn on the way out of town.
     She grabbed two packs of Camels off the stack next to the register and a lighter from under the counter. She pulled one out and lit it up while she looked out the door of the place she’d worked for the last eight years. With one last glance down the counter she walked through the door and climbed into her truck, not even bothering to lock up behind her.
     When the truck roared back to life the radio was playing a driving guitar rhythm and a deep voice was singing about the girls in La Grange. Bailey looked northeast towards Chattanooga, and southwest towards Birmingham. Beyond Birmingham was Mississippi and Texas and at the end of the road was Hollywood.
     “Prettiest face since Hollywood...”
     She put it in gear to the beat of the music and dropped the clutch. The truck launched southwest, headlights illuminating all the something in front of her, taillights shining on all the nothing she was leaving behind.

[Word Count: 1345]

Anyway, I’ll be posting the rest of the pieces on my fiction oriented site once I refresh that one and give it a face-lift and reboot. As I continue to post over there I’ll drop posts with links here just so no one has to follow both to keep up with the writing if they want to.

—

     The train-whistle called out through the heavy air of an Alabama summer night, and she looked out over the long moonlit field between her front porch and the tracks on the other side of old man Gilbert’s farm.
     It was the ten-thirty running north and east from Birmingham to Chattanooga, and like everything else in her eye-blink little town it was running slow. Slow like the words on the lips of the customers at the diner she called a job. Slow like the ambition of her brother sleeping off an afternoon of beers and girly magazines on the couch in the living room. Slow like the minutes of her life that were bleeding out of her with every breath she took, choking on the stink of stale cigarettes and rotting garbage piled up under the sink; the smell of a little life drowning in boredom and suffocating under the weight of being less than the nothing she ever thought she’d be.
     She looked back at the picture of Ben Franklin on the hundred dollar bill she’d been holding as reverently as her grandmother’s Bible for the last hour. She couldn’t decide if he’d been drunk when he tipped her more money than she took home in a week, but he said she “had the prettiest face he’d seen since Hollywood” and then drove away in his fancy silver sports car. She’d spent her entire shift assuming it was a dollar bill, or maybe even a five like she might get from the men who thought they were high rollers after too much whiskey on a Saturday night. When she pulled it out at the end of her shift it shocked her so much she dropped it on the bathroom floor like it had burned her finger tips.
     The train called out again in the night, telling the world it was going somewhere, anywhere, just not here. Attalla Alabama was nothing and nowhere. She’d been born here on a summer night in nineteen fifty and not a damn thing had happened in the twenty-four years since. She listened to the power of the train pushing itself away from her nowhere, wheels grinding in a deep roar of purpose eating up the black distance between where she was and the brighter lights of anywhere else on earth.
     The sudden sound of an empty beer bottle falling from her brother’s sleeping hand snapped her out of her reverie, and jolted Bailey Dixon – the girl everyone called Dixie - into making the first something decision of her nothing life.
     Truthfully, she’d been thinking about this since the day two years ago when she inherited the house and responsibility for the drunk and snoring pervert face-down and drooling between the spread thighs of his latest Hustler darling in the next room. Her grandmother left her both of them, as well as a stack of hospital bills and the rough running ’56 Chevy pick-up parked next to the pecan tree out front. The doctors said it was cancer from the cigarettes that killed her, but Bailey figured being a miserable old bitch might have had something to do with it.
     She walked down the hallway back to the bedroom with the crooked door hanging from one hinge and took the oversized white Bible down off the top shelf. The morning after her grandmother’s funeral she’d opened it up to write down the date in the record of births and deaths recorded in the front, and that’s when she found them. Placed neatly and pressed smooth, fives and tens and twenties squirreled away in the one place no one would ever look by accident. Her grandmother had spent years using that old white monstrosity to threaten and torture her, never once letting slip that almost five hundred dollars were hiding between Ruth and Samuel.
     She took out the old tweed-covered suitcase with the leather trimmed edges for the first time since she brought hit home with her grandmother’s effects from the funeral home. Unceremoniously she emptied the old woman’s shirts and polyester pants into a heap on the floor and then packed it with the three dresses she owned, four shirts, two pairs of jeans, the grey mock-heels she’d bought on a lark last spring, her Sunday bra and slip, and all the panties in her top drawer. Just before closing the lid she had a pang of sympathy for the old woman who’d raised her since her mother disappeared on a summer night hardly any different from this one, the same year they bought the pickup new off the lot in Birmingham; so she grabbed up the old woman’s Bible and placed it in the suitcase before snapping the latches tight and carrying the only pieces of her nothing life she could be bothered to keep out to the old Chevy.

[Word Count: 980]

The rest of Chapter 1 in this post.

Stupid.

The jolt from a solar-powered box with a 2500 milliamp battery is basically equivalent to the zip you get from a 9v battery on your tongue times two. The jolt from an AC fence energizer that can power ten miles of fence and runs dedicated off a 20 amp breaker over 12 gauge wire is…stronger. Like, “red scorch mark on your hand” and “knee buckles out from under you” stronger. Let us just say that I didn’t have to test it a second time.

Anyway, the thing I didn’t do over the holidays was write. Anything. At all.

A couple of weeks ago I got a comment that, for a lot of reasons, hit a pretty deep nerve. Explaining why means opening up and sharing something very personal.

As I’ve discussed before, growing up my mom wrote novels. A lot of novels. And won awards. And spoke at conventions. And signed books for hours and hours at signings. And talked to a lot of aspiring writers.

All of those aspiring writers had one thing in common, they honestly and truly believed they could write at a professional level. MANY of them would have my mom read something they had written and ask for advice. My mom was so good at saying positive things and encouraging them to follow their dreams. But there’s a dark side to that happy memory. Of the hundreds of people who asked her for advice, the exact number of people who had any conceivable chance of being published by a paying market was exactly zero. Not a one. Over twenty-five years my mom encountered exactly no-one with even a reasonable grasp of English and the ability to string words into sentences and sentences into something that anyone would willing pay money to read. Nada. Zip. Nil. Goose-Egg. Doughnut. ZERO.

But every single one of them believed they could. They looked at what they’d written and were completely oblivious to the flaws. Something in them said “this is good enough” and went out looking for confirmation.

In the years since, I’ve dabbled in the professional writing industry. I know editors and agents, and I have some pretty good insight into how it all works and I’ve done enough light editing and structure advice for others that I know how to critique, how to revise, how to take what is there and fashion it into something professional. Something people would pay for. I imagine that there are life choices I could have made that would have led me into the production side of the industry as an editor or agent (or at least that side of the industry, those jobs are tough as tough can be and I don’t have the hubris to believe I could have just moseyed in and magically gotten one of the premier jobs in the industry).

I know enough about the slushpile (the place where unsolicited manuscripts go to languish) to know that for every manuscript with the potential to be published that crosses the threshold, at least a thousand piles of dreck masquerading as written words crossed over before it. Piles of dreck that someone honestly thought was the best “synopsis and three” they could put out. Piles of dreck that someone believed in enough to put their name on and send out into the world.

I do not understand this.

Every moment of every day I have an insidious imp of self-doubt sitting on my shoulder and whispering into my ear all the reasons I’m not good enough. My greatest challenge isn’t believing that I’m “the best” or that I’m “good enough” or anything like that…my challenge is just ignoring the imp. I don’t have to believe I’m the best, I just have to believe I’m not as crappy as I’m afraid I am.

“Who would write this?” he says to me. “Who would be stupid enough to publish this where people could read it?”

I stopped answering long ago, but my silence is simply encouragement to him.

“You know you suck. You know it and you prove it every time you try.”

And because I’m afraid of him, I decide that the best way to avoid my fears is to do something else. He can’t taunt me if I don’t try.

Sometimes I do try, and that’s when he gets personal. You see, because he’s just a metaphorical manifestation of my own insecurities, he knows exactly where to hit me.

“You know what she said. She read everything you’ve ever written and then said that you should ‘keep practicing and just follow your dream’…exactly what she said to every other loser that couldn’t write their way out of a wet paper bag.”

And that does me in. Because it’s true. And it kills me.

Every time I read through my archives I hit some point where the writing just doesn’t shine and the taunts from the imp drown out the glow from the words that I’m proud of having written. Deep down I suspect that this will keep me from ever writing in a significant professional capacity.

Now, please don’t think this is some kind of reverse plea for internet affirmation because that’s the most insidious part of it, I don’t believe them. At least, not for long. Not in a significant or lasting way.

The last time I wrote about this, several people chided me for taking my writing so seriously, “it’s just a blog” and “write for yourself” are true and accurate statements; but they’re also just fodder for the imp. “It’s just a blog” can easily be appended with “because you suck” and nothing anyone can do can change that. Not even me.

When I first started blogging there was one thing that anonymity gave me, and that was insulation from the imp. You can’t take your writing personally when no one knows who wrote it. Which is dangerous. Anonymity may free us from self-doubt, but it also eliminates self-restraint and self-censorship, which are tools civilized people created to prevent the collapse of society.

Two weeks ago someone said exactly what I’m afraid of, that half the stuff I write sucks. I’m afraid of it, because deep down I know half of it does. Nominally, this doesn’t matter because no one (and I do mean NO ONE) actually hits it out of the park every time they swing the bat; and I’m smart enough to know that. But it’s fodder for the imp and that just beats me to the ground.

As I’ve tried to work through this over the last few days I’ve been confronted by a quote someone posted on Facebook:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” -Marianne Williamson

I think this is true. I think I’m not afraid of writing crap, I’m afraid of being a good writer who ALSO wrote crap. Really, I’m afraid of not being able to tell the difference. The imp would have no power over me if I didn’t care. And if I didn’t suspect that something, somewhere, deep down really was worth putting out there then I wouldn’t care at all. I’d do tax-automation integrations and drink a beer at night and worry about fantasy football and my XBox Gamerscore and writing would never cross my mind.

I know what I need to do, I need to write more. The more I produce, the more quality stuff comes out. The more quality I can see, the less power the imp has over me. If I can’t do that, then I need to accept that I’m not a writer and turn the imp loose and climb off this existential roller-coaster. Of course, I know I can’t do that. Without an outlet I become intellectually constipated, which makes me irritable and unpleasant to be around.

So I’m going to ramp back up the writing habit for a while, to see if I can get back to a place where writing happens more frequently if not necessarily more consistently. To that end, I’m considering some other changes around here. I’m going to reset the word count down in the bottom right corner and try to crank out about 20k words a month. As a short blog post from me cracks in at 1500 words that works out to about three posts a week. I’m going to try for a Monday-Wednesday-Friday pattern but we’ll see what we can do.

Also, I’m going to actively try to ramp up the fiction writing over at serialstoryteller.com and include those words in the word count as well. That way even if I’m not blogging I’m still giving myself credit for writing, and that’s really what I need to be doing.

My goal for the next few months (before my birthday in April) is to finish my “What I’m Looking For” series and put up at least two short stories on Serial Storyteller. If I can do that and be around 75k words in the word count bucket I’ll be pretty happy with my progress. If I come up short, well, I’ll just have to buy imp-proof earplugs or something.

We’ll all see how it goes.

[Word Count: 1645]

Happy Birthday, and may all your pony/goat/chicken dreams come true this year! If I can keep from blowing away, your fence will be up/moved/”fixed” and your electrical run by the end of the day tomorrow.

Now sit back and enjoy your day!

[EDIT: This was scheduled to go up at midnight, but auto-post failed me horribly. Sorry, it was supposed to be more timely.]

WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!!!

We’re right in the middle of moving seventy-five miles out to Monroe Georgia…but it’s worth it. This is the last move I’ll ever make. I’ve spent the last week working my ass off and NOT getting the packing done. This weekend, the office, the storage room, the kitchen and the dining room will be packed. OS has busted out our bedroom and the kids rooms already, and she’s well on her way to having the tack consolidated and the living room ready.

If I can get my stuff “done” then I get to sit on my vacationing ass and write and play Skyrim. There’s a LOT of incentive to get done before the Moving truck gets here Wednesday morning.

If I don’t post again before the big move (and let’s be honest, I won’t), then I’ll just say “Happy Thanksgiving” and “see you all online from Monroe!”

After coming home and leaving my serious books and my serious expectations on the dining-room table, I would gather up my true favorites, my secret loves, and hide beneath the bottom shelf in my walk-in closet. I would take with me the tales of Arthur and his knights, the different passages to Narnia, and most belovedly the wondrous tales of Oz. There are children who read because they have to, and ones who read because it’s expected of them, and a few – a very lucky few – who do not read at all but rather swim and dive and drown in reading. To become something and someone else for untold whiles in the thick weight and light breath of true wonder.

I have always tried to keep my secret-self; to remember the paths and byways of fairylands and fantastic places. As the years have grown up around me, I have traded old friends for new ones and discovered others that touch me as deeply as any I’d met before. I also hid my secret well, I have books and tomes and volume after volume about serious things on serious shelves that you would never suspect were filled with sideways paths and slanting doorways to the magic places where my true heart lives.

College textbooks about Archaeology? Images and histories of forgotten things rediscovered.

Volumes of apocrypha and pseudo-canonical religious writings? Wonder Tales from a distant past.

Atlas after Atlas? Maps and pathways that vanished long ago.

A library of history texts that span from the Ancient Near East to the 21st Century? History is the trade secret of fantasy; what has been is the framework of our dreams of yet to come.

(Long Parenthetical Aside: It is not insignificant that the only fictions I aspire to write are fairytales. I have been told I have a talent for writing of myself, and I suspect I could write equally about other familiar things; but my heart simply isn’t in it, and the muse rewards a halfhearted offering on her alter with scorn at best – and utter banishment from her sight if the offering is particularly egregious. Based on my current brief and fleeting intercourse with the muse, I’d guess I’ve offered up some rather egregious things recently.)

When I was ten years old my favorite book out of the hundreds I had already read was “The Road to Oz” By L. Frank Baum. It was a second-hand copy with a spine in lavender and a picture of Polychrome and the Shaggy Man abord the sandboat on the cover. That copy is lost to time, but I do have a three volume set of all of Baum’s writings leather bound with gold-leaf edges and crisp fresh type to replace it. I can’t really say why it was my favorite, it was not the “best” of the Oz stories by any subjective measure, but it struck a chord with me and my favorite it remained. In twenty-five years my tastes have changed, my expectations of characters and plot and style have matured…but nothing has ever quite touched me the way that the Oz stories did. Nothing has physically taken me to different places in the same tangible and all-consuming way.

Until now.

I have been a fan of Catherynne M. Valente since discovering her “Tales from the Night Garden” books and her short stories on her livejournal. She wrote what had been my favorite short story ever put on paper. I was peripherally aware of her new projects coming out, and bought “Deathless” and “Habitation of the Blessed” at retail when they were released. I knew of her children’s project “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making” and had even read a few snippets here and there, but it wasn’t really “my thing” as I’m a serious boy, and I have not truly walked down Fairy Paths in many many years.

A few weeks after it came out on Amazon, I read a short story set in the same universe on TOR.com. There have been many things published on TOR.com that I’ve liked, and more than a few that have led me to purchase books from a variety of authors across a range of publishing houses (which is a serious kudo to the people who run TOR.com). But of all those stories, none of them have consumed and altered me the way that “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland For a Little While” did as I read it. For a long and shattering moment as the last few lines dripped past my eyes I was ten years old again, hiding from other’s expectations in a world beyond make-believe. A world that so captured the words of my heart it felt as though they had escaped onto the page in front of me.

I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books? I shall only engage in commerce if books are the coin. Come to my door if you have a book —and a good one, not just your great-aunt’s book of doily patterns— and I will give you an egg or a cake or a pair of woolen socks. I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement. That is all I am after.

After writing my simple comment (I post as bookgoblin for any curious souls), I immediately clicked over to Amazon and ordered the novel with overnight delivery. I sat, anxious as a cat in a rainstorm from morning until it finally arrived late that following afternoon. I would say that I read it, but that would be doing it a gross disservice. I swam and dove and drowned in it as though I was ten years old again. I exalted in it, trembled in it, wept bitterly in it, and reached the far shore of it exhausted and spent in ways too wonderful to believe.

And I was afraid; afraid that my heart had deceived me and that I had let myself be tricked by beautiful words and pretty pictures in my mind. So I read it again, studiously and evaluatingly, critically and mindfully; and I was rewarded once again. It was the story of me but not me, and my heart but not my heart.

All children are heartless. They have not grown a heart yet, which is why they can climb tall trees and say shocking things and leap so very high that the grown-up hearts flutter in terror. Hearts weigh quite a lot. That is why it takes so long to grow one. But, as in their reading and arithmetic and drawing, different children proceed at different speeds. (It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.) Some small ones are terrible and fey, Utterly Heartless. Some are dear and sweet and Hardly Heartless at all. September stood very generally in the middle on the day the Green Wind took her, Somewhat Heartless, and Somewhat Grown.

A very few times in our lives do we get the chance to see true magic. The magic that binds hearts and loosens tongues and frees souls to be other and better and more. There are writers that appeal to my “serious boy” side that have done that in my life, Neil Gaiman and Jane Austen are my more obvious choices; but the ones that truly altered me at a fundamental level told me stories when I was a child that have stayed with me all of my life, things about Narnia and Oz and a Neverending Story.

Stories have a way of changing faces. They are unruly things, undisciplined, given to delinquency and the throwing of erasers. This is why we must close them up into thick, solid books, so they cannot get out and cause trouble.

As an adult, if you would have asked me what my favorite book was, I would have told you “Pride and Prejudice” or “Fragile Things” or “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “A Tale of Two Cities” and thought nothing of the lie. I am a “serious boy” and I like serious things. Fiction should be serious about being fiction after all, for telling stories is serious work, and we shall have no fairytales in our grown-up list of favorite things.

Now, I have once again walked down fairy roads and met fairy folk and had serious adventures about the most serious thing of all, to be who we truly are.

Fairyland did not choose you-you chose yourself. You could have had a lovely holiday in Fairyland and never met the Marquess, never worried yourself with the local politics, had a romp with a few brownies and gone home with enough memories for a lifetime’s worth of novels. But you didn’t. You chose.

I am slightly terrified that someone will read this and know the truth, that a serious boy loves a child’s fairy story more than any and all other words ever put on paper or spoken aloud. More than the love stories of Jane Austen, more than the intellectual fantasy of Neil Gaiman, more than the broadcasts of Ira Glass, more than the articles of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I have read hundreds of thousands of pages in my thirty-five years. Some of those things have been important to me, invaded me and let me change myself; but Catherynne M. Valente has written something that already KNEW ME. It was OF ME before I ever encountered it. I picked it up and it spoke my true name, and in that power it changed itself into exactly what I needed it to be.

Like, when your parents call you to dinner and you don’t come, and they call again but you still don’t come, and they call you by all your names together, and then, of course, you have to come, and right quick. Because True Names have power…

As my second time through the story was drawing to a close, I was at first afraid that I too had a clock with my name on it that could expire, leaving me again without fairyland beneath my feet and fantasy truly in my grasp. But I realized that I did not stumble into her Fairyland, and no clock can ever steal me away. I am one of the ravished, and my heart will always half-belong to her magical world.

If you have a child, or know of children, or even were simply a child once in your distant memories of a time before you became a serious grown-up with serious tastes…please share the opportunity to experience these words and ideas, these places and things, these deep tides and heavy waters. These stories will call you by your True Name, and true names have the power to change everything.

My name is Nicholas Karl Rogers, these are the best stories I have ever read, and I don’t expect to ever meet their equal in however many days I have remaining. I am so glad I found them when I did, for my life is richer and my heart dwells again in secret places filled with wonder.

[Word Count: 2050]

—

All Block Quotes copyright Catherynne M. Valente and are excerpted from “The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making” and “The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland For a Little While” without permission (but cited via a Fair Use expectation).

I’ve been preoccupied for the summer, and for that I am not even the tiniest bit apologetic. But, that time is coming to an end. Once I dig my way back out of the upcoming minor depression, I plan to go back to writing with at least my past intermittent bursts of output.

The other thing that new visitors won’t recognize is the significant revamp I’ve put into the site’s design and look-and-feel. I would gladly take any feedback and suggestions anyone has about any aspect of the new paint and trim. Hate the font? let me know. Think the background and link color is more “Pottery Barn” than “masculine moss?” Let me know. Find the comment balloons irritating and unsightly? Too bad.

If there’s something about the site after the change that “just works” or “just doesn’t” please drop a comment and let me know.