I’m standing at the door now, saying goodbye.I’m notoriously bad at this.We can be at a party that Fred has every expectation of leaving and I’m looping back one more time.
Sometimes I leave stuff behind.Today I’m going to leave something behind on purpose, and I hope you can use it.
We all have our own fragile store of polished treasures we sort through, hoping if we warm them reverently in our hands and say the spells just right, a faint wisp of inspiration will start to glow.
Here is what I’ve found that works if I’m stuck.Maybe you already have this treasure in your arsenal, or a different one, but this one’s gold for me, and so I’m giving it to you:
Let’s say, for our purposes, you’re stuck on a scene and nothing’s happening.
The five minutes rule.Set a timer for five minutes.You heard me.Five minutes.The beauty of this exercise is, well, you can do it practically anywhere.Standing in line at the bank, waiting in line for a burrito, on your coffee break at work.You don’t actually even have to use a timer, just look at your watch.I find that if I travel with 3 x 5 cards, it’s easy to pull one out and use the back of my purse to write on, but I’ve used drug store receipts and once even the edge of the white paper on my exam table when I went it for a check-up.
Okay, the timer’s running; you have your paper and pen out. Usually, about now, I have competing voices in my head so I’ll lay them out.
What has to happen in this scene?This isn’t writing the scene yet, it’s just about writing the scene.Write as quickly as you can.Go on.I’ll wait.
But hold it.I don’t even know what the scene’s about.What part of the word stuck don’t you get?
What has to happen to drive the plot forward?
I’m not sure what the plot is.
Write as if you knew.
What?
The timer’s still running.You don’t know what the scene’s about, I get that. That’s okay.But if these characters were talking to you—
Which they aren’t.
--but if they were, what does the main character want?
No idea.
Pick something: information, love, a good stiff drink.Pick it now.
My character’s underage.
Now you’re talking.
Underage drinking?
I meant, now your character’s talking. To you.
Okay.I have something.
Good.Now take it away.
What?
Don’t let the character get it.
That’s mean.
That’s good theater.Don’t let the character get it, or if the character does, have it be not the way she wanted it or in the way he expected.
Wait.
Give her something she needs, something he’s dying to get, and then don’t let him have it.
Ever?
Just now, here.What she wants.What he gets.
You fling pronouns around an awful lot. (Sound of furious scribbling).Okay.I got it.It’s not perfect—
Doesn’t have to be. Now tweak it.
Hunh?
Do four more outcomes. Do them now. But never never give him what--
I get it, I get it. (More writing).
Your five minutes is up.
I’ve found that when I do this, when I—with a kindliness toward my writer-self—use this five minute-exercise, the work I do right then can fuel my next session of actual writing. It gives me a way past the dark spot.
And that's all any of us need, really.
Here’s to your journeys.To the hard spots, and getting through them.To being kind to ourselves and to each other.Here’s to the life of the writer, to our lives.
I’m lucky; I’ve always felt myself part of a vast creative community, living and dead, artists who take care of each other. When I’m fried, when the work isn’t coming, when the words congeal, there are incantations and exhortations that always work for me, comfort food for the soul, or even better, talismans so powerful they make me for the moment, unafraid.
I thought today I’d share as many of them with you as I can remember. I'm going to set a timer. That sounds fair. I can't be waking you up in the middle of the night, adding one more.
So here we go. I have fifteen minutes, as Padma says on Top Chef. . .starting. . .now:
John Steinbeck: My work does not coagulate. It is as unmanageable as a raw egg on a kitchen floor. It makes me crazy. (Good grief, if even Steinbeck felt that way, then my terrors are pretty standard stuff).
We work in our own darkness a great deal with little real knowledge of what we are doing. (See above).
Stephen King: I've got to finish it. I'm not trying to do anything with it except finish it. (Is that it? His secret?)
Nick Lowe: Bash it out now, tart it up later.
Ernest Hemingway: All first drafts are shit.
If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out. Rabindranath Tagore
Truth doesn't count. Just make it vivid. Jack London
Lower your standards and keep going. William Stafford
From my friend Joe Finder's January blog: Just Write the Darn Thing. www.joefinder.com
The bell rang. That's it. Pretty good list, although it needs the inclusion of anything Annie Lamott has to say in Bird by Bird.
Okay, another ten minutes.
If you never get rejected, you're probably doing something wrong. Larry Block
This has really thrown me. . .they turned it down (A Wrinkle in Time) so quickly, two days, that I know it hasn't had a fair reading. Someone lower down who just sent a form-type of rejection. . .It's been rejected by publisher after publisher. . .Madeline L'Engle, three years before Wrinkle in Time won the Newbery Medal.
Write as if you were dying. . . This is, after all, the case. . .Annie Dillard
Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself. Nikki Giovanni
I work very painfully, but I work. James Michener
Do the job all the way through, even if it's no good. William Saroyan
Handwritten, left behind in Michelangelo's studio, this note to his apprentice: Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.
Okay, gang, I'm in Hawaii, and have just talked to my dear friend Louise Ure, www.murderati.com, who passed along this gem from Gillian Roberts:
Today is the worst writing you'll ever do. Why would you want to put that off till tomorrow?
I am among the directionally challenged. I do not enjoy jokes that involve paper bags and people trying to find their way out of them.
I've gotten lost inside one, way too many times.
When we first moved to San Diego, Fred said, with a certain amount of wonder, "Are you aware that the children tell stories about what it's like to ride in the car with you?"
I wasn't. I only knew they seemed to need a lot of supplies when they climbed into the backseat: water, pillows, flashlights, stamped postcards, throat lozenges, crackers, science fiction trilogies--as if we were embarking on a long, perilous journey into the unknown, instead of heading off to Fashion Valley, a trip that took, when Fred was at the helm, all of fifteen minutes.
This subject is of particular interest to me right now, as I think about these book signings. I'm traveling alone to Kona but I'm going to be met by friends, Merle and Kathy Wood, and that's a good thing. Usually I can get on the plane by myself okay, but even that's not a lock.
A couple of year's back, (but well after 9-11 when security had already become exceedingly tight), Martha and I were doing the college tour I'd done years before with Aaron. We were someplace, Boston, I think, and I realized I needed a candy bar. Okay, I don't want to hear the candy bar jokes, either, but the point is, I rushed to the kiosk--right around the corner, actually almost within sight of the gate--stood in a line long enough to make me rethink my idea--but how can you give up your spot when you're almost there--bought the candy bar and came back.
The flight was boarding.
The flight had boarded. My heart thumped. My daughter--who had warned me this might happen and if it did, by golly, she was going to be smart enough to get on the plane without me--was gone.
My crumpled E-ticket wouldn't work. The attendant, wise-cracking and relaxed, smoothed it flat and tried again. Still nothing. Again, again.
"She's on the plane." I waggled my finger toward the empty corridor connecting us to the flight that would carry us home to San Diego. "I must board the plane." I sounded only slightly less shrill than that sidekick on Fantasy Island.
He tried it one more time. Nothing. He grimaced. "Damn. I hate it when this happens." I could see him weighing options. He shrugged. Shooed me through. "Go, go," he said irritably, "before I change my mind. Just don't tell anybody."
I went.
It was the part of the preflight where the seats sat upright, belts locked over the laps of passengers who'd had the common courtesy to show up on time, luggage stowed. I squeezed past the flight attendant who was banging closed the overhead compartments. Our seats were toward the back.
Martha wasn't in hers.
I slid on my belt, swiveled and checked the bathroom doors. Closed.
The pilot started his lecture, the one that involves the flight attendant holding up the oxygen mask and cheerily telling everybody it's perfectly okay, no, mandatory, to save the grown-ups first before even worrying about the kids.
The plane made grinding noises, exhaled. The attendant tucked the mask away and began to sit. I could feel the plane under me, the rumble it makes right before it starts to roll.
She'd been in there too long. I shifted in my seat. Glanced behind me. The doors were still closed. There it was, this niggling thought. Another minute passed.
I felt the blood rush down my body. My face grew hot. I snapped off my belt and shot to my feet. "Wait, wait," I hollered, "is somebody in the bathroom?"
It was one of those frozen moments: Heads turning, frowns beginning to crease faces as the entire plane realized in unison there was a crazy person on board in row 22, seat A.
The body builder in row twelve shifted in his seat and slid off his buckle. The flight attendant locked eyes with him. She spoke into her wrist and got cautiously to her feet. She tried a smile. "Why, do you need to use it?"
"No, no," I shrieked, "is somebody in the bathroom?" I was demented, already racing down the aisles, banging on the bathroom doors. They buckled open."Wait, wait, she's not on? Where is she? What happened to her?"
I turned, my path blocked by a very large man who apparently was in a hurry now to use the bathroom himself, followed by a rhumba line of male passengers carrying energy in their shoulders and fists, and the flight attendant. She was holding a tray table flat in her hand as if she knew how to use it.
I frowned. "Where is this flight going?"
They looked at each other.
"Toledo." She said the word very carefully, emphasizing every syllable.
"You're joking." I blinked. "Right?"
She tried a different pronunciation. It was still Toledo.
She escorted me off the plane, back to my new friend at the gate. He was not happy to see me.
"You realize we're going to be writing you up." He frowned. He had a firm grip on my elbow, my E-ticket in his hand. The San Diego flight had just boarded and he was in a hurry to get rid of me.
Writing me up? I visualized a damp cell, bright lights and something shapeless to wear in puce.
"We're putting you in the manual, on what not to do."
He sounded like this whole thing was my fault.
My daughter sank into her seat, a mix of relief and irritation on her face when she saw me come down the aisle. "I don't even want to hear it," she said.
I was going to end it there, and then I remembered this thing that's too good to leave out.
Years ago, in Anchorage, I volunteered to guide a new resident to a local supermarket. Stephanie Moen hadn't been warned. She followed in her car. it was dark and slippery. Time passed. Snow fell. We dead-ended in a cul-de-sac I hadn't known was there.
Stephanie cracked down her window. "Did you see that moose?" she asked.
What moose.
She stared. "You mean you didn't see those two state trooper cars with the red lights on and the game warden cutting up the moose on the side of the road?"
I admit, I missed it. But at least I have company. Soon after we moved to San Diego, I found this in the Union-Tribune:
A lost motorist wound up at the end of Interstate 8 next to the Pacific Ocean yesterday, after he completely missed Arizona while driving from New Mexico. He had a map on his lap and a perplexed look on his face.
We could start a club, except we'd never make the meetings.
How about it, readers. How lost have you gotten? Where were you trying to go, and where did you end up?
I've decided to spend one hour cleaning the garage.I figure one hour every twenty-one years or so is doable.This pleases my husband greatly.
I can already see the problem and I’ve barely opened the door and turned on the light:The problem with cleaning out the garage is that eventually, you have to throw things away.
My instinct is to try and find them new homes, which is why, Fred points out, the garage looks the way it does in the first place.But since almost everything in there is mine, Fred agrees it’s wise I take a crack at it first myself.We came to this conclusion several years ago, but these things can’t be rushed.
Perhaps it would help if I showed you what it looks like inside:
I’m pausing here, realizing I still can’t figure out how to transfer pictures to my computer.But never mind: I can’t actually find my camera anyway.Maybe it’s in the garage.
Let me say this.Our garage is not as bad as the woman’s across the street where we once lived.We can get cars into ours.She parked at the curb for eight years and needed an actual Dumpster when it came time to empty hers.Men trudged in and out in a resigned steady line, loading that Dumpster, hauling it away, reloading it.They did this for two and a half weeks. Then they started on the house.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do need to add that our garage was suitable for shooting the bomb-making terrorist scenes for the webisodes without any modification whatsoever.
That first day, I’d asked the director and cameraman if I needed to dress the set, add anything to make it more believable.They glanced away from the tripod toward the teetering walls of boxes, the wooden table jammed with decades-old abandoned art projects, the mouldering columns of magazines and water warped books, the bikes with the split seats and the boogie boards so old the foam had flaked off.The cameraman shrugged.
“Nope,” Mark Nicholson tweaked the light, “looks fine.”
I start with the smallest item I can find, a wooden box I can hold in my hand. I figure this way, I can always close the lid if what’s inside is too daunting.
The box has been sitting on a wooden shelf next to a four buckets of paint, a set of cloudy and cracked flippers and snorkel gear in a size nobody fits anymore, one tennis shoe and a bottle of Anti-freeze.We haven’t lived in Alaska for two decades.
Inside the box are stamps.
I vaguely recall that whenever the post office changedrates, I tossed the leftovers in there.The 25-cent stamp has a flag that flies over Yosemite and tilts up at its end, buoyed by some invisible, optimistic breeze.Not so the 29-center:that one gusts violently across the top of Mount Rushmore, as if all the superstars carved in stone below it were bellowing admonitions and helpful tips at the top of their lungs, creating enough air to snap that flag upward.
I have a Clyde McPhatter on a 29-center, a Red Cloud on a 10, and a Madonna and Child that says Christmas 1991.These are stamps you have to lick.
So now I’m in trouble.These are way too valuable to throw away and I’m not even to the bottom of the box yet.I close the lid.Just for the time being.
The wall against the window looks promising and with a little digging, I find my Anthony Robbins motivational tapes, numbers 4 through 9 still in their original wrappers.This is a gold mine.I am missing the one that deals with unleashing the financial genius inside of me; I tossed that one in the trash during the last big market dip in '87. I discover my first portable cell phone, the size and weight of a brick.You have to plug that one into a machine that looks like its there for kidney dialysis.
I've been happily married a long time; I don’t need the books I bought in college about how to get out of bad relationships. Or the series on how to backpack through countries that no longer exist.It’s all good.
Too good.I could sell this stuff on e-Bay, I’m certain of it.
“How are you doing, honey?”Fred calls.
“Swell,” I answer.
“Filling up that trash bag?”
I’m back to the stamps.The oldest is the 22-cent Frilled Dogwinkle and its companion, the Reticulated Helmet. At the bottom I find it, a stamp with no flag flapping, no numbers.
This US stamp along with 25 cents of additional US postage is equivalent to the F stamp rate.
The F stamp? The F word has its own stamp?
I use it--not the stamp, of course, goodness knows how much that one's worth---and close the lid.
How about you? Anything you can't part with? What treasure have you found in your garage or old trunk? And here are webisodes 10-12:
Tomorrow night's the book launch at Mysterious Galaxy here in San Diego, and the next morning I leave for Hawaii, and Left Coast Crime, where I'll be on panels and give a mini-talk about writing webisodes. I'll also be signing at a Borders on the island of Kona. (Yes! You can find my schedule on my webpage: www.susanarnoutsmith.com thank you for asking!) This starts my west coast tour.
I tell you this because I'm pausing, here, as I pack.
I had planned by now to be several sizes smaller.
It was a good plan. Sound. Regrettably, my body never got the memo.
This would ordinarily trouble me, except that recently I ran across a piece I did as an essayist for National Public Radio, Weekend Edition-Sunday, oh, several years ago.
Here it is, and then we'll talk:
I feel like I'm holding on to the side of a cliff and scrabbling to get purchase, but it's muddy and sometimes it rains, and bit by bit, inexorably, I'm sliding.
I'm not happy about this.
I'm not going without a good fight. My next birthday, in a few scant days, I'll be fifty. A shape-changer is at work in the mirror. Gravity is pulling everything south. I feel like I'm in a science fiction movie, the one where the incredibly vain main character with the platinum hair and the big garnet dinner ring who's really mean to everybody shrieks Oh, my God! and flings her suddenly wrinkled fingers to her face, but not before we see in fascinated horror that her face is changing, the skin crackling like so many pork rinds, her chin a quivering wattle dancing to music only it can hear, her lips grotesquely enlarged with lip-liner way outside the lines.
And it's not just the face.
My body seems to have this idea that a really big, awful, food shortage is coming to the Smith family soon and the only way to get through this, like Heidi, is to wear everything it owns at once. I am layered in my own padding, and its wrinkled and freckled and specked with defects. I am not alone in this.
I approach Cabrillo Elementary, where my 5th grader, Martha, attends, and see a woman I like a lot, a woman I've been friends with now since our kids were in kindergarten. She sits on the steps in a pair of shorts gathered at the top, waiting for her child, and I note to myself in a casual kind of way she has significantly more spider veins on her upper thighs than I do. My heart sings and is ashamed. Her knees are better, so everything balances out. Hers, unlike mine, don't seem to have those little gobs of cellulite lodged under the skin like so many wads of bubble gum.
I do these kinds of comparisions constantly. It does not make me glad in my heart about myself, but it does make me realize, with a kind of grim snap of satisfaction, that everybody I was ever friends with who was really cute once, is getting old.
"Okay, alright, so we're not attractive to boys anymore, big deal," says my friend Jude Lyon, when we speak of this on the phone. We both leave out the part that our idea of boys has been adjusted to now include grown men in their mid-thirties.
Don't get me wrong. I'm utterly, passionately in love with my husband. I can't imagine being married to anybody else. This isn't about that. It's about knowing that chances are, nothing is ever coming my way again I will ever have to say no to.
It happened overnight, caught me by surprise. I truly thought I was exempt, as if aging was some really bad career choice these other women made.
My Alaskan friend Mary Nagel told me that the last time she visited her young and hunky doctor for a check-up, he didn't ever bother having a nurse in there with them. She realized in a moment of clarity, it just didn't occur to him there was any reason to.
This did not please her. She wanted to say, she says, Listen, sonny, you don't know who you're alone with. You don't know what the magnetic power of my body is capable of eliciting. Why, I've had kingdoms thrown at my feet. Instead, she went home and tossed out an old T-shirt I'd once given her that said Somewhere between 30 and Death. We thought it was very funny when I bought it, "But can you imagine," she said, "people would think I was this sad, pitiful woman trying to delude herself into believing she still looked like she was in her 30's."
I got off the phone and took a good hard look at my closet. There was this really classy pair of hemp and black velvet sandals, with ribbons that crossed over the ankles and tied in front, sandals that said,I'm a with-it, happening-kind-of-girl, capable of great surprises. I set them aside for recyling. Snip snip. Out of my life they went.
"Oh, Mommy," my daughter Martha cries when she sees them in the garage. "They're perfect, I love them, I want them."
"But these sandals don't fit!" I say reasonably.
And my beautiful, long-lashed silky skinned sun-scented girl levels me with a look. She smiles. "Oh, but Mommy," she says. "They will."
Okay, so that's the NPR piece. Martha's now a junior at Stanford, by the way, and she's outgrown the shoes. The ones she buys are spikier and taller.
I like my face again. I smile at her in the mirror and there's sweetness in her eyes, a mocking, gentle knowing: We're in this together, kiddo, and always will be. A rich kind of healing comes from experiencing days piled upon days like a soft, settling quilt. Some days I do the thing where I stand in front of the mirror and press my palms up so that I suddenly have cheekbones again. I have friends who have actually done the surgery, and look amazing, but I don't think it's for me.
I'm not after beauty so much anymore as God, I hate to say it, wellness. Aaron's second-grade Alaskan teacher years ago tainted that word for me after she'd asked me to bring treats. I'd labored all morning over thirty-one perfectly frosted cupcakes, each decorated to resemble Mt. Alyeska. Getting them in and out of the car was a little tricky, since I was hugely pregnant and it was raining. I leaned against the hallway wall to catch my breath and opened the classroom door. She took one look at my offering and waved it away. "Oh, no, no, no, no. This class is into wellness." Little hands convulsively reached up, eyes mute with pleading. It was like being in Slumdog Millionaire. I took the cupcakes back to the car and ate three.
Now? Not so much. Three would give me heartburn. It's hard enough sleeping through the night.
I struggle with the weight, but the substance, this corporeal being moving through time, this woman who has has built meals and books and a family and taught a child she didn't know how to read, this woman who still takes enough chances to be embarrassing--well, this woman deserves a pair of shoes.
So, my friends: How do you deal with aging? Is it different for you men? Was there a single moment when it clicked, or a gradual realization? How do you honor your own wisdom? I can't wait to hear. I'll be right here with a bag of Cheetos.
Also, I'm going on radio tour today! Here's the schedule:
Mornings with Lorri and Larry, FamilyNet Radio 8:08-8:20 a. m. Eastern time on Sirius Satellite 161 and Simulcast from 7-9 a.m.
The Morning Show with host Lincoln Brown 8:15 - 8:35 a.m. Mountain time KVEL-AM in Vernal, UT
10:30-10:45 Pacific time, KRCB-FM Radio in Santa Rosa, CA
11-11:20 a.m. Eastern time Nabuurs and Friends, with host Mike Nabuurs Talk 820 Hamilton, ON
11-11:15 Mountain time Culinary Confessions with hots Him and Don 1310 KXAM in Phoenix, AZ
Bring it back! Let me rewrite it or better--let me burn it. Don't let it out in the unfriendly cold in that condition. John Steinbeck
Once words have been set down, they form part of a material object, and as such, must take their chances. Margaret Atwood
So today's the day Out at Night takes its chances.
I take a breath, reading that, stare a long time at the words. If you walk into a bookstore in America today, you will find this book. Not I, no, no, not I. It's way too stressful; I'm not going anywhere near a bookstore, but yes, it's there, glistening in a brand-new wrapper that looks like this:
Maybe it was my dad's German work ethic, but a taking a moment, pausing to let in the moment, honoring it, has been difficult.
Nearly impossible.
When we were growing up--myself and my three sisters and brother--the rule was: if you went out at night, you had to get up early the next morning. By early I mean six-thirty. And you had to be ready to work. No exceptions. If you were sick? Well, that just proved you shouldn't have been out in the first place. Dad always delivered this with a Jack Nicholson crazy smile, as if it made perfect sense.
We lived in the mountains of Colorado and the jobs outside were dirty, stressful, involving moving large chips of rock like a line of convicts from one stationary spot to another until our backs ached and our palms stung.We strung barbed wire with our dad.We dug in rocky soil to plant seeds that never grew.We carried lumber and hauled brick. Inside we scrubbed or dusted or ripped or hung wallpaper, paying for every moment we had been on the dance floor at prom, every glass of fruit punch. You must understand: We loved our father dearly and knew he loved us. He'd had a hard life, growing up in Alaska on an island, and one of the gifts he brought us was the ability to work through most everything, to set aside the small, sweet triumph of the moment and turn our attention back to more important matters, like shoveling horse shit off the driveway.
Celebrating, for me, always carried a price tag; after awhile, most of the time, it seemed too expensive to do it at all. I'm not certain my sisters feel this way (my brother's already gone)--we're very close, but I realize I've never spoken of this with them. My mom and step-dad, (my Dad's gone, too), entertain generously and gracefully.
Me, I envy friends who spontaneously have parties wherever they go, magically building meals out of Cheese Whiz and three limp pickles, diffusing joy as if it were a bright dye they'd tossed into a pool of water just to watch it spread.
I married a lovely, private man who gets tense at parties. We're a pair. The larger family I married into--most of whom live within a fifteen minute radius--all know the value of celebration. They do it brilliantly and treat us with extraordinary kindness; they have made me--this woman who goes back over every scrap of dialogue, pressing my forehead into the doorframe at memories of things I've said and how I've behaved--they've made me theirs. At Ellie's 75th birthday party, at the Evanco's celebrating Laurel's christening, at the Kersulis' honoring a birth, the Graham's house for Valentine's Day, the Landis house at Christmas and Dossy and Jack's during the big game, it is a gift beyond words, to have this. More than that, they honor the value of the moment, the things between the parties that knit us together.
And so I make myself, right now, turn back to my book, not away from it. Honoring it by talking about it. This makes me feel faint, except I can see in my mind my family--the ones here, the ones far away--smiling encouragingly. I swallow. Okay.
I do know Out at Night was a complicated book to write; my goal was to make it effortless to read, to imbue it with a sense of inevitability, one chapter hurtling after the other, linkages as taut and strong as a speeding train.
They wait. I take a drink of water.
Perhaps it helps that there's an actual speeding train in it.
I put down the glass. Water spills. I mop it with the edge of my shirt.
It's odd. Talking about this book is a private thing; sharing it feels not dangerous, so much as risky.
I'm warming, now; it comes in a blurt.
I want to smarten up its little vest, rub the catsup off its thumb, remind it to look people in the eye and not take up too much room.
In my mind's eye, my 92-year old mother-in-law smiles benignly. Years ago, upon learning that her son was finally going to settle down, she'd leaned over and whispered in my ear, Thank God! You're not going to just live with him! Now she's shifting in her chair.I speed things up.
On the other hand, yes, yes! I want it to suck the air completely out of a room; I want it to grab the reader by the throat and not let go.
Concern flits across her face. .
Maybe not the throat--breathing is good--but the lapel, strongly by the lapel. I want its presence to linger.
I clarify.
Not like bad cheese; more like a haunting riff you hear while gliding in a car with the windows down, past a street corner at dusk. Okay, yeah, I'm whacked. But good whacked, not completely teetering on the edge humming the la la song with a knife in my hand whacked, just the other kind, where you can't remember where you put the keys and then you find them in the refrigerator.
I've got my rhythm now, I keep going.
This book. We writers dream the dream a long time and then we move on. One of the reasons I love writing the Grace Descanso series is because it allows me to ease back into that particular dream for a moment. Ease sounds easy. What it feels like is this: Lunging forward, flailing, weighed down with shabby boxes and crumpled pages, like Harry Potter trying to find the entrance to the Hogwart's train station. It's in there someplace, this magical door, if I can just head-butt my way through it. And the world is never exactly the same as the one I left behind at the end of the last book. These people don't have the decency to stay where I put them; they go on, willy-nilly, gossiping, getting tattoos and into trouble. I'm already well into writing book three, and Grace and her pals still have the ability to make me laugh. And at the end of the day, this auspicious day, that has to be enough.
I exhale. I think about flowers at the door. Ice cream on the back porch.
No, wait.That’s not enough.That can’t be enough. I'll raise a glass tonight, to the book, to friends and to my family: the one I was born into, the one I created, and the one that made me theirs. And maybe tomorrow I'll allow myself, just this once, to sleep in.
So, friends: How do you honor the day your book comes into the world? And to those without books, but with proper milestones nonetheless, by what means do you mark the moment? And what would you suggest to someone short on ceremony and long on lists, (short of clubbing myself with a mallet), to slow things down enough to let it in?
First, it's great to be back blogging at Moments in Crime. I've been so excited about doing this again, and can't wait to hear from you. I live in San Diego, in a house that faces the bay.We’ve lived in the same house for twenty years and in all that time I’ve met exactly nine people who live on our street.This includes two people who have already died.
I’m a writer, which, by definition, means I have no time and very few social skills.I run a raggedy, scrappy staff of one.She’s not treated nicely.I can’t remember the last time I gave her a day off.And bonuses—forget about it.Describing myself in the third person is a byproduct of spending way too much time alone in flip-flops, talking to people only I can see.
It’s a splintery ship, hemorrhaging water, but it’s mine, all mine.So it was with trepidation that I began work on a new set of webisodes—teensy dramas a minute in length that multiplied under foot like ants until there were twenty-two of them—webisodes that would require interacting again with actual people.
The idea is that these webisodes will be teasers, and that these teasers will set up my next book, (Out at Night, in stores tomorrow, thank you for asking).
This isn’t my idea.My film agent, a gravelly-voiced woman who has been known to make male assistants cry and beg for death, insisted I develop a presence on the Net.
“I’m way too old for the Net,” I’d protested.
“Do it.”
Yes, ma’m.I will do it and I will like it.
I’d first tried this a year ago.San Diego is just close enough, if you strain hard, to hear the faint, tinny sound of lights, camera, action, always happening someplace else, a place registering much higher on the cool meter.Those first webisodes, produced in advance of The Timer Game last year, had been shot on a ranch outside Los Angeles, which doubled for a remote location in Guatemala.
I’d watched helplessly as my budget, (Fred and I were paying for everything ourselves), unspun from its mooring and snapped free, a long, gaily buoyant ticker tape of expenses.The woman in charge who will remain nameless (not Kai—Kai Soremekun was brilliant), a skinny woman in high glossy boots I’d never met before, hired friends.
Granted, some were amazing; some just seemed to need regular naps.She was also fond of clapping her hands together smartly and crying out:Heads of departments, heads of departments, I want all of you on the set now.I’m not certain which department I headed, but this was where I learned how to glue together a fake Mayan statue with nine pieces of used Spearmint gum.
If there was a 12-step, I’d have brought coffee.I was done with webisodes.Until a random conversation with somebody in sales in one of the countries where The Timer Game was published informed me brightly, “And here’s what’s great.Now your readers will expect every time a new set of webisodes.”He used a smiley tone of voice, as if delivering exceedingly good news.My husband had to put his head down between his knees and breathe deeply when I’d told him that part.
So these new webisodes for Out at Night I was shooting on the cheap in our back yard.This last afternoon, we were down to shooting scenes with four actors in camouflage—a leader barking out commands—racing up stone steps, climbing a wire fence, spray-painting the words: Get Ready to Die on a piece of laminated wall-covering, smeared to resemble an actual graffiti-covered wall.Fred had found a plastic rifle in the garage that looked as if it had been around since Wagon Train went off the air, and they used that as a prop.I’d roped in a friend’s two sons and promised they’d be in facemasks so their chances at good colleges would remain unsullied.
The military had been doing maneuvers over Point Loma, where my house is, all afternoon, and the chatter of planes and helicopters was an issue, so the lead actor screamed so hard the cords in his neck stuck out.
Suddenly, we realized dimly in unison that the stutter of a helicopter seemed much louder.We looked up.It wasn’t the military.It was the police.Doing a tight spiral right over the back of our house.
It seems a good neighbor, ever vigilant, had phoned in a report that it sounded as if the Smiths were being held up at gunpoint.We raced toward the curb. And there they were:the dog-walker, the koi-feeder, the new neighbors who had just unloaded their U-Haul, and the ones who have lived on the block a long time, crowded around three police cars as if grouped at a bountiful table in a Norman Rockwell painting.
Fred told me I’d be relieved to know that he’d had the presence of mind to get rid of the fake Molotov cocktails before he’d opened the garage door.
So what about you? How did you meet your neighbors? Are you close to them? Any meetings recently with the police?
Oh, and all week-long I'll be playing the webisodes that got me into so much trouble. Here are the first three:
SUSAN ARNOUT SMITH is a third-generation Alaskan whose grandparents homesteaded an island. Winner of the Stanley Drama Award and a playwright at the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, she has also been a recreation director on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a television anchor in Anchorage, and an essayist for National Public Radio. She has written screenplays for TV movies, one of which was a finalist for the PEN USA West Award. She lives in Southern California with her husband. This is her third novel.
It’s the dead of night, and Professor Thaddeus Bartholomew is frantically crawling through a field to stay alive. With mere moments to act, he has only enough time to type out a text message—a name—before his stalker overcomes him. Later he’s found with a hole in his chest, shot with a crossbow, and burned to death. Meanwhile, San Diego crime scene tech Grace Descanso has gone on vacation with her daughter, but
the FBI feels far from guilty about interrupting them after her name turns up on the professor’s phone. Grace knows vaguely who he is, but can’t imagine why his dying act would involve her in any way—not that it matters. The FBI won’t let her walk away; she can either join the investigation or become a suspect in it. Soon, political leaders and extremists will converge at the world’s largest agricultural conference, and all signs indicate that Bartholomew’s brutal murder in a field of genetically modified soy is just the beginning of something much larger than one man’s death.
A gripping sequel to her heart-racing series debut, The Timer Game, Susan Arnout Smith’s Out at Night entangles Grace in a sweeping conspiracy that hits her dangerously close to home.
I'm packing boxes, stowing suitcases in the car. Not a real car, mind you, but the one that's there waiting for me. I'm moving quickly; time is short.
I'm trying to cram in all the last minute things, the important details, the map to find my way back to you.
Because, see, I’m hoping we’re going to meet again. That as my tour comes together , if I’m in your town, you’ll stop by and say hello.
The world is big out there, and it’s time I took a breath, squared my shoulders, climbed into the driver’s seat and headed toward whatever bold new thing is next.
Except I’m terribly directionally challenged and I hate night driving and I have worries that tend to go off in the middle of the night like a chirruping fire alarm that needs new batteries.
So if you live in San Diego or Los Angeles or Madison, Wisconsin, or Richmond, Virginia, or Washington D.C., or Denver, if you happen to be there when I am, please understand how very very happy I’m going to be to see you.
Remind me that we’ve already met, here, and that you’re a friend, stopping by to say hello.
I’ll be adding other places, too, so keep checking. And if you want me to come to your town, contact me at www.thetimergame.com and we’ll work out details.
Or you can write me at:
Susan Arnout Smith/PO Box 60061/San Diego, CA 92166
What else. The webisodes are on the same website, if you’re interested in them. The current one’s always on top; the rest are in archives. Oh, and at the end of this blog is an interview with me about the book. Just press the question mark icon to see it.
Okay. I guess that’s it. Starting tomorrow, you'll have the incomparable CJ Box, whose book sounds luminous. What he hasn't experienced yet and I have--is you. Thanks for being here this week. Hope to see you soon.
The Timer Game is going to be in stores next Tuesday. Next Tuesday, I can walk into a store and buy it.
I'm going to have to too, because my mother wants one right away and she won't buy it herself.
She called me the other day, all excited. "Did you know you can actually buy this book in advance?" Her voice went up at the end.
"Yeah, Mom, you can get it pretty much everywhere, from what I hear."
"But. . . "and here she took a breath and plunged on. . ."I won't have to, will I?"
She's good.
After that she talked to one of my sisters in a voice we know well, the kind you'd use to ponder the mysteries of the universe. She talks like this when she already knows the answer, and we know that she already knows the answer, and that what she really wants is a specific answer back.
"Now," she says to my sister, "Susan said I wouldn't have to buy her book." Her voice grows hushed. "What do you suppose that means?"
My sister and I are laughing. It means, I tell Bonnie, that Mom pushed really hard and I'm buying one Tuesday and sending it to her. That's what it means.
Eventually, I'll get a stack of books, I'm sure, and be able to send them out, but for now, I'm going to stop into a book store opening day and ask for it.
I feel a little fluttery, just thinking about that. It's this part that's so hard. The book is done.
St. Martin's Minotaur sent along a copy for my shelf and it's beautiful. I haven't even been able to risk reading it; I don't know if that will ever happen, but I love the way it feels in my hands. It feels lighter than I thought. Lighter than all the years I put into it.
Fred, my husband, suggested that perhaps it's because chapters 13 through 24 were accidentally omitted, but Fred's a real kidder and I don't think so.
I think it was finally pared down to its truest form.
That's where all the work is for all of us, isn't it. Paring it down. Not just in books, either. Going to the essential truth and staying there.
We have the worries of the world in our hearts and the list is long of the little ones too--running out of milk and stamps and doing work we hate or being scared to do the work we love.
I'm hoping I've created a world that is so true, so vivid, that you can sink down into it and lose yourself for a few hours. Go someplace else.
Those are the books I love to read, and that's the one I've tried to write.
While I think of it, thanks for this week. Tomorrow might be hectic; it's hard to say. So I want to tell you now how much you mean to me, those who have written comments, and those who have communicated with me off-line.
You rock, in my opinion.
And down past that, at the essential truth, you rule. You deserve something funny and heart-stopping and great. I hope I've written a book that's worthy of you.
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