Tag Archives: fiction

Don’t Fly With Me–

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Jack’s Wednesday guest blog – –

Like many people, I watched replays of 9/11 and the twin towers a couple of days ago, and I was reminded of the horror of it all.

Then I envisaged an imaginary phone conversation that might have happened afterwards between two imaginary characters called Dubya and Tone –

Tone: Hi Dubya – Just wanted to say how everyone here was horrified about what happened, and we send you our thoughts and prayers.

Dubya: Thanks, Tone, and we use thoughts and prayers a lot over here. They’re very useful.

Tone: So, do you have any idea who did this and who’s behind it?

Dubya: Oh, yes – our guys have all the intel. The hijackers were almost all Saudis, and so was the man who planned it. The pilots got their visas through the Saudi embassy and trained over here.

Tone: So you’ll be hitting the Saudis hard, then? Bomb them back to the Stone Age like your Dad did in Iraq?

Dubya: Well, not exactly. There’s the oil and our arms sales to them, and some are good friends.

Tone: What, then?

Dubya: Unfinished business in Iraq.

Tone: But they didn’t have anything to do with it, and one of our best scientists is part of the UN team that just concluded they don’t have any WMDs.

Dubya: You’d do me a big favor if you could take care of that and join me in what I’ll call ‘Operation Crusade’.

Tone: Done – he committed suicide in the woods near his house – no witnesses and no inquiry. So the guy behind this is in Iraq? I think he’s called Bin Laden? Isn’t crusade a bit provocative?

Dubya: He’s in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and my good friend has interests there. We need a pipeline through there to get oil to the Indian Ocean.

Tone: Well, far be it for me to say, but we tried it in the 1800s, and the Soviets tried it in the 1900s, and both of us failed.

Dubya: So, can I count on you?

Tone: Of course!

Bin Laden: Perfect – – – –

Jack: I didn’t show Wendy this post.

You Ever Feel Stuck?

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You ever feel stuck?

Sometimes you just do. It’s a good time to eat chocolate ice cream, or go for a walk, or take a bath.

Getting unstuck is usually a combination of mental and physical, which is interesting because feeling stuck is usually entirely a mental thing.

But we’re mammals, so getting unstuck sometimes requires a little physicality. Shaking it off might be literal. Don’t overthink it, just get moving. Enjoy something. Not so much “rest” in the sense of removal from activity, but thoughtful rest in an activity you enjoy.

That was my advice to myself this week when I grew frustrated with my inability to attract a fiction agent. My nonfiction career is going great guns with our seventh edited anthology, thanks, but nobody thinks I have an imagination? I took myself on a long, shady walk in the woods to give myself a pep talk.

Two years now, I’ve been working on a coming-of-age novel set in West Virginia. Two years, the characters have shaped and stammered and grabbed the keyboard from my hands and run amok across it. Now it’s time to edit the opening to make it more of a grabber than an explainer. Something that has never been my forte. But in the personal rejections coming from agents (in a ratio of 1 personal for 3 standard), they pretty much say the same thing: the opening isn’t making me care what happens to the characters.

This is a puzzle to be solved, a craft to be practiced, and I have to remind myself I write because I like writing, because there are things to be said, and because it keeps me from strangling people with my bare hands. So, there’s that. Do what you love because you love it, and remember that’s why you started this journey.

That said, the journey doesn’t have to end down a dead-end alley with the words “your characters are not compelling” written on it. I intend to see that mine does not.

But oh, the energy, oh the strategy, oh the strange masochistic joy of this journey.

If you’re out there writing,too, be encouraged. I’ve published seven books across four lovely publishers, and this is what I have to say about our industry right now: this too shall pass. One way or another, we will unstick. Because, writing.

Get up and try again, kids. That’s my plan.