Saalon Muyo

Here’s all I know about working in sales: Always Be Closing. That might just be something from a movie, come to think of it. Do actual salesmen say that?  It’s good advice, though. Maybe not to salesmen. My advice to salesmen is to Always Be Finding Another Job (For Your Sanity). But for everyone else?

I have a lot of friends who want to get into programming, or write their first novel, or shoot a short film. They’ve come up with an idea and want to know what I think of it. Don’t ask me why people want to know what I think about things. I talk enough without the encouragement. But they ask, and I inevitably say one thing. Well, maybe two, if I think the idea is really cool. Which it is, actually, a lot of the time.  If it’s cool, I tell them so. That’s the first thing. Then I say something else.

Go and finish it.

We all have piles of unfinished projects. Half written stories and chunks of code that don’t run and basements full of boxes we never unpacked in the five years since moving. I don’t know about you, but I know exactly what I’ve learned from all of those incomplete things: absolutely nothing.

No, that’s not true. I did learn something from them. I learned to think less of myself.

The problem with good ideas is that you convince yourself this might be the best one you’ll have for a very long time, so you’d better not screw it up. That kind of thinking is poison, and apart from laziness (another problem in which I am well versed) it’s the single most prolific murderer of projects.  Without a doubt, your idea is going to get away from you. Maybe early on, more likely in the middle, that solid block of gold will turn to sand and slip through your fingers. It’s a given. It’ll happen. If the goal in your head is don’t screw this up and not get this sucker finished, you’ll decide you already failed and give in.

Enough of those and you start to think that you’re the problem.  Your ideas are great, sure, but you can’t make them work. When the next idea comes, you remember the last four unfinished novels, films or websites gathering electrons on a hard drive somewhere and decide there’s no reason even to try.

I’ve never learned much of anything from half finished works of genius (which is what they somehow remain, no matter that you fled when they slipped the leash), but I’ve learned buckets from completed pieces of crap. And, oh boy, have I got them. Some of them are websites still live and in production or scripts floating out in the wired. Some sit here, on my computer, never to be read again. I’ve learned invaluable things from all of them, but none so important as realizing I could make it across the finish line.  That lesson lets me set something aside when I need to and know I can come back and make it work with a clear head. That lesson gets me over mountains and under barbed wire fences. It’s what keeps me strong when I’m lost and spinning out nothing but garbage.

There are other big, important things to learn, but you won’t learn a single one of them from the unfinished or incomplete. Live with a mess of a codebase for a while and you’ll start figuring out how to do the next one better.  Reread that novel you wrote and you’ll see where things got away from you, and maybe you’ll recognize it when it happens again.  Finishing things won’t make you a good programmer or writer on its own, but you won’t get close until you learn how to close.

This is a plea to those who recommended or enjoyed the The Dark Is Rising sequence. Right now, I’m very near to tapping out.

I’m trying. I get that these were written for a younger audience. Younger, even, than I realized when I picked them up. I wasn’t expecting an eleven year old protagonist, which admittedly threw me off a bit. It’s a little out of my comfort zone for a book I didn’t first read closer to its target age. I could probably re-read The Mouse and the Motorcycle, because I know what it felt like to read it when I was a kid. I’m finding it difficult to project into something new, though.  That might be part of the problem.

But a lot of you really enjoy these books, and I’d like to know why. I’m about 40 pages from the end of the second book, The Dark is Rising. As it stands, I’m not sure if I’ll have the will to pick up Greenwitch. I don’t want to crap out. I want to see what those who recommended it are seeing, even if it turns out I don’t like them the way they do. I don’t want to just return the last three books to the library unless I’m sure I’m not going to enjoy this.

Right now, the series is feeling like a well written but dry object hunt. I’m not feeling any of the characters as people, just as relic hunters and puzzle solvers.  With a few exceptions (Simon being chased in Over Sea, Under Stone and the building cold in The Dark is Rising), the stakes are almost nonexistent. It’s just a sequence of problems solved immediately by external forces. I gave Over Sea, Under Stone the same pass I did the first Narnia book (The Magician’s Nephew, a book Over Sea, Under Stone unfortunately reminded me of), but I can’t take another 3 books of slogging.

So here’s my plea: Tell me, in the comments or on Twitter, what it is you love about the The Dark Is Rising sequence. Am I missing something? Are the problems I’m feeling just part of the early series? Does this get deeper, more emotionally involving or at least more complex than a series of puzzles leading to a series of powerful objects? If this is the series and it’s just not hitting me, maybe it’s time to call it quits. But if I’ve missed something, or if there are deeper waters to be found, I’m happy to stick around. I just need, at this point, a lifeline. I need to see this through your eyes before my eyes crust over and refuse to read another word.

I go to bed certain my mom will forget to brine the turkey.

When the call comes at 7:30 a.m. the next morning, I’m already awake, having driven Erin to the airport an hour before. She says, “I really screwed up,” and I know what’s coming. The turkey isn’t brined.

“I forgot to add the preserves to the cranberry sauce and ruined it. Can you go to the store and buy some more?”

Oh. Is that it?

————

I’m being loud. I’m always loud, especially at my mother’s house. I don’t expect to be shushed. It happens anyway.

“There are people sleeping upstairs.”

People? What people? I have to cook and deal with house guests? This was so not part of the plan. I spend until noon answering questions from a thirteen year old I’ve never met, wondering if it really is too early to start drinking.

————

Things are going well. There’s a turkey breast in the oven at my grandmother’s, and the full bird in the oven at my mom’s.  My friend Christine comes over to get a glass of wine – her family is having dinner just down the street – and I start to tell her how insane our Thanksgivings usually are.

The oven starts beeping.

And shuts off.

We head down to the garage, flip the breakers to cycle the power and turn the oven back on. A minute later, beeping and shutting off. Again. The turkey only has a half hour left, I think. Just let it go. We can finish it at my grandmother’s if we have to. And cook the stuffing and sweet potatoes there too, somehow. It’ll work.

I stay zen for a full twenty minutes. Then the oven starts working again.

————

My mom, of course, does not have a meat thermometer. I walk over to my grandmother’s (for the third time) to get one of hers. I bring Christine so she can say hello.  I storm in, say I can’t stick around, grab a thermometer, and bring Christine upstairs to my grandfather for a quick hello.

“Christine,” he says, “I have a picture of your grandmother I wanted to show you, but I haven’t found it yet.”

“We have to go, grandpa.”

“You have to go. Christine can stay.”

————

We cut the legs and wings off of the turkey and carve only the two breasts.  There are, Hallelujah, compliments and good cheer over the bird. The dinner goes great. Everything, on the whole, has gone great.

Leftovers get packed, and people notice that we never served the wings or legs. One by one, people approach me and say the same thing.

“Next year, why don’t we just cook a turkey breast?”

I had to go back to see when I’d hit my 200th post. It took a while, because it’s been two years. Two years for a hundred posts.  Not an awe inspiring rate. When you consider that almost half of those posts were written in the past three months, it’s downright embarrassing.  Not because I wasn’t blogging, but that it was a reflection of how writing has gone for me over the past two years.

In December of 2009 I started my job at the Cultural Trust.  New jobs are a huge disruption. I lose half of a year, at best, to the pressure of fitting into a new home.  Starting at the Trust was far, far worse. Because of how much I still had to learn about development, the better part of a year slipped into the void.  My job was my life.

I was talking with my friend Danielle on Monday, and she asked me a question.  Do I consider myself a writer or a programmer? There were a few ways I could have answered, all technically true.

I’m both.

I’m one now but am trying to transition into the other.

I’m barely a journeyman at both, so who knows?

My answer to her was, I think, more honest than those.  I told her it’s tough to say, because I get paid to do one, but not the other. But I do one without pay, and I don’t know if I’d keep doing the other without it.

I’ve done alright at being a writer.  I have done a miserable job of finding a way to get paid for it.  This isn’t just a problem for my ego.  A paycheck would mean it’s a job, too. It would mean I didn’t have to squeeze out another thousand words after a day spent slamming my head into a website.  Even a small amount of money could be the difference between needing to spend five days programming or four.

So this is where I say enough.

No, not enough writing. Enough wanting. Enough hoping.  I need a plan.

The plan starts today.

I’m going to keep it manageable.  I’m only worried about the next year. Since I know something just north of squat about getting paid for this, I could end up next year with little to show. The plan might need to change midway, anyway, so a year is as far out as I want to think. So, what’s the plan?

Wait, I actually need to come up with one? Um. Hold on a second.

Ok, plan.

First, I have a finished novel. The most important possible thing is for this novel to get into print.  The best case scenario is for publication, even with the tiniest possible press in the world. As much as I would love fame, fortune and the adoration of women for Broken Magic, what I really need are publication credits. I need a resume. I need a book in the wild. I’ll self-publish if that’s what it takes, but I’m not quite there, yet. So here’s step one: If no one has agreed to publish Broken Magic by March, 2012, I’ll publish it myself.

Second, I need another novel. It’s been years since I wrote Broken Magic and it’s embarrassing. More importantly, if I’ve gotten a publication credit on my resume, then I need something that said credit helps me publish. So, step 2: Write the first draft of Mimesis by June 2012. Finish the second draft by November, 2012.  The upside to this is I’ll have a finished novel before the world ends in December.

Third, I’ve been running from film long enough. I’ve been working on a webseries idea with Rachel and it’s weird and interesting and it’s something I can film. I don’t have a lot of hope for anything I film making me money or leading directly to fame and glory, but it’d something with my name people could see. So step 3: Film a short webseries in the summer of 2012. Release it before the end of the year.

Simple, right? 2012 isn’t already making me feel weak and nauseated or anything. No. Not me.

This plan has implications. I’m still going to be working a full time, mind shredding programming job. I’m going to have crises I can’t foresee and vacations and mental breakdowns and any number of other problems. I’m going to hate what I’m writing, have writer’s block, get inspired by something not on the plan. It’s going to be really, really hard. That means I have no idea what my free time is going to look like next year. I’ll do what I can not to vanish. If nothing else, you’ll see me online.

We’ll call this the draft version of the plan. If you have thoughts, suggestions, ideas, hopes or complaints, let me know. But next year, I’m making progress. I’m moving forward.

Or at least, I’m giving it my best possible effort.

Vow made on my 300th post. See you at 400.

Another day month, another tanka.

Your shirt drifts up and
you catch sunset on your skin.
I say something else,
as if I don’t notice this
is a moment that will pass.

The story starts on Thanksgiving. Any Thanksgiving, it doesn’t matter. The family sits down – there are a lot of us, enough that we have to push the kitchen and dining room tables together – and the food gets set out. People take a few bites before it begins.

“I don’t even like turkey.”

It’s usually my grandmother who gets things going, but if not, she’s onboard immediately.  This meal, this cake-eater, Thanksgiving meal, is too much work for something nobody likes anyway. Oh, sure, we love the stuffing and the sweet potatoes and the cranberry and the gravy (ok, who doesn’t like the gravy?), but the turkey? That thing’s a bitch. It takes forever to cook and you’re always afraid it’ll dry out before the inside’s done and then you have to carve the thing and then nobody even wants it.  The griping goes on for a little bit before someone makes a suggestion.

“Why don’t we just cook the turkey breast next year?”

Agreement. Hearty agreement. That’ll give us the meat we need, it’ll still be Thanksgiving, but cooking it will be so much easier. Sometimes, for variety, the suggestion is that we do a chicken instead, but the point is the same: easier, simpler, and maybe people will even like it better.  By the end of the night, it’s decided. Next year will be different.

This conversation’s been going for fifteen years.

I didn’t learn why until I took over the cooking of the bird.  We had our pre-Thanksgiving pow-wow to decide what we were going to buy, and we – we being me, my mom and my grandmother – decided that we’d try out cooking just a turkey breast this year and see how that went.  Lovely. Fantastic. No whole bird.  We were actually doing it.  I ordered this giant, organically grown local turkey breast that could feed the whole family, got my recipes together and prepared for the big day.

A week before Thanksgiving, I get a call from my mom.  ”Grandma bought a turkey,” she says.

“What? I already have a breast. It’s like a million pounds. Why do we need a turkey, too?”

“She wants something to stuff.”

Things descended quickly into a shouting match about who they thought was going to cook both a turkey and a breast, and anyway, why had I gone out and bought an expensive and gigantic turkey tit if we were just going to end up with a Butterball anyway?  The shouting match continued through the week and on into Thanksgiving morning itself. A two-oven strategy was devised, where I would cook the breast and grandma would stuff the bird.  Compromise.

Food gets laid out. Family starts to eat.

“I don’t even like turkey.”

Two years later, I gave up.  My family had cyclical Thanksgiving psychosis and there’s no way I could cure it.  I decided to opt out of the whole turkey process. Every year it was something new. A different last minute change, a slight variant on the argument. But it always ended the same, with a family who didn’t even want the thing. Rather than subject myself to the Groundhog Day-like horror of it all, I told my family to give me something else to cook and subject themselves to the turkey that they just couldn’t quit.

This was last year. The night before the big day, my mom calls, all desperate, because my grandmother has dumped off the turkey on them and they have no idea what to do with it. Could I please, please, please come help?  The shouting the previous two years had nothing on the righteous Thanksgiving fury that followed.  A full morning of rage, of my shouting while I grudgingly went about roasting that stupid, stupid bird. Why am I cooking this thing if everyone hates it? Why doesn’t one of the people who keeps forcing us to serve this bird at the last minute come over here and cook the damn thing themselves! I am so sick of this holiday! I’m going out of town next year,  just you see!

Well, it’s Thanksgiving again, and here I am. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this holiday, it’s that there is no escape from it. On the phone with my mom last week, I had one request. “I don’t care what we cook or how we cook it. Just please decide everything now. If I wake up Thursday to another turkey surprise, I’m going to lose it.”

I shouldn’t have even bothered. After all, there are two certainties on Thanksgiving.

I’ll lose it.

And everyone will hate the turkey.

The apocalyptic month of October, which stretched its Cthuluian tentacles far into November, is finally over. That’s right, friends. The Cultural Trust’s new website is live!

Seriously, check it out!

One thing that’s no fun about being a programmer is that the majority of what you do is meaningless to friends and family.  I’ve built a few really cool things in my career, but you can’t go home and say, “Mom! Look what your son did today! He built an entirely functional model to handle dynamic pricing for flex packages!” Not unless you like that glazed over look people get when you describe technology to them.

Today, though? Today is awesome. Today I can point with a jittery, anxious hand to a brand new website and say that it’s mine. My website. The one I built with my hands. Use it, and you’re using stuff I built. The thing near killed me a few weeks ago. There were a few days of catastrophic stress levels in there. By the end, the stress of it had crept into every other aspect of my life. Erin could almost certainly count the number of days I didn’t come home ranting desperately on one hand.  This has been, hands down, the most stressful month of my life in memory. But look! There be website here!

So what didn’t I do for the site? Well, I don’t do graphics, so anything pretty was the work of graphic designers. While I can execute a layout, I can’t design them, so the look of the site was drawn, so to speak, by someone else, but implemented and coded by me. While programming is a lot like writing, it is nothing like visual design, so I suck at it as badly as I have my entire life. I know just enough about visual art to be seethingly jealous of those good at it. Also there are a few bits of functionality – that spinning carousel thing on the home page – that are free, downloaded website plugins that I then customized. Writing code means knowing when to steal code. I know when to steal code.

The rest is all me. There are a lot of cool things about it that you can’t see, but the neatest is this: If you troll around, you’ll see a lot of event information. When things are coming up, links to buy tickets, and all of that. That information? It all pulls from our ticketing site, culturaldistrict.org (which I co-developed, and which is now all mine for the foreseeable future) with the power of hot, sticky, Ruby API magic. No one has to enter events a second time into the new site. It just slurps them in and shows them. Considering our old site was The Stinky Pit Of Duplicate Effort, this is a big deal. And I built it. Give me a moment to high five myself.

This means that I can spend the weekend recovering.  Since I have no idea how I come off to people (not kidding. at all.), I’m not sure how much of a basket case I’ve seemed for the past month and a half. If it’s been excruciating, it’s hopefully coming to an end.  If not, cool. No idea how I pretended to keep it together.

Now let’s go down to the pub and grab some drinks, yeah?

You can read Part 1 here.

The first time I saw it, I wasn’t interested.  The cover caught my attention, so I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it over.  Something about the description put me off, though I don’t recall what it was.  I remember thinking, “This could go either way. It’ll probably be pretentious.”  I placed it back on the shelf and moved on.

I came back.  You know how some books just call out to you? How there’s something between the marketing copy and the cover and praising quotes that screams out that this is a book just for you? (Or is that just me?) Speak wanted me to read it. It took me a while to get the message, but before long I was back at the shelf, wondering why I’d put it back the first time. I hadn’t a clue. I took it to the register.

Speak is Laurie Halse Anderson’s first, and best, novel.  It’s not a book I like to describe in any detail, because the plot is so simple that it’s hard not to give the whole thing away in a blurb.  Melinda is starting high school, and something very bad happened over the summer.  She’s been abandoned by her friends, alienated from her family, and can’t find the words to speak about any of it. It’s about how we blame ourselves for terrible things that happened to us, and how shame and fear and loneliness force us into silence.

It’s more than just a great story to me. Speak shifted something in my head and in my heart. There was something so raw and personal in the narrative, something utterly immediate about it all.  In most of the young adult fiction I’d read, there were good characters, but they rarely felt like real teenagers.  I love Vicky from A Ring of Endless Light, but she’s a step detached from the way it felt to be that age.  Most of the really good young adult fiction gives its characters the right problems. They feel the right things. They just don’t feel them the way, or with the intensity, that I want. Speak was the real deal. Speak was being in high school again.

One of the reasons I’d jumped from kids’ books to Stephen King was It. Unlike the books written for my age group, It didn’t screw around. The kids’ heads were a bigger mess even than their lives.  Speak felt the same way. Melinda was real.  Not just the pain and loneliness, but her perspective, her wit, her sense of humor.  No one is a simple reflection of the big bad thing happening at that moment in their lives.  The rest is still in there, laughing and snarking and screaming at everything happening around us.

Speak isn’t the only book to strike so personal a tone, or to do it so successfully. But it was the one I read at the right moment, when I was ready to understand it.  The difference between books we love and books that change us can be found there, in the timing of finding them.  For me, Speak was the first time I really understood what being personal meant in a story. It taught me the line between a novel telling a story and being that story.

When things fell into place for my first novel, it was no surprise that it was the story of a teenager I wanted to tell.  I didn’t, and don’t, consider myself a young adult writer. If you backed me into a corner, I’d say I was a fantasy author first and foremost.  But after Speak, I knew I had to find that tone, to find my way that far inside of a story.  Maybe it was because a young adult novel had opened my eyes, or maybe the most raw and turbulent emotions in memory were of my senior year of high school, but a young adult novel was the only possible choice.

It’s odd to think about how those little choices push us into place.  Without the Coming of Age Literature class, there’s no way I end up in the young adult section of Barnes and Noble to see Speak.  Without Speak, I haven’t a clue what I’d have written, or even if it would have been any good.  A few steps taken out of laziness and intuition, and I find myself, years later, with a young adult novel behind me and a second down the road.

Thank God I didn’t take a class in mid-20th century American depresso-lit, right?

Ten years ago, I would have laughed if you’d told me I’d be writing young adult novels.  I barely read young adult novels when I was a young adult. Other than reading seemingly every single Three Investigators book, A Wrinkle in Time, that Tripod trilogy and a few I’m sure I’ve forgotten, I basically skipped from Mouse and the Motorcycle and Ramona books straight into It and The Stand and every single Anne Rice vampire novel in print. One of my friends in junior high had already jumped to cool, edgy adult books, you see, and peer pressure dragged me along.

It took a misunderstanding to change things.  For someone who hated every English and Literature class he took in high school, filling a humanities requirement feels like signing up to fight Tarmon Gai’don. They’re all different flavors of excruciating pain and humiliation, and the best for which you can hope is that you get to read a good book or two (that they’ll ruin with inane analytical essays) and a final grade that won’t kill your GPA. Scanning the list of available classes, one caught my eye as more interesting than the rest. It must have been because it sounded different. Not another review of 18th century European romanticism or examination of mid-20th century American depresso-lit. The subject? Coming of Age Literature.

Hey, I loved Catcher in the Rye. It would be more stuff like that, right?  Vast swaths of fantasy are basically sword-and-sorcery enhanced coming of age tales. This would be cool!

On the first day of class, I got the reading list. It started with The Hobbit. The excitement stopped there. What the hell was this list of books? Catherine Called Birdie? Hatchet? The Chocolate War? These were frakking kids’ books! I didn’t go to college to read kids’ books! This was an offense, a travesty, an insult to every functional brain cell in my noggin. This. Would. Not. Stand.

But if I change classes, I’d have to do…oh…never mind. You know what? Griping will be way easier than taking a stand.

Things did not start well. I loathed Catherine Called Birdie with every fiber of my being. It was every bit the simpering kiddy crap I was certain this class was passing off as real fiction. The next two were better, but still kids’ books.

Something was happening, despite the parade of insults the professor had marching over my refined taste. I was starting to like the stuff. Maybe it was because, unlike so many literature teachers, she didn’t bristle when I wrote scathing essays about the books. Maybe it was because there was a real passion for what she had us reading, a passion that couldn’t be there simply to mask laziness or bad taste. She cared about this stuff.  It took a while, but I started to get why. The books got better, my indignation faded, and I started looking forward to the next book.

That class? It changed my life. I did my final project on Madeleine L’Engle. I read every one of her Kairos books, not like they were an assignment, but like a ravenous fan that couldn’t stop. These weren’t books for children. They were books about growing up.  Sure, like every genre, there’s a pile of pandering garbage, but this wasn’t a lesser genre. God, I had been treating it the way people treated Science Fiction and Fantasy. I was an elitist jerk. And I was wrong.

It depresses me that I can’t remember the name of that professor. She was incredible, and she conned me into see things her way by letting me tell her how silly and wrong her way was without failing me for my effort. I left the class no longer seeing young adult books as something less than other books. They were just stories from a different perspective, that’s all. The name of the class hadn’t been a lie, or a misdirection. Calling it young adult fiction minimized it. This was coming of age literature.

I still wasn’t going to write the stuff, though. That came later, after a book called Speak.

Part 2 is available here.

To everyone who read, commented on, or passed along word of the first two chapters of Broken Magic (which you can find here and here): Thank you. I don’t break out the bold lightly. I’m an italics sort of guy. The bold is for you, to show you how much it meant for you to stop by and participate.  It really and truly helped, and I can’t thank you enough. High fives and cookies for everyone.

Where does that leave me and my novel? Let’s start with the novel.

I have two choices with Broken Magic. I can send it out to more publishers and agents and see where that leads. Broken Magic is, and always has been, a bit of a hard sell. Especially for a first novel, it doesn’t have the kind of showy plot features that make it easy to pitch. It was the book I wanted to write, and I love it dearly, but it’s not doing my any favors with publishers. The other option is that I self-publish. I’ve been circling that idea for the past 6 months, and while I’m not opposed, the idea of marketing my novel makes me want to lie down and sleep. I’m a terrible marketer, and if I go the self-publishing route, I need to stop being terrible. I have absolutely no idea how.

I’m planning on doing both. Or, at least, continuing to query while I look into doing it myself. I hope to have another query or two out this weekend, and while I wait, I’m going to look into my options for self-publishing. Advice on the latter would be appreciated.  The important thing is this: Getting it out in front of people has made dealing with Broken Magic urgent again. A mixture of hopelessness and despair had been sapping my will, and I was starting to hide from it. This has shaken something loose. I’m going to take advantage of it. Like, now.  I’ll keep you all in the loop.

What about me?

Here’s something I never expected to happen after I finished my first novel, especially before it even got published: It really, really psyched me out. Though I’ve written a fair bit since, I’ve made no meaningful progress on a second novel.  Not for lack of trying, either. There are two projects between which I’ve bounced. All I’ve got to show for them are piles of notes. Why? While Broken Magic is by and large a quiet, low key thing, it has a special distinction. It was the first time I wrote something that sounded like me, through and through.

You spend the first million words you write chasing your own voice. You can hear it when you think a story through, but the words that end up on paper, for a very long time, are a corruption.  The voice you hear in your head rings clear as a tuning fork; you know when what’s on paper is off key.  Broken Magic, whatever its other merits or flaws, was when everything fell into harmony, and when I finally saw myself in all the threads of the tapestry.

It scared the ever loving hell out of me. Because what if I couldn’t do that again?

Broken Magic is closer to the bone than I usually write, which probably made it easier to make friends with my prose and get it to play along.  There’s been a voice ever since, asking if the only reason I got this one right was because I’d cannibalized so many of my own neuroses in its construction. Broken Magic isn’t a story about me, but it’s a much less obfuscated look into my head than I normally write. What if that’s the only reason it worked? What if I can’t find myself again when a story requires more smoke and mirrors?

I know that’s nonsense. But it wormed its way in and only time and distance dug it out. For the first time since Broken Magic, the heartbeat of that next novel is loud and clear, and hasn’t slipped away regardless of my other work and writing. That means it’s time to write again. Not something I intend to throw away (and, yes, in the last year I’ve written two novellas I never intended to publish; don’t ask), but something that matters.

That’s where I am, and that’s where Broken Magic is. If I haven’t said it enough, let me say it one more time. Thank you, so much, for the support. I didn’t expect this all to help. It did. Thank you.