Suzy Spencer's blog

Today’s the day after Christmas. It’s a day I should be writing my year-end blog where I tell you what wonderful things happened in 2011 and how joyous and grateful I am. And for those of you who haven’t been keeping up with me through Twitter or Facebook (since I haven’t been very good at blogging this year), wonderful things have happened in 2011.

Magician Kent Cummins sawing me in half for the Bess Whitehead Scholarship Fund.

• In May, I finally finished the sex book.
• In July, my publisher, Berkley Books, informally accepted the sex book.
• In August, I accepted an offer to write a screenplay about a topic that takes me back to my undergraduate studies and dreams.
• In September, I got to spend a night in San Francisco reconnecting with dear friends. I got to start research for the screenplay and had some fabulous experiences doing it. And I got to get sawed in half as a fundraiser for the Bess Whitehead Scholarship Fund.
• In October, Berkley Books gave me a firm publication date for the sex book — October 2012. And Red Line Films/Dick Clark Productions interviewed me about my true crime book Wasted for the new Investigation Discovery Channel TV show Deadly Sins, which will premiere in Spring 2012.
• In December, I got a dog from Cocker Spaniel Rescue of Austin/San Antonio. Jacob and I are very simpatico — he likes to spend his time eating and sleeping in front of the TV. And Berkley Books gave me the official title of the sex book – Secret Sex Lives: A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality.

On set for interview with Investigation Discovery's "Deadly Sins."

Then there are the stories on the news: A Christmas-celebrating family in Grapevine, Texas, shot to death by a presumed family member dressed in a Santa suit, who then killed himself for a total of seven dead. A Connecticut mother lost her three daughters and mother and father – who was the Saks Fifth Avenue Santa Claus – in a house fire as the mother screamed, “My whole life is in there!” Oh, God, that breaks my heart.

I have my family, my health, a dog who loves me, the knowledge that I’ll have a roof over my head and food in my fridge no matter what (thanks to my family), and a book coming out and a screenplay that’s due. I should be screaming from my roof, THANK YOU, JESUS! And part of me does say thank You over and over again. But as I told my sister, the worst thing about depression is that it won’t go away even when you know you have no reason to be depressed, even though you know you are blessed far beyond what you deserve. She understood. Not everyone does. That makes me grieve, and it makes me angry.

Jacob, my "therapy" dog.

This weekend I asked a man, who lost his job last spring and is still unemployed, how his stepdaughter is. I knew she’d had problems, even though even the broadest of details have been kept secret. I surmised the problems had to do with legal issues due to a mental illness. The man’s reply was an angrily whispered, “She’s a sixteen-year-old Casey Anthony.” Oh, God, his comment makes me cry for his stepdaughter. How does this child have a chance with so little support from her own family? I say that because, as far as I know, she hasn’t had a baby and hasn’t been accused of murdering anyone. And either before or after my conversation with the stepfather – my memory is fuzzy because of the stress and shock of the day and learning what I learned – I overheard (though not from him) that the girl had attempted suicide, had been in a coma, and was apparently still in the hospital recovering.

I want to give this man a break and say his ignorance and insensitivity about mental illness are due to the stress of his unemployment, lack of job prospects, and money troubles, and the child’s suicide attempt is beyond what he can bear. I did say to him that I’ve been concerned that the child suffers from schizophrenia. She is of the age when the symptoms begin to appear. Or maybe she’s bipolar. I don’t know. I’m not a psychiatrist. All I know is that mental illness is not a choice. It’s not a desire. It’s not a call for attention. It’s not being melodramatic. It’s not a matter of bucking up or not praying enough. It is a disorder. A brain disorder. An illness.

Think of it this way, if this child had leukemia, there is no way that she purposely f***ed up her white blood cells to cause leukemia, and there’s nothing she could do to reorder the structure of her white blood cells to make herself healthy. She’d need great doctors and great medicine to have any chance of regaining her health. And everyone knows that and accepts that.

Similarly, a child with a brain disorder did not purposely scramble her brain so that she could be “crazy,” get attention, or cause problems for the family. And she can’t re-order her brain, as if it were a Rubik’s cube that could be twisted and turned until it’s miraculously put back in order. Like a leukemia child, she needs great doctors and great medicine to have any chance of regaining her healthy. Sadly, not everyone knows that or accepts that.

After all, people don’t talk about what a f***up a child with leukemia is or how bad she is or how she’s ruining the lives of everyone in the family. They certainly don’t compare her to Casey Anthony. And they don’t wish her away. Rather, they contact Make-A-Wish Foundation, take her to Disneyland and celebrate her. They pray for her and try to get her the best treatment for possible. Let me repeat: the child with leukemia did not cause or create her disorder of the blood, just as that man’s stepdaughter did not cause or create her disorder of the brain.

So, if there’s one positive thing I can do at the close of 2011, I think that one thing is to attempt to create some understanding about mental illness. Understanding doesn’t just make it easier on the one who is suffering from the brain disease — it increases the chances of recovering mental health. Perhaps equally important, understanding makes it easier on the friends and family members, too. After all, isn’t being empathetic, patient, and caring a heck of a lot easier than being angry and hateful?

Now I’m going to try to practice what I preach – get over my anger at her stepfather and be understanding toward him. After all, a lot of wonderful things happened in 2011, and I have a book coming out in 2012.

Click on the below for additional reading and information regarding brain disorders:

National Alliance on Mental Illness

Breaking Point by Suzy Spencer

Austin American-Statesman columnist Andrea Ball on being bipolar

And posts from my blog:

Update on Tracey Tarlton from The Fortune Hunter

Strong Legs, Fragile Brain: A Guest Post by Diana Kern

A Dark Cloud of Desperation: A Joint Post with D.H. Gregory

As you may have noticed, I’ve been more than lax in my blog posts since last spring.  At first I was too busy with the sex book to think about blogging.  Then, after I turned in the manuscript on May 1, I was just plain all “wrote out.”  The book took everything I had to give, emotionally and physically.  More than three months later, I’m still all “wrote out.”  I can barely tap out a word.  But I feel I owe you a few updates.

Fused glass artwork: Kim Brill; Photo: Larry Brill

For those who don’t follow me on Facebook or Twitter, I have some very good news.  On July 15, I learned that my publisher, Berkley Books, has accepted my sex book manuscript and set a tentative publication date of October 2012.  The next 12-plus months will be spent editing, vetting, copy editing, and proofing the manuscript, as well as deciding on a name for the book, designing its cover, and creating marketing, sales and publicity plans.

That sex book acceptance news should have sent me into ecstasy.  Instead, it sent me into panic.  I ate 10 pounds of McDonald’s hot fudge sundaes as I worried and fretted about what neighbors, friends (particularly my Christian friends from high school), co-workers, future employers and, most of all, my family – specifically my mother – would think of me after reading the book.  After an afternoon trip to the emergency room, I begged my mother not to read the book.  She promised she wouldn’t, and I relaxed … some.

Through all of this, indeed, through the past 13 years of writing four true crime books and one sex book, my emotional rock has been my dear Mr. Cool.  In truth, he’s not “my” dear Mr. Cool.  He is my mother’s beautiful, sweet, blond cocker spaniel.  He is the one who calmed me as I wrote about five dead babies and nurtured me as I sank into depression afterwards.  In fact, he has soothed me through many depressions.  And when I panicked over the sex book, all I had to do was think of Mr. Cool because I knew he would be the one who would love me and treat me the same no matter what I revealed in the book.  But on the night of August 9^th, after a brief illness, Mr. Cool moved to puppy heaven.

Earlier in the day, he’d collapsed in my mother’s front yard.  For the next hour and a half, I lay with him in the St. Augustine grass, whispering that I loved him and that it was okay to walk toward the light.  I think he knows how much I hate death because he did not walk toward the light until I told him goodbye, left my mother’s home, and left him with those who are better at death than I – my mother and sister.

But I left with one big regret.  That regret is that I cut Mr. Cool from the sex book.

Please don’t go to any kinky thoughts when you ask why in the world I included my mother’s dog in a book about sex.  It’s a perfectly clean explanation:  Just as Mr. Cool comforted me through the stress and confusion of writing about real life murder, he comforted me through the stress and confusion of writing about real life sex.

More specifically, my boundaries as a journalist constantly blurred as my sex sources turned to me for reassurance and yearned for friendship.  And sometimes I too longed for their friendship, as they often came to my emotional rescue, such as the time they supported me after my mother fell and broke her hip.  Thus, I became confused over my role in their lives and their roles in my life.  And I equally became confused over the role of sex in my life.

So, as a salute to Mr. Cool, I share a (deleted) moment from the sex book.  In it, I’m juggling comforting my sex sources with taking care of my mother.

* * *

I shut down my computer and drove the 40 minutes to my mother’s house.  In the darkness of two and three A.M., as I listened to her obnoxious bird clock tweet the wee hours, I rolled over on her couch and petted her blond cocker spaniel.  Mr. Cool is his name because he’s always calm, cool, and collected and because he’s always known who he is – one cool dog.  Throughout the night, his collar jingle jangling as he walked, Mr. Cool made the rounds from my mother’s bedroom to the couch and back and forth again to check on us both.  And when I lay on my right side, my fingers lightly on Mr. Cool’s head, touching his comfortingly soft hair, I could see into my mother’s bedroom and know for myself that she was safe and hadn’t fallen again.

… This night, as I lay on my mother’s plaid couch, the same couch I’d lain on when that workman had lightly stroked my legs and I hadn’t known how to stop him, part of me wanted desperately to be back in my own house where I was free to think about sex.  And part of me didn’t want to leave my mother.  Unlike Mr. Cool, I didn’t know who I was.

* * *

Today, I know who I am.  I’m an all “wrote out” writer who is blessed to be comforted by the memory of a dog, the friendship of some sex sources, and a mother who loves me enough not to read my book. 

Friday night, around nine or 10 o’clock, my cell phone rang.  I swallowed the bite of peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had in my mouth and answered the phone.

The caller was a friend I hadn’t seen or talked to in months.  We’ve both been too busy.  He asked what I’ve been doing.  “Working,” I said, pacing the kitchen in my gym clothes.

“What else?”

“Nothing.”  I walked over to my briefcase, back to my dinner, over to the sink, back to my briefcase, my dinner, the sink and back.

He asked again what else I’d been doing.

I could tell then that he didn’t understand a writer’s life, particularly a writer under deadline.  I understand that.  One cannot comprehend a writer’s life unless one is a writer, or at least lives with one.  After all, the cliché fantasy is that of a glorious life spent drinking in exotic locales while trading tales of adventure with glamorous people, perhaps making strange and exciting love with those same glamorous people, and then, in the wee hours of the morning, falling into brilliant words that are slammed perfectly onto the page and then fly off the bookstore shelves.

Such wonderful fiction. This is this writer’s life – under deadline:

Yes, I wake whenever I want.  Depending on the stress in my mind, that’s usually somewhere between 5 AM and 8 AM.  I roll over in bed and read my Bible and Al-Anon daily devotional.  If my mind isn’t reeling too much with the worries of work, I lie there and pray for a while.  Yes, I realize that when I’m worried is exactly when I should pray more.

I get up, turn on NPR on an old clock radio, because I’ve purposely disconnected my TV cable and Internet so that I won’t be distracted from work, and jump in the shower.  After I dress, I grab my briefcase, which is really a 30-year-old black leather bag holding my laptop, yesterday’s work for rewrite, today’s work for rewrite, notes on both, notes on characters, basically a ream of paper, a thumb drive or two with the various versions of my book on them, my cell phone, wallet … well, you get the picture.  I throw these pounds over my shoulder and slump out the door.

While slurping down a ridiculously unhealthy breakfast, I check and answer email and start work – editing, cutting, rewriting.  (Yes, I’m writing this while eating breakfast.)  I work until my laptop battery flashes that it’s almost dead.  I pack up, throw my bag over my shoulder, and schlep back home.

There, I fire up both my PC and laptop and get down to the serious work of the day – editing, cutting, rewriting, double-checking facts and timelines, trying to figure out how to make this manuscript riveting and the best book I’ve ever written in my life.  After all, this will be my income for the next three to 10 years.

Around 2 PM, or maybe it’s 4 PM, it all depends on my concentration, I grab a horribly unhealthy lunch.  If I grab it at home, I pace and think about the book while eating.  If I go out, I work while eating.  Usually, somewhere between 4 and 6 PM, my mother phones and asks if I’d like some dinner.  I bark, “I’m working!” even though I know she’s only trying to help.  Around 7 or 7:30 PM, I shut down my computers and pack up my laptop.  My back is burning from being hunched over the keyboards and I’m too tired to think about cooking.  That’s when I often phone my mother and meekly ask, “Are there any leftovers?”

Sometimes I go over to her house, eat fried meat and potatoes, check email and come home and crash.  Other times, I know I need exercise to alleviate the back pain and stress, so I go to the gym, maybe work out 20 minutes, maybe an hour, then crash on one of the gym couches and check email.  That’s what happened Friday night when my friend called.  I’d just gotten home from the gym, had spread a half of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sliced half of a banana, and I was pacing around the kitchen, thinking about my book, eating, and stressing.

Yes, I could have told my friend that I did take an hour and a half off one evening to see another friend I hadn’t seen in more than a month.  And, yes, I did take two hours off one Saturday to go see my 11-year-old cousin’s football game.  (He threw one touchdown pass, while playing offense.  He intercepted a pass and ran it in for a touchdown, while playing defense.)  But now I’ve even taken my cousin’s football games off my calendar because that one game blew my concentration for the next two days.

After I hung up from my friend, I finished my sandwich, sank into a bath, climbed into bed, read, and fell into another fitful night of sleep – waking with leg and foot cramps from too much sitting, too little exercise, too much fried food, too few vegetables, and thinking about my book.

The reason writers disappear, cocoon, hibernate, hole up, become anti-social, whatever you want to call it, when we’re writing is because we’ve got to live in the world we’re writing about.  Call it method writing, I guess.  Anything that takes us out of that world – like a football game – destroys our ability to work.  At least it does me.*

So that’s why my friend – any of my friends – won’t see me until I meet my May 2 deadline.  But after May 2, I’ll be ready to live that glorious fantasy life of writers drinking in exotic locales while trading tales of adventure with glamorous people, and then, in the wee hours of the morning, falling into brilliant words that are slammed perfectly onto the page and fly off the bookstore shelves.

And I wouldn’t trade any of it for any other career.  I love what I do.

* Admittedly, mothers who write are better at juggling than I.  They have to be.  And I don’t know how they do it.  I admire them.

In 2001, when I first started covering the story of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children, I read every article on the case I could find.  I thought the most touching writing came from a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.  I contacted her to tell her how beautiful and emotional her work was.  If I recall correctly, I told her she should be the one writing the Yates book, not me.  Her writing was so moving that I knew she was a much more talented writer than I.  She begged off saying she didn’t like covering the story.  If I remember correctly, she said she preferred covering war.

More than nine years later, after watching the last mine rescuer in Chile safely return to the surface (yes, I mean mine rescuer, not rescued miner), I found myself combing through unread emails, including my daily update from Publishers Lunch.  ”We posted another 35 new deals yesterday at Publisher’s Marketplace,” I read, “among them: Journalist Jonathan Franklin’s inside story of the trapped Chilean miners…”

At that, a bit of sadness washed over me.  I was sad because we were already commercializing such a rare, beautiful victory.  Couldn’t we just savor it in our memories for a while before committing it to commercialism?  Of course, I have no right to feel that way; I was part of the commercialization of Andrea Yates and her five murdered children.  And maybe Jonathan Franklin is like me.  Maybe he didn’t pursue the story.  Maybe, like me, he was asked to write it.

I know I had qualms about writing the Andrea Yates book.  I remember discussing it with my family.  They told me, “Someone’s going to write it.  Why not you?  You’ll handle it with more sensitivity.”  I hope I handled it with sensitivity.

I drew myself away from Mr. Franklin and continued reading Publishers Lunch.  ”National Book Award Nominees Avoid the Predictable…”  I barely glanced at the fiction nominees and focused instead on the nonfiction list, briefly wondering if, briefly dreaming that, my sex book could gain such esteem.  I knocked that embarrassing thought out of my head and kept reading: “Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco) … Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday)”.

I stopped.  Megan K. Stack.  That name sounded so familiar.  Then, I thought I knew why.  I Googled Megan to make sure.  Yes, she was that great LA Times reporter who had covered Andrea Yates with such respectful, touching power.  I’d had no idea how young Megan was when she was covering that case — 25 years old.   At that, I was even more in awe of her talent.  I then went to Amazon to read the opening sentences of her National Book Award nominated book.

* * *

This memory from childhood is still there: the voices of the adults bounce fretfully, eternally in rooms that have since been sold or abandoned.  Beirut, they said, never Lebanon.  John was in Beirut.  All meaning fit into those words.  His barracks had been blown up, but he had survived.

John the drinker, the smoker, the apprentice in three-card monte and hanger-out with New York street cons; his face cut by light, arms angled in salt air, his imprint lingers still in corners and amber edges.  John was my father’s cousin, my godfather’s brother, our two Irish Catholic families braided together in city blocks, in the Bronx, by marriage and the crosshatches of godfathering.  He was adrift between the generations of our family, too old to be a cousin and too young to be an uncle, but still unmistakably one of us, with us in churches and cramped living rooms and summers on the beach.  In my earliest memories I waddle in his retreating shadow, arms in the air and begging, “Johnny! Uppy!”  And then this skinny street hustler sweeps me into the air to swing on the rim of centrifugal force until the salty, sunny world swims.

* * *

As I first read Megan’s words, I thought, oh, my, she still has that ability to paint power with a few, simple words.  As I typed Megan’s words, I remembered my days working in New York City.  I was a researcher for Fortune magazine, just a bit younger than Megan when she’d covered Andrea Yates.  Often, I spent my lunch hour touring the Museum of Modern Art.  There I watched struggling artists – the same age as me – sitting on uncomfortable black benches, sketching the Masters, trying to learn from the best. 

More than 30 years later, I too am trying to do that – learn from the best.  I’m reading memoir after memoir, including Megan’s, trying to figure out what they’re doing right and I’m doing wrong.  And the reason I’m doing that is embarrassing.  My sex memoir, the one that I previously bragged was the best book I’ve ever written, has been returned to me for rewrite, again. 

It’s painfully shaming to admit that a book I’ve been working on since December 2004 isn’t of publishable quality.  How good of an author can I be if I – a professional writer since 1976, an author of four books including one that has New York Times best-seller on the cover – can’t get a manuscript accepted after more than six years of trying to perfect it?

Yes, admitting that is embarrassing.  In fact, I started writing this “embarrassing” blog post in September, continued trying to write it in October, pushed it aside and tried to forget it forever in November because a friend had said I shouldn’t publicly admit my rejection.  I understood why – people want to be associated with winners, not losers.

But I decided to write the post and publish it anyway because, well, I’m tired of hearing, “I can’t wait to read your sex book this summer,” with me replying, “It won’t be out then.”  And I’m tired of hearing, “When’s your sex book coming out?” and me mumbling, “God knows when, if ever.”  But most of all, I’m writing this because I need to for me.  I can’t seem to move forward on the rewrite until I confess my sin of … failing. 

I know I have some terrific friends and fans out there who will say, “Suzy, don’t say that.  You haven’t failed.  You’re not a loser.”  I appreciate that kindness and support.  I really do.  And I have a small fantasy that by admitting this publicly that there will be at least one struggling person out there who will be inspired to keep working toward achieving their …well, whatever they’re pursuing, because I know that I will keep writing and rewriting this manuscript until I get it right.

I also know that one of the reasons I’m having such trouble with this memoir is because – like the Yates book – I have qualms about writing it.  But as I tried to handle the Andrea Yates case with sensitivity, I will try to handle myself with sensitivity too.  And God willing, I’ll succeed.

I think about mental health and mental illness a lot.  Serious depression permeates my personal life; serious mental illness permeates my professional life: Andrea Yates, the psychotic mother in my book Breaking Point; Tracey Tarlton, the bipolar book store manager in my book The Fortune Hunter. 

While researching The Fortune Hunter, specifically while sitting in the courtroom every day covering the trial of Celeste Beard, I met a young mother and reporter named Andrea Ball.  I was taken with Ms. Ball because she was hard-working, dedicated, so much more talented than I as both a reporter and writer, funny as hell, and proud of her son.  And being proud of one’s children seemed in short supply in that courtroom.  (Read the book, if you want to understand what I mean.) 

Andrea Ball

I was especially impressed by Ms. Ball when I learned that crime reporting wasn’t her usual beat – philanthropy was.  She has a talent for both.  So on January 15, 2011, when she posted on Facebook her Austin American-Statesman story headlined “Jared Loughner and the stigma and the reality of mental illness,” I was expecting to read more of her great work – heartfelt, accurate, sensitive, insightful, and as my former literary agent would say, “beautifully rendered.”  What I wasn’t expecting was a confession.

“Well, I have bipolar disorder, and I’m not coming to kill you, I promise,” Ms. Ball wrote.

I was thrilled to read her words – not because I’m happy she’s bipolar – but because just a few weeks before a friend had angered me when he’d suggested that I should stop hanging out with another friend because – he’d decided – she’s bipolar.  She’s not, as far as I know.  But I don’t give a flying F whether she is or isn’t, because she’s my friend, and one doesn’t abandon a friend just because she may have a mental disease, just as one doesn’t abandon a friend because she has breast cancer or high cholesterol and heart disease.  Instead, one stands by that friend and loves her through treatment.

The day that that man made his comment, I’d wanted to scream at him, “There are doctors and lawyers and judges who are bipolar and function perfectly well in society.”  But then I decided maybe lawyers weren’t such a good example and I kept quiet.  Then Ms. Ball published her confession, and I had proof that intelligent, hard-working, talented people can be bipolar and functioning members of society who make our world a better place.  (If you don’t believe me, just go to the Austin American-Statesman website and read some of Ms. Ball’s other stories.)

So I posted Ms. Ball’s article on Facebook.  I loved the majority of the responses made by my FB friends.  For the most part, they were kind and showed an understanding of mental disease.  But there was one comment that especially touched my heart.

“Andrea [Ball] hits home with me,” wrote D.H. Gregory.  “I am treated for bipolar and chronic depression.  Out of the closet.  And my stepson is a peaceful, innocent, incurable schizophrenic, who would harm only himself.  The headlines make me flinch, knowing the ignorance of mental illness.”

Yes, the headlines make me flinch, but so do my friends – and family members – who refuse to acknowledge mental illness, particularly that it is real and not simply a matter of “bucking up,” “mind over matter,” or “thinking positive thoughts” … AND who refuse to admit the fact that – like cancer – it can be treated.  But just like cancer, sometimes the proper treatments are difficult to determine and sometimes the results are better than others. 

With that in mind, perhaps it’s ironic that I asked D.H. Gregory to write a guest blog post on his battle with depression.  D.H. is also battling cancer of the brain.  Following are his words on mental illness, words he wrote saddened days after learning that a mutual friend of ours own battle with cancer isn’t going as well as we all prayed.

While still a youngster, depression snuck up on me like a ghost in the night…stealing away whatever blithe boyhood spirit I once had.  And it did usually come at night, upstairs in my top bunk.  A wave of crippling dread would wash over me like a blanket that was too warm.  I couldn’t talk about it, because I didn’t understand what to say.

I did not know about clinical depression back then.  I didn’t know what the hell it was, or the cause of it.  Sure, I had my moments of elation and despair, but not in equal measure.  The unseen flow of sadness was becoming increasingly troublesome. 

My folks would invariably ask me, “What’s wrong?  Why are you so down?”  I didn’t know.  I looked in the mirror through melancholy eyes and didn’t know what I saw.  “Why?”  Stop asking, Dad!

Christ, yeah, I went to church, and even Sunday-damn-School, and sat there drowning in…what? 

Dad, I don’t know!

I sat there in dread of the day, and of the next day.  What young boy sits in Sunday School, not in boredom, but in muted agony?

Funny thing was that my dad was always down too.  He was generally depressed as all hell.  I found out 40 years later that my problem back then, and  now, may be hereditary.

I could have inherited his endorphins or lack of dopamine or serotonin or whatever the hell else.  Re-uptake inhibitors?  Chemical stuff.

By college I was full-fledged down in the dumps.  Unless I was drinking or writing.  Most always both together.  Okay, always together.  When a buzz wore off…thud…back down the dark abyss.  A sort of chronic grief wrapped around my neck like a wool scarf in the heat of summer.  Sure…I could get stoked up over some Bikini Beach Volleyball, but after it was over … then what?  The inevitable descent back into gloom.  Afraid of the next day.

Then when I was about 35 I told my family doctor about it.  He asked my dad the same questions.   “I don’t really know, Doc.”  He said there was a drug called Zoloft that might help.  Sure, I said.  I would have agreed to arsenic.  That drug may have helped.  How could one really know?  I was still depressed, but maybe it was helping and I would have been more depressed if I didn’t take it.  Or maybe it wasn’t helping at all.  Like vitamins, how do you know if a vitamin is working?  I sure don’t.  A V-8 sure tastes good.  But how do I really know what it is doing for me?  Anyone who knows that for sure is a smarter man than I am.  I hear that antidepressants help.  Maybe they do.

But now, years and blues later, I take three medicines for depression … unpredictable permutations piggy-backed together to get me through a day.  That must be working – I am still here.  I have been a dart board of experimentation for many years.  Shrinks talk to me and take notes like they are typing out rapid-fire Morse code.  You know, pinpointing biological and social causes of my ills and afflictions.

Depression can be… well, it can be controlled somewhat.   I often get stuck under a pitiless cloud of desperation.  But help is out there.  So I am told.

After D. H. wrote that piece, he sent it to his best friend.  The friend wrote back and apologized for not recognizing D.H.’s problem, even though they’d hung out constantly, as D.H. said, since the sixth grade. 

So I guess the point I’m trying to make is don’t be afraid and run away if someone you know has a mental illness.  Treat them with the same tender love and compassion you would if they had cancer  … ‘cause maybe like D.H. they’re trying to heal from both. 

D.H. Gregory

D.H. Gregory holds a Master’s degree in English and journalism from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.  He was a newspaper columnist and film critic for eight years, followed by 25 years in the college bookstore business.  A native of Rockford, Illinois, he is now retired in Austin, Texas, with his wife Theresa, and he proudly wears the moniker of brain cancer survivor. 

D.H. also wants to write a memoir, and I think we should encourage him to do that.

* * *

For additional information on mental illness, contact the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the Austin Child Guidance Center, and read Andrea Ball’s articles “A thank-you to readers” and “Mental health centers face big cuts in state budget.”

Recently, I was reading my friend Ruth Pennebaker’s blog post titled “Is This How It’s Going to be From Now On?” The post is about the many losses she and her friends have suffered in 2010.  By losses, she means deaths.

I’m not one to use words like “loss” or “passed.”  I say “died” or “kicked the bucket.”  To me, “lost” and “passed” seem too namby-pamby dream-like for what’s really happening – a damn hard, mule kick in the heart that leaves a gaping hole.  Yeah, sure, the hole eventually scars over and the soul-shattering pain slowly dulls.  But completely heal?  I don’t think so.

My father’s been dead for 50 years and though my mother, my sister and I have – in so many ways – joyfully moved on, there is that … loss.  Okay, I used that word.  But I didn’t lose my daddy like we lost him in the amusement park of life, because that’s what I always think about when someone says something like, “Oh, we lost our father this Christmas.”  That makes me want to scream, “Well, if he’s lost, go find him!  Say what he really is.  Dead.  Kicked the bucket.  Gone forever.  Sayonara, sonny.  Adios, amigo.  Goodbye.”

It’s not that simple, though.

This week I drove four and a half hours to my hometown, spent two and a half hours having lunch with friends I’ve known since kindergarten and haven’t seen for at least eight years, and drove four and a half hours back to my current home.  The reason I did that is because one of those dear friends “lost” her father a few weeks ago, I couldn’t make it to the funeral, she’s feeling that mule kick to the heart, and like Ruth and her friends, my friend is wondering “Is this how it’s going to be from now on?”

It depends.

I’ve had a lot of experience with death.  My dad dropping dead when I was five.  My grandfather kicking the bucket just before Christmas when I was in the seventh grade.  Our family friend Mark Wayne Conner dying of asphyxiation over spring break when he was a freshman in college and I was in the eighth grade.  Our family friend Rachel Perry shooting and killing her husband over summer vacation when I was in high school.  My friends Steve Brashear, Victor Stua, and Mike Lawrence dying in a water skiing accident, a house fire, and a car wreck between high school graduation and college graduation.  My friend and Sunday school teacher Lynn Grey murdered in a bank robbery not long after I graduated from college.  Or maybe that happened while I was in college.  It all runs together.  I could go on and on.

In fact, back in the days when I lived in Los Angeles, I remember regularly calling my mother before flying home for Christmas and saying, “Do I need to bring funeral clothes?” because it always seemed that someone we were close to died at Christmas time.

It’s a strange thing about Christmas … how death and birth seem to be so tightly twined in the season.  Why is it that we choose to celebrate the birth of the Christ child in the dead of winter?  Is it because we desperately need that hope in this desolate time of the year?*

One Christmas, I got off the plane, walked down the jetway to my mother, and in baggage claim she said, “Rick died today.”

Rick was the son of my mother’s business partner, a wonderful woman named Lavonia.  Our families were entwined like Christmas and death.  Six months before, Rick had gone into a coma.  Publicly, everyone said he was in a diabetic coma.  I believed he was in a cocaine-induced coma.  Once spring fell into summer, summer turned into fall, and fall edged into winter, his sister pulled the plug on him.  There was no other choice.

After the funeral, I stomped to our car, slammed the door, and yelled at my mother, “I’m so angry!”  I was furious that no one had tried to stop Rick from his addiction.  Instead, we’d enabled it.  I screamed, “I’m too angry to go to the cemetery.”  We went home.

A few years later, Lavonia’s daughter died from cirrhosis.

By then, my cousin Kathleen had kicked the bucket at age 32 from breast cancer.  Her mother and grandmother were still suffering from that unhealed kick to the heart.  So I looked at my mother’s business partner, who leaned against a doorframe in her home, and she smiled at me.

I said, “How do you do it?”

“What?” she said.

Both of her children were dead.  Her husband was dead.  Even her businesses were dead.  She and my mother had closed them after my cousin had died.  And my mother now lived four and half hours from her, not four and a half blocks.  So to some degree, their 30-plus years of daily friendship was dead, too.  “Keep smiling,” I said.

“Life’s for the living,” she answered.  And she wasn’t in denial about her life, her kids, their deaths, her … losses.  Life was simply for the living.

Not long after, my mother and I stood by her bedside.  This time, Lavonia was in the hospital.  She’d just had her leg amputated due to diabetes, and she started singing, “Tip toe through the tulips … and through the tulips with me …” 

A week or so ago, my friend whose father just died said to me, “No one copes well with death.”  I wanted to say to her, “Yes, some do.”  Lavonia. But it’s too early to say that to her.  She’s still in the “Is it always going to be like this?” stage.

But for me, when the sadness of Christmastime hits, when the thoughts of those we “lost” cause our scarred hearts to hurt, I think of Lavonia, and in my head I sing, “Tip toe through the tulips with me.  Knee deep in flowers we’ll stray.  We’ll keep the showers away.  And if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight, will you pardon me.  Come tip toe through the tulips with me.”  And I smile.  I loved Lavonia.  I miss her.  I weep for her at this moment because she was a second mom to me and she taught me that life is for the living.

I hope my friend can come to understand that, and I hope that someday she, Ruth, and Ruth’s friends will join me in a gentle chorus of “Tip toe through the tulips …  In the garden, in the moonlight …”

*Yes, I’m ignoring the fact that it’s summer in the southern hemisphere.

Lunching with Celeste

Today, Kingwood, Texas, friend and fan Courtney Little posted the above photo on her Facebook page with the words, “Suzy, today I’m lunching with Celeste.  Haha!  I’m a little scared …”  Celeste is the killer in my true crime book The Fortune Hunter.  So, yes, if Courtney truly were having lunch with Celeste, she should be scared.  Celeste is frightening, but she’s also very entertaining. 

When I interviewed Celeste in prison, I didn’t want to leave because she was so much fun.  I know that sounds weird – interviewing a killer in prison and having fun.  But Celeste is funny.  And only by sitting down with her and spending time with her did I understand how and why she could talk a friend into killing her husband for her … and afterwards convince other friends that she was completely innocent.  In my opinion, Celeste wraps her lies in just enough truth – shocking, humorous confessions of truths that most people would want to keep hidden – that everything else she says, including her lies, feels honest.

Strangely enough, The Fortune Hunter is the only true crime book I ever really wanted to write.  I fell into my first true crime book, Wasted.  To a lesser degree, I fell into my second book, Wages of Sin.  (I may explain that in a later post.)  I only did the third book, Breaking Point, because I was asked to write it.  But The Fortune Hunter was different.  I’d wanted to write it ever since I first heard about the crime in 1999. 

I wanted to write about it because the person who pulled the trigger was Tracey Tarlton, a manager at BookPeople, the largest independent bookstore in Texas.  BookPeople had been very good to me in promoting Wasted.  I don’t think Tracey remembers this, but I once contacted her and asked her to make sure another writer who was appearing at BookPeople got a copy of Wasted.  Tracey promised me she’d get it to her, and I appreciated that. 

But I also wanted to write about the case because Celeste and Tracey had met at a mental health facility and mental health issues have always fascinated me.  (I would have been a psychology major if a rat lab hadn’t been a requirement at Baylor.  I’m deathly afraid of rodents).

I pitched the story to my then agent, who pitched it to my then editor.  My editor made an offer on the book, but my agent encouraged me to turn it down.  So, I did. 

Years later, I was having lunch with an old friend from summer camp.  When I say an old friend, I mean we’d first met when we were about eight years old and approximately 40 years later we were still getting together and laughing and talking.  This day, we were scarfing down Mexican food at Hula Hut on Lake Austin, when my friend announced that she and another camp friend had decided what book I should write next – “Tracey Tarlton,” she said.

“What?” I screamed.  I didn’t know how my friend even knew about the case.  For years, she’d been living overseas.  But then she explained that Tracey was the Tracey Tarlton at our summer camp.  In full disclosure, Tracey and I never really knew each other at camp.  I just knew who she was, and, obviously, we had many of the same friends.  In fact, I eventually learned that my friend had been a mentor to Tracey. 

With that, I had to write the book.  It was my story.  I planned on it being the last true crime book I ever wrote, and I planned on it being the best true crime book I ever wrote. 

Well, half came true – it is the last true crime book I ever plan on writing.  But according to many, it is the worst true crime book I ever wrote, and it’s not my story.  The reasons for that are many, and I don’t feel like confessing them right now.  Let’s just say I take the blame.  But the good news is that the events surrounding that book solidified my decision to never write true crime again.  

* * *

Of course, even when one makes a decision that is right for her, it doesn’t mean it’s a decision without mourning.  Today one of those proverbial waves of sadness washed over me when I learned what I had long suspected – The Fortune Hunter has gone out of print.  I knew this day was coming.  In December of 2009, I emailed my editor and asked if it was out of print – too many people had told me they couldn’t find the book.  My editor had someone else email me that the book was still available.

In early September 2010, there was a bit of renewed interest in the book.  Once again, people emailed me that they couldn’t find it and wanted a copy.  Again, I figured it was out of print.  But some people searched, begged, and found a copy.  Courtney Little’s mother, Connie, was one of them.  Connie – a friend from high school – read the book and passed it on to Courtney, which resulted in Courtney’s Facebook post of today.

Courtney doesn’t know how perfect her note and timing were.  It helped with that wash of sadness.  So did her mother’s Facebook comment:  “You know what I like about Celeste?  She makes me look like a really GOOD mother.” 

I know, I know, I shouldn’t be sad.  I’m on to a new, exciting challenge writing a memoir.  And though I say I’m finished with true crime, Wages of Sin is returning to print next month.  Still, I also know that it’s time to move on.  But before I do, I want to say thank you.  Thank you, Courtney, for making me smile.  Thank you, Connie, for making me laugh.  And thank you to all my true crime friends.  You have changed my life.  You have made it better.  I hope you’ll consider following me into my new world of writing. 

In the meantime, let me introduce you to Stephanie Martin, the killer in Wages of Sin, the woman I refer to as the Southern Baptist killer stripper.  She was reared Southern Baptist, became a stripper, and then a killer.  I wonder what Courtney will say about having lunch with Stephanie.

Stephanie Martin, WAGES OF SIN

I’ve been staring at this page for an hour or two.  I want to fill it with perfect words, but the only words that come to my mind are steak and martini.  If I think harder, I hear the hoarse laughter and cough of a woman who has smoked for too many years, and yet I smile.  And in my mind, I see a short, plump woman in a yellow sweater with hair that almost matches, a cigarette in her dainty, tanned, bejeweled fingers, and I smile again.  Then I remember the tears she shed as we talked, and how – thanks to our mutual, warped senses of humor – those tears would often morph into that husky laugh, before falling into her smoker’s cough.  I am thinking of my friend Becky Beard.  Becky died yesterday of an apparent heart attack. 

The first time I met Becky, she, her younger brother Paul, and Paul’s wife Kim and I shared dinner at Ray’s Steakhouse in Austin.  They were in town for the trial of their father’s killer, which I was covering for ABC News. The gist of the story is that after Becky’s mother died, her father Steven, a lonely millionaire TV executive, married a young waitress from Austin Country Club.  Though Steve gave the waitress every material thing she wanted, she couldn’t wait to get her hands on each and every penny he had.  So she romanced a lonely lesbian named Tracey Tarlton and convinced Tracey to kill Steve for her.  If you recognize the story it’s because it became my book The Fortune Hunter. 

But I don’t want to dwell on The Fortune Hunter right now.  I don’t want anyone to think that I’m using Becky’s death to promote my book.  So please, don’t even consider buying it right now.  I’m only telling you this to explain how and why Becky and I met. 

As the murder trial progressed, Paul and Kim had to return to work in Virginia, leaving Becky, who lived in Dallas, alone to bear the stress and grief of the trial in Austin.  That’s what prompted Becky and me to start sharing our courthouse lunches and dinners at Ray’s.  In fact, we ate at least one meal together almost every day of the two-month long trial. 

The evenings after especially stressful days, we’d rush to Ray’s, where we’d plop down at the bar.  Becky would order a Ketel One vodka martini, and I’d order a Bombay Sapphire gin martini.  I hate to admit that I introduced her to martinis, but I love to admit that ABC producer Bert Rudman introduced her to Ketel vodka.  Anyway, I digress.  Becky and I both would order filets mignons.  She’d emphasize that hers had to be seared on both sides, which is the way her father liked them cooked.  And she’d order a baked potato, while I would stick with the restaurant’s garlic mashed potatoes. 

We’d sit for hours, eating and drinking, often sipping a second martini.  Sometimes we’d joke with the bartender.  Other times we’d eavesdrop on patrons talking about the trial.  Most times we’d huddle in secret conversation.  Sometimes Becky would rage about the day’s events.  Other times she’d cry.  But always we ended up cracking jokes and laughing.  Her laugh was more like a snort.  To think about it makes me smile.

I know a good reporter is supposed to keep her emotional distance from her sources.  But I failed that miserably with that story.  I grew to love Becky and think of her as a dear friend.  Though I was a bit of an emotional support for her during the trial, she definitely was my emotional support.  Strangely enough, reporters need that during murder trials.

Becky and I stayed in touch for years.  Often she’d phoned me late at night, while sitting in a noisy bar and drinking martinis.  Over the shouts and laughter of drunken patrons, we’d once again cry and laugh together.  She’d send me emails suggesting story ideas, including a clever and funny novel based on our favorite prosecutor, Allison Wetzel.  She’d tell me about her trips to Destin, Florida, and her attendance at pro golf tournaments.  Like her mother, Becky was an avid golfer.  And once her father’s estate was settled, I remember Becky’s excitement over buying a gold-toned Ford Thunderbird convertible.   It was an indulgence for a woman who often worked two jobs.  Becky was a math teacher who moonlighted as a bookkeeper.  I always admired her for her work ethic.

I admired her too for her golden heart.  Becky rarely resented the fact that her father adopted his killer’s teenaged daughters and made those teens equal heirs to his riches.  In fact, Becky expressed gratitude that her father had provided her with sisters; for decades she’d been the reliable middle child between two sons.  At one point, she even included the killer’s daughters in her own will.  Becky was a far, far better and more loving person than I could ever be.

Yesterday, her sister-in-law Kim announced Becky’s passing on Facebook.  In actuality, Kim only said her sister-in-law had passed.  Knowing that Kim has at least two sisters-in-law, I privately emailed her and asked if she was referring to Becky.  All the while, I assured myself that she wasn’t.  But I knew Becky drank too much, smoked too much, and was heavy.  And to my devastation, Kim wrote back that, yes, she was referring to Becky.

I feel indulgent in saying to my “devastation.”  I’m not a relative like Kim.  I hadn’t spoken to Becky in a long while.  I had distanced from her as I had gotten more into my sex book research … and as I had kept firm in my promise to myself that The Fortune Hunter would be my last true crime book.  But I’d thought about Becky last month as I’d traveled to Dallas.  And I think about her today.  She died 11 years and 18 days after her father had been shot while he slept.  I wonder if the month of October had been too emotionally tough for that kind and gracious heart of hers. 

Kim told me to go have a steak and martini in honor of Becky.  I don’t know if I can do that tonight.  My eyes are filled with tears.  Becky was just so damned good to me.  Instead, four hours after I started searching for the perfect words to salute my beautifully imperfect friend, I’m going to go to the gym.  Maybe trying to keep my heart healthy is the best way I can honor her.  But I tell you one thing for darned sure, if Ray’s Steakhouse were still open,* which it isn’t, I’d say screw the gym and I’d go have a steak, seared on both sides, and a martini for Becky.  After all, Ray’s has seen us shed tears before. 

Becky, here’s to you. 

* Strangely enough, Ray LeMay, the owner of Ray’s Steakhouse, died just this past summer.

The day after I emailed my sex book to my editor in New York, I had so much I wanted to blog about.  Ideas and words kept popping into my head.  But I wouldn’t let myself write them because I felt I needed to take the day off.  The previous four months had been long, hard, and stressful – editing and rewriting my own work under a tight deadline, along with editing and coaching others, teaching, prepping for and going to China, family responsibilities, and perhaps most stressful of all, the fear and anxiety of revealing my soul in a memoir that I dream hundreds of thousands of people will read.

The second day after turning in my sex memoir, the blog ideas and words continued popping into my brain.  I still had a hunger to write them down.  Instead, I returned to my sex book and did a week’s worth of rewrite and re-turned in the book, a “whopping” five pages shorter than the original, but with an ending I hope is stronger and more satisfying to the reader.  (And please pardon that ridiculous pun.  It’s one I wouldn’t have used if a better word had popped into my brain).

Just like the week before when I’d first turned in the sex book, that hunger and desire to blog returned.  Still I wouldn’t let myself write.  I knew I needed rest, and I had freelance assignments that had been waiting for two months.  I had to dive into them.  (Thank you, kind clients, for waiting for me.)

By the time I turned in those assignments, complete and utter physical, mental and emotional exhaustion overwhelmed me.  I think that happens to most writers once we finish a book.  After the exhaustion, or perhaps more accurately, in the midst of the exhaustion, depression sets in as we grieve over our projects and the loss of our characters.  Whether one is writing nonfiction or fiction our characters are real to us.  They are our friends and constant companions.  When they are no longer there for us on a daily basis, we mourn their passing.  Without them, we are a bit lost.

That’s where I am right now.  I’m a bit lost.  That sounds silly when I have another freelance project to do, one that will take months, when I know what I want my next two books to be and I need to get cracking on them, and when I have another secret project that I want to do and must be done now if it is to happen at all.

But instead of working and accomplishing, I sit at my computer and stare at TMZ and Facebook as if someone is going to post something that will forever alter my future for the positive if I don’t read that post within five seconds of it going online.  I then tell myself that I’m not writing because I’ve first got to clean my desk, my office, and my house.  I need to clear out the old and get organized before I can start the new.  Instead, I walk around in circles, fuming at the mess that won’t walk out on its own like cartoon ants exiting a picnic.

So I exit, stand on the edge of my back porch, stare at my Hill Country view, and remind myself how lucky and blessed I am.  I look at my yard, notice how it needs mowing and weeding and how it’s turning brown under the relentless heat.  I think about how desperately we need rain, and I walk back inside, to my bedroom, and collapse into my bed, even though it’s only three or four in the afternoon.  I do that because I’ve got nothing left inside me to give.

As I lie there in the cool quiet, I realize that is exactly what I need – cool, quiet. I thank God for the moment of peace.  It’s been so long since my mind has been able to rest.  I know I’m repeating myself, but I am so frigging tired; I am lost.

I want to be lost on the beach where my mind can wash in and out with the waves.  I want to taste the salt sea water on my lips.  And I want to lie in a king-sized bed with white Egyptian cotton sheets, a friend’s arms wrapped around me as a way to say it’s going to be okay, while I weep for my characters lost.  But I know that’s not going to happen.  I won’t let it because I know that in truth I have no reason to weep.  I’ve just written the best book of my life.  And maybe that’s the real reason I want to weep.  Victory can bring us to tears.

* * *

Addendum:  As some of you may have noticed, I wrote my sex memoir.  Yes, this book isn’t just a look at Americans’ alternative sex practices, as originally planned.  At my editor’s request, it’s been turned into a memoir.  That changed has made this not only the best book I’ve ever written, but the most difficult, honest , and self-revealing.  So the tears I won’t allow myself to weep aren’t just tears of grief and victory.  They’re tears of fear too as I worry about how my family, friends, fans, and freelance employers will react.

But strangely enough, as I typed the words “victory can bring us to tears,” I looked out my window.  And this is what I saw. 

I’m hoping this rainbow is a sign that all is going to be okay with my sex memoir.

Who would have ever thought that researching and writing a book on sex in America would result in a life-changing business trip to China?  Certainly, I wouldn’t have, but it did.  Alas, I don’t have time to tell you about it right now because the trip put me severely behind in my sex book rewrite.  In fact, it’s nearly 10 o’clock at night and I haven’t met today’s minimum page count, which is imperative to do because my August 1 deadline is non-negotiable.  So, I need to get back to the book. 

In fact, since I am so behind in rewrite, my planned one-month blogging hiatus is going to have to change to a two-month hiatus. 

But I will tell you this tidbit of info because it explains the title of this blog post and the photo below:

I met some businessmen from Hong Kong who have a company that grows, processes, and sells organic ginger.  They joked that my trip was going to result in a novel about a reporter who meets and falls in love with a ginger farmer.  Then they drove our little entourage  into the mountainous farmlands of China where we walked through their leased caves storing their fresh ginger.  As we emerged from a dark, chilly, spider-infested cave into the Chinese sunlight, I saw a tall, lean Chinaman in a navy blue shirt and wearing a coolie hat.  He was the owner of the ginger caves and a farmer, too.  I wanted a picture of him, so I had my traveling companion stand where it looked like I was taking a picture of my friend, but was really photographing the farmer.  But when the farmer grinned and scooted into frame, I realized he wanted his photo taken. 

Unfortunately, just like now, I was in rush.  We had another cave to tour.  So I drew down my camera, and we hiked through the farmer’s fields of peanuts, walked through another cave, and hiked back down the mountain.  As we walked, I told my companion that I wanted him to take a picture of me with the farmer.  But when we returned, the farmer wasn’t there … at least not at first.  Then I saw him literally trotting toward us.  I smiled, and I laughed.  He’d changed from his navy blue shirt into a white shirt that matched mine.  We stood next to each other, and my friend took our picture.  When I saw it, I laughed again.  Notice that we aren’t simply wearing the same color of v-neck, knit shirt, we’re tilting our heads the exact same way, too.  Maybe the reporter and ginger farmer are meant to be … or are at least meant to be another book. 

The Reporter and the Ginger Farmer

Dear Friends,

I barely got this blog going (meaning posting regularly), when I got hit with sex book deadline, teaching, freelance work, and business travel.  Forgive me, but I’m going to take a blogging hiatus for the month of June.  I know my limits.  I know I’m not a great multi-tasker.  And I know the quality of my writing here has suffered due to my inability to multi-task.  In 2005, I swore to myself that I’d work toward publishing only the best that I can write, and that includes this blog.  So … I hope to be back by Fourth of July weekend.  And when I do return, I should have some interesting news and posts. 

Have a great June!  And I’ll see you next month.

Suzy

For those of you who know I’m writing a book about sex, get your minds out of the gutter.  When I say I’m going to bed with my work, that’s not what I mean.

For those of you who regularly read my blog, you’ll know exactly what I mean.  I’m climbing into bed with my research.  Well, that doesn’t sound right either.

What I mean is that I’m so bogged down in my work that I’m finishing late at night and need to go to sleep thinking about my work so that I wake up the next day and know exactly where to start.  That means I take my notes to bed with me and read them just before going to sleep.  That’s what I did in college – go to sleep with my notes, study in my dreams, and wake up the next day to take the tests.  Then again, I didn’t do so great in undergrad.  Let’s hope it works better now.  I’m behind schedule on the rewrite.

Today, I re-edited for the gazillionith time the pages covering May 13, 2005.  That day, I met with two sex sources who have commented here, did a photo shoot during which the photographer told me about a dildo bar in San Francisco, and went to a seminar on the psychology of bondage.  I was exhausted at the end of the day … just like I am now.

Let’s hope while I dream I can figure out … zzzzzzzzzz.

I saw something the other day that caused mixed emotions in me.  It was a hardback book, spread-eagle in the middle of the parkway, its pages flapping in the wind as cars drove over it.  Now the cars weren’t smashing it with their tires, thank God.  They were straddling it.  (Yes, I know, there are lots of sex puns there.  They’re not intended.)

My mixed emotions came from the fact that I was so thrilled that someone was actually buying books, perhaps even reading them.  That was juxtaposed with an equal amount of sadness that the book was being treated so poorly.  I wanted to rush into traffic and grab it and protect it like a child.  But I was rushing to Mickey D’s for a sausage biscuit.*

Besides, maybe the owner of the book would miss it and come looking for it.  Then again, maybe the owner didn’t give a hoot about the book and had tossed it in a rage.  A wife furious at what her husband was reading?  A student fed-up with school?  Maybe furious at a specific teacher?  Or did it accidentally fly out of the bed of a pick-up truck and that student wants that book?  Will he get in trouble for his carelessness?  Does he need the information it contains to get into college?   Does he love that book?  Maybe it holds a love sonnet he wanted to copy for his girlfriend – or words of inspiration for his baseball team. 

For struggling writers, this is where stories and books come from … from seeing something that triggers questions and daring to find the answers to those questions.  

Yes, part of that is the proverbial “then what” or “what happens next” question.  I used to use that when I talked to elementary students about writing.  A kid’s dreaming of a Slurpee, I’d tell them.  He goes to the 7-Eleven with a dollar in his pocket, but just as he gets to the 7-Eleven, that dollar blows out of his hand, and he’s really, really thirsty.  Then what?  From that, the kids would take off on an adventure, with me constantly asking, “Then what?”  And it’d usually end when the teacher and I would get freaked when the kids would have the monsters or bad guys show up.

But that doesn’t just work in fiction; it works in nonfiction too.  Suzy, an uptight, white Southern Baptist chick, starts researching and investigating Americans’ alternative sex practices.  Then what happens … to her?

Now I’m dreaming of the book I could write if I’d picked up the book I saw spread-eagle in the middle of the parkway and searched for the story behind it.  Maybe it’s the book owner’s story?  Maybe it’s the story of the book’s author?

But I’ll never know because I went to Mickey D’s and stood at the counter with mixed emotions.  They were serving breakfast and lunch.  I didn’t know what to choose.  I hate breakfast; I love lunch.  But if I had lunch now, which is 1000 calories, I couldn’t have lunch later today.  But if I had breakfast, ugh, that’d be 500 calories, and I could still have lunch later today.  Then what?

Mixed emotions. 

* So what happened that Suzy ended up at Mickey D’s instead of Whataburger?  My neighborhood Whataburger has gotten so filthy that I’m not going as often.  And Suzy really wants her daily Whataburger.  What happens next?

I’ve got the shakes.  On top of that, I just knocked over a glass of water and a large cup of Diet Coke, both spilling onto my cream-colored carpet.  The carpet is only two years old.  I don’t want it stained, so I just spent 30 minutes or so standing on towels trying to soak up the mess.  It’s now 1:32 PM and I still haven’t started work.  I thought I was starting work when I knocked over the glasses.  Now I’m writing this instead of working on my sex book. 

Last Friday night, I broke or jammed a toe.  Last night, as I sat in bed with two computers, working hard on everything but the sex book, I accidentally slammed the injured toe into one of the computers. Man, that hurt.  I have a tendency to break toes and sprain ankles when I’m under deadline.  As you can imagine, I’ve broken a lot of toes over the years.

I know that my behavior — the spilling of drinks, the breaking of toes, the shakes — sounds like I’ve been experiencing boozy nights.  No.  Though I have been indulging in unhealthy behavior lately, it’s not alcohol.  It’s cookies and cake and pizza and skipped workouts.  This too is typical of me when I’m under deadline.  I get to the point of saying screw everything until I get this book finished, though I guess since I’m writing a sex book I need to clarify that I don’t mean screw in the sexual sense.

Sex book.  There you have it.  That’s why I have the shakes.  I’m terrified of this book.  Of what I’ll expose.  Of what my editor wants me to expose.  What I need to expose to make this book great.

No, I’m not sure that’s true.  I’m not terrified of the exposure.  I’m terrified of the repercussions of the exposure.  Of what my friends and family will think of me.  How they’ll judge me.  And … well, I could tell you more, but I’m not comfortable exposing all that right now and it might distract from my point, which by now you’re probably wondering what it is.

My point is that this is normal modus operandi for a writer.  And I’m making this point for all the writers out there who come to me for coaching, who take classes from me, who come to my book signings to ask for advice, and who seek me out at conferences for a few words of encouragement.

My words of advice and encouragement are don’t be afraid of the fear or the panic.  It’s part of writing.  Now go (figuratively) jam a few toes, spill a few drinks, and get the shakes.

By the way, I wrote this a while back, so my toe is doing better.   I haven’t spilled anything in a few days.  I’ve eaten fish two nights in a row.  I don’t have a slice of pizza or cake or a cookie in the house.  And I’ve been making it to the gym four days a week.  You can imagine how my rewrite is going.  Well, okay, I haven’t had the shakes either but I have wakened in panic.  Maybe there’s hope!

Puttanesca

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and words are important to me, powerful to me.  Just a few moments ago, I heard a poem on the radio, Puttanesca by Michael Heffernan.  The words that caught my ears were simple — “a street walker’s sweat.” 

Words like that stun me with their beauty that comes from their vividness.  They encourage me.  They make me want to do better, be better.  Not just a better writer, but a better person … someone who is worthy of such poetry.

When I was a student at Baylor University, I remember learning the meaning of a specific New Testament Bible verse, which unfortunately I can’t find right now, though it’s in something like Galatians or Ephesians.  But that verse, in its original language, said that we are God’s poetry. 

I think about that verse and I think about how hard I work on my words for a book, how I write them, read them, rewrite them, rework them, leave them alone, polish them, and try to perfect them over and over again, each time with love, passion, and desire.  And if I do that for my words, and if we’re God’s poetry, oh, my gosh, how He works, polishes, and loves us. 

What I’m trying to say is that it’s the words that get to me.  Specifically, it’s the name-calling words that get to me.

I hear it a lot in myself.  I hear it a lot on TV.  When I do, I wonder what kind of example we’re setting for our children  — that it’s okay to spew hate-filled words just for the sake venting, for the chance to rage and get on TV, to start and have a career as a pundit or reality TV star.  I hear it even more on radio.  I remember I heard it on the radio the morning after the Fort Hood shooting, as I was driving down I-35, returning to Killeen and the hospital where the injured and dying had been taken. 

Strangely enough, I didn’t hear it from the doctors and nurses who frantically worked to save lives.  I saw exhausted smiles of pride over the lives they had saved.  And I didn’t hear it from the victims who lived to tell their stories of that horrible day.  I heard gratitude.

But on the radio, from people who were miles from the blood and the death, I heard it.  Perhaps it was understandable.  That’s not the way it came across, though.  It came across as trying to stir up people for ratings and advertising dollars. 

What really gets to me, though, is the every day name-calling.   I’m not talking name-calling against people like Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter.  I’m talking about name-calling that’s screamed and shouted under the guise of  freedom of speech in the name of trying to save our nation from … whichever side they think is wrong and they’re right.  I’m talking name-calling and hate in the name of superiority, name-calling and hate in the name of righteousness, name-calling and hate out of fear. 

Do not fear, for I am with you.  I will bless you …

Genesis 26:24

I read it a lot on newspaper websites, where people can anonymously vent their anger, rage, insanity, and hate.  And I read it a lot on Facebook.  I think that’s where it gets to me the most — reading name-calling from my friends. 

All I know is that it makes me lose respect for those I once admired, just like I lose respect for myself when I do it.  I don’t want to lose respect for them … or for me.  I know they are smart people.  I know I’m smart.  I know they are kind, giving, and gracious people in the majority of their lives.  I’d like to think I’m kind, giving and gracious in the majority of my life.  But, when it comes to politics, we become the very essence of what we’re accusing the other side of being. 

I guess for that very reason I can’t give up.  Nor can I spew back.  After all, I’m God’s poetry — written, read, rewritten, reworked, trying to get perfected. 

*  I wrote this last March and revamped it and rewrote it in May.  I don’t think I ever had any intention of ever posting it.  And maybe I shouldn’t be posting it now because it may be too similar to I Don’t Know Where to Start.  Yet that very blog post, I Don’t Know Where to Start – specifically some of the comments posted here — is what motivated me to go ahead and publish this.  Forgive me if you find it redundant.

I have a thing for clean fingernails.  Usually, mine are clean.  Everyone can see that because I don’t wear nail polish.  Nail polish just isn’t me.

Today, while eating lunch alone, I stared at my fingernails.  There was dirt underneath them.  That upset me.  I’ve noticed dirt under them a lot lately.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been pulling a lot of weeds, which are thick in my backyard.  I have to dig deep to get to their roots.  The dirt they’re in is damp and sticky.  It gets between the ridges of my fingerprints.  It ekes beneath my cuticles.  It sticks under my fingernails.  I scrub.  I scrap.  I scrub and scrap some more, and the dirt refuses to come out.  It makes me mad.

As I sat there staring at my fingernails, I thought about my sex book.  I can’t figure out how to open it.  My editor knows how I should – just the way it’s written right now.  I know that opening’s okay, but I also know it’s not great.  It needs to be great. 

My friend Carol knows exactly how I should open the book.  She’s told me precisely how to do it.  I started a rough draft of her version.  It’s not bad, not bad at all.  But I’m not sure it works for me. 

I have a third version that I’ve written, too.  That version involves my family, which could be misinterpreted to sound a bit kinky.  It’s not at all.  It’s very clean.  But that version made me think about my little guy and his fingernails, which are always filthy.  Then again, what does one expect from a little boy? 

I remember when he was three or four years old.  I gave him a fingernail brush.  I tried to teach him to use it, but when they’re that age it’s hard to explain a fingernail brush in words and mimicked motions only.  I needed to show him with soap and water, and I wasn’t ever around him at bath time. 

When he turned five, his dad and I took him to Mexico so that he could swim with dolphins.  My little guy and I went to the beach; his dad went to play golf.  Before his dad got back, my little guy and I returned to our rooms to get ready for dinner.  I sent him off to the shower, or so I thought.  After I discovered him still covered in salt water and sand, he eventually confessed that he didn’t know how to wash his hair.  I poured out some shampoo, smeared it on his blond head, quickly tried to show him what to do and left him alone.  A bit later he walked into my room, all smiles, all wet, all proud of himself, and with sand still in his hair.  I bragged about what a good job he’d done.

Now that my little guy has a stepmom, I thought she’d make sure he keeps his fingernails clean.  But, they’re still dirty.  I make myself keep quiet about it, though I want to buy him another fingernail brush.  I look down at my fingernails and want to buy me one too. 

Though my editor is content with the opening of my book, she wants me to put more of “me” into the book.  As she says, she wants me to reveal my soul.  I don’t want to do that.  I think about the weeds I’ve been pulling.  They fight me to come out of the ground, just like this book fights me too.  When I finally do manage to yank out the weeds, a ball of damp dirt covers their roots.  It’s that root dirt that sticks to me. 

I look down at my hamburger and French fries.  When there’s just ketchup and mustard under my fingernails, I can wash that out quickly.  But when I’m pulling weeds … well,  I wonder if that’s why most women wear fingernail polish … so that no one can see their root dirt underneath.

My blog generates frequent comments, though they’ve never shown up here.  Most often they’re posted on Facebook.  Sometimes, they arrive in my private email box.  A few days ago, I received what I felt was a powerful response to my Working Through the Struggle post.  That’s the one where I quoted award-winning novelist Joe O’Connell.  The response was so powerful that I asked its author if I could post the comment here.  I was told yes.  So, here it is.

“A few years ago I started an alternative teaching certification program so I could be an English teacher.  My big thing in the classroom was going to be making those kids write something every day.  Writing is that important and students are not being taught the skills necessary to succeed in freshman-level composition classes. And why is this? 

1.  “Name the two school subjects that consistently receive government funding and attention from the media?  Science and mathematics.

2.  “Name two careers that are consistently portrayed in the media as being glamorous?  Scientists and engineers.

3.  “Name two careers that pay the highest salaries to graduating college seniors?  Scientists and engineers.

“Now compare that to the way writers and other creative-types are portrayed.  It’s a little depressing, especially when it is we creative-types that the scientists and engineers approach to create their business ad campaigns or write their press releases.  Are we trying to be subversive?  Counter to the culture?  Our little way of raging against the Man?  Well, maybe we’ve been doing it a little too well. Maybe we need to light the fires under our own ‘hey, ho, look at us creative types go!’ kind of marketing campaign.  A ‘where would the world be without journalists or writers?’ type of campaign?

“Do we minimize our contribution to society because for so long we have been made to feel less-than-intelligent due to our lackluster math skills or inability to understand the human genome?

“Now don’t get me wrong, I love science and the fact that there are people that spend their entire life in the pursuit of science excellence.  I know several scientists and engineers that write extremely well and sell value in a well-turned phrase.  They also contribute significantly to the advancement of humanity and all that jazz.  However, the last time I checked, so did Shakespeare, Alcott, Cather, Shaw, Twain, and thousands of other writers.

“Why then do I have college grad students approach me seeking guidance on what makes a good writer or what makes a good article?  One grad student in particular comes to mind.  He attends a very prestigious*, highly regarded East Coast university, is a native speaker and is a product of American public school system, yet he struggles to write a simple article.  Writing clearly makes him, a math god, uncomfortable.  And you know what?  When the people in power are uncomfortable with doing something, then that something (writing, journalism, etc.) struggles. 

“One last story before I go.  When I was in college, my roommate was an engineering major.  She used to give me hell for wasting my time with an English degree, said that technical writing was a joke.  After graduating, she went to work for one of the major oil and gas exploration companies*, making near six-figures when they started.  Ten years went by before we spoke again. 

“Imagine her astonishment when she learned that I, a lowly technical writer with my joke of a degree, was working offshore doing the type of work that she dreamed of doing while in college.  She now sits in an office all day, every day.  Me?  I do the same, but every once in a while I get to go offshore and see and do some pretty amazing stuff. Stuff that is pretty darn close to ’cutting edge’ as one can get without getting cut.  So, yeah, it goes to show that a liberal arts education makes you a lot more open-minded to trying new things than the one-track mind of an engineer.

“I’ll get off my soapbox now.  You have a great way of hitting all the right buttons.”

By the way, the author of the preceding comment loved Joe’s suggestion of creating a vision board “to get the daydreams flowing.”  For more information on that, click here.

I’d also like to note that I love comments.  Feel free to leave them here, post them on Facebook, or send them to me privately.  But especially feel free to leave them here.

*  I was told the name of the “very prestigious” university and the name of the “major” oil and gas company.  Indeed, it is a “very prestigious” university, and it is a “major” oil and gas company.

Once a month, a group of Austin’s most successful writers, as well as movers and shakers in the publishing business, get together for drinks and conversation.  I rarely go to these events because, well, I live in the boondocks and it’s a long trek into town.  Besides, I’m not a big socializer.  After a day of work, I’d rather hide under the bedcovers.  But last Friday night, the group was supposed to meet at the Blanton Museum for its once a month B scene event.  I immediately RSVPed yes because one of my favorite singers was headlining the event — Suzanna Choffel.

You may have noticed that I said “was supposed to meet.”  That’s because hundreds of people attended the Blanton event, and among those hundreds it was nearly impossible to find the gathering of writers.  So, by myself, I perused the Blanton’s current art exhibit called Desire, which is fascinating.  Well, let me restate that, it’s fascinating to a sex writer.  I was watching a curious short film when Gianna LaMorte, a sales rep for Random House, and Colleen Devine Ellis, a publicist for the University of Texas Press, grabbed me and jokingly accused me of watching porn. 

Laughing, I left the film to join them.  After all, friends in the industry had finally found me.  They glanced at the art while I scootched closer to what appeared to be several yards of white thumbtacks, all in a nice straight line, pressed into a white wall.  On inspection, there was a tiny black and white photograph on each tack head, as though one were looking through a peephole.  Gianna and Colleen too quickly moved on.  Well, too quickly in my opinion, not quickly enough in theirs.  They weren’t enamored with thumbtacks.  In fact, the only exhibit they liked was a sculpture of black roses, which I barely noticed.  But it was near that sculpture that award-winning novelist John Pipkin spotted us.  Like me, John was relieved that he’d finally found someone he knew. 

John Pipkin

John and I began to talk.  I thought Gianna and Colleen were talking with us, too, until I realized they’d dumped me.  That meant John got stuck talking to me for the next three hours.  I love talking to John.  He’s boyishly handsome.  He dresses well.  He wears great glasses.  He has wonderful (complimentary) stories to tell about his editor, the famous Nan Talese, and Nan’s equally famous husband, Gay Talese.  I love hearing these stories because Gay has taught in the University of Southern California’s Master of Professional Writing Program, from which I graduated, and Gay wrote the book Thy Neighbor’s Wife, which was a bit of inspiration for my literary agent’s suggestion for my next book – yes, the forever-talked-about, yet-to-be-published sex book.

But most of all, I love to talk to John because I can get him to blush so easily, especially when sex is mentioned.  Since we were standing in a sex-oriented art exhibit and since I’m writing a book about sex, needless to say, John blushed often.  He is so cute when that rose blush warms his creamy cheeks.  Yes, John, I know I’m embarrassing you.  And if your wife is reading this, she has nothing to worry about.  I’m too old.  You’re too good.  And I only tease those with whom I know I’m completely sexually safe.  But, boy, you’re a charmer.

After maybe an hour, we moved away from the sex exhibit, closer to where Suzanna was going to perform, John stopped blushing, and we seriously talked about writing and the writing process. When John talks about the writing process, I listen.  His first novel, Woodsburner, was named one of the best books of 2009 by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Antonio Express-News.  And – and let me emphasize this and – it won the 2009 First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction.  He received the prize at an awards banquet in New York where he was seated with Nan and Gay Talese.  (Yes, I’m jealous.)

Woodsburner revolves around a 300-acre fire that William David Thoreau accidentally set near Walden Woods and how that fire affects the lives of John’s four main characters – Thoreau; Caleb Dowdy, an opium-addicted, fire and brimstone preacher; Oddmund Hus, a man who lusts over his employer’s wife; and Eliott Calvert, an inept playwright, bookseller, and seller of porn.  (Yep, that’s a lot of sex by an author who blushes so easily at the mention of the topic, and I haven’t even listed all of the sexual references in his book.)

After spending three hours with John, I felt emboldened to ask him for one to three tips for working through the struggle of writing.  Here’s what John suggested:

1.  “The first tip is not terribly original or exciting, but it usually seems to work for me, and in fact I just followed this method earlier today.  When I’m at a loss for where to start writing, I’ll often begin by revising the previous day’s work.  This helps to bring me back into the story and remind me where the characters are.  Often revision produces new ideas to carry me into the next chapter or scene.

 2.  “I’m a big fan of maps and outlines, so whenever I get stuck, I usually return to my outline to see what I originally thought might come next.  Sometimes it’s easier to play with scenes and conflicts in outline form because it allows you to juggle ideas above the fray, rather than struggle with them in the trenches.  And, as horribly as un-sexy as it sounds, I tend to map out ideas in spreadsheets (yeah, I know).  Keeping ideas organized and compartmentalized in a spreadsheet buys me the freedom to wander around from idea to idea when I’m writing.  So when I get stuck, I’ll often just spend a day tinkering with the ideas in a spreadsheet to see where I am and where I’d like to go next.  I also like index cards*, and I currently have a big bulletin board in my home office covered with color-coded index cards.  Sometimes it helps to be able to physically move scenes and chapters around.  (Plus, there’s a certain satisfaction in stabbing frustrating chapters through the heart with a thumbtack.)  So, I usually have two or three different versions of the same story mapped out in different visual formats, and sometimes one format helps me to see the way out better than another.

 3.  “Let the characters do the work.  When I’m not sure where the story will go next, or how a particular conflict or struggle should be resolved, I try to turn to the characters involved to find out how they would react to the situation.  In this way the characters shoulder the burden of moving the plot forward.  This helps in two ways.  First, it ensures that the plot develops out of character’s motivations and actions/reactions.  Second, if I have no idea how a character would react in the scene that I am working on, this is a good sign that my character is under-developed and needs more refining.  Most of the time when I find that my plot is stuck, it isn’t because I don’t have enough ‘twists’ ready at hand, but because I haven’t thought through my characters carefully enough, and as a result, I have no idea what they should do next.  If the characters are full developed, they can help push the plot forward.  (Conversely, if the plot pushes under-developed characters forward, then the characters begin to seem like two-dimensional vehicles for external conflicts and ideas.)”

I want to point out that like Joe O’Connell, the award-winning novelist I quoted in Working Through the Struggle, John is a writer, husband, father, and teacher.  He teaches at both the University of Texas in Austin and Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.  I say that to emphasize that if one says one doesn’t have time to write, one doesn’t really want to write.  John crafted Woodsburner while he was executive director of the Writers’ League of Texas.  Being executive director of the WLT is a hellaciously stressful job requiring morning, noon and night commitment on weekdays and on weekends.  Because of that, John rose at four each morning to boot up his computer and write Woodsburner.  That’s commitment.  And that’s another reason I like John Pipkin.

 *  In December 2009, best-selling mystery and suspense novelist and friend Jeff Abbott blogged about Scrivener, which I gather is an Apple-only computer software program that, in essence, combines John’s spreadsheet concept with his index cards.  Jeff highly recommends Scrivener.  I can’t offer an opinion — I’m a PC.

I never intended for my blog to be solely about writing.  As such, I’ve tried to make sure each post has a universal message so that writers and non-writers alike can glean something from it.  But as I began this post, I knew it was for writers only … until today.  I added a few notes at the end that made me realize this post has something of import to non-writers too, specifically to those who are fed-up with the media.  Maybe the notes will help you understand why there is a decline in the quantity of quality journalism.  And, maybe there’s another little message that will be of benefit too.

I’m not a big fan of those “10 Tips to …” pieces.  To me, they’re simplistic articles that someone tosses out in a half hour in order to make $7 from a website that places no value on writing while desperately needing writers.*  Such sites equate word count with substance. 

On second thought, I think that may be exactly why I don’t like such articles — the so-called publishers are destroying the profession of writing.  When Helen Gurley Brown published a 10 tips to satisfying your man article in Cosmopolitan magazine, well, it may have been written by someone whose credentials we didn’t know, but we knew Ms. Brown was editing those pieces and she had credentials.  She wrote the groundbreaking book Sex and the Single Girl, based on her life as a sexually active single woman in the 1950s and ’60s and at the encouragement of her apparently sexually satisfied husband, the late David Brown.  And, Ms. Brown was paying her writers a decent wage for those ten tips.

Now days publishers say give me 750 (or 1000) words on such and such topic and I want 10 of those pieces in one day and I’ll pay you $7 a piece.**  Certainly that encourages the employment of writers with questionable credentials and expertise in the topic and practically forces them to make up all the information, rather than actually research, report, and verify the information.  It devalues the profession of writing, and it devalues writers, making it nearly impossible to be a full-time, professional writer.  Worse, it makes doubtful the validity of the information one reads.

All of that is a round about way for me to (1) rant about the state of publishing, journalism, and copywriting and (2) to say that I’m only writing this particular blog piece at the semi-request of one of my clients.  She’s the one I mentioned in Struggling.  Since she was struggling with her writing, I asked her if she wanted me to provide her with some tips to working through the struggle.  Hence, my use of semi-request — I offered, she said yes.

But as I started typing this and writing the part about writers just making up their tips and not doing their research, I had a brainstorm — why don’t I do some research on this topic.  I contacted four friends, all of whom have successful novels on the bookstore shelves right now.  I asked them to provide me with one to three tips on how they work through the writing struggle.  Four said they would.  Two actually came through.  (Interestingly, it was the men who came through for me, not the women.)

This spring, Joe is teaching a novella-in-a-semester class at St. Edward’s University.  It’s based on the NaNo writing concept — whipping out a novel in a month, while not worrying about editing and rewriting.  That way one silences the self-editing demon that can hamper productivity and creativity.  In fact, Joe’s writing with his class.

Joe’s Tips

1.  “One thing we are doing may sound a bit goofy,” Joe emailed me, “but I have them construct a vision board — photos that remind them of characters, places, etc.  We get out the Mod Podge and act like 13-year-old girls in creating something.  The idea is to get the daydreams flowing.  This is very useful at the start of a project and is also something to meditate on while writing.”

I’m going to interrupt here and interject that this works equally well in nonfiction.  For my true crime books, I paste on a poster board photographs of the “characters” from the book, pictures from their childhoods, their homes, their families, and their friends.  I also paste on photographs of the crime scenes and evidence.  I’ll stare at these poster boards for hours, noticing the tiniest details and looking into my characters eyes, begging them to tell me something, and usually they do. 

2.  “If (and when) I get caught in the middle,” Joe says, “I try to spend some time plotting out the rest of the book.  I write a 4- to 8-page loose synopsis of the story.  I usually don’t write this until I get stuck, but this semester I’m having students do it early so they can speed through that sloppy first draft.”

 Of course, Suzy’s got to throw in her two-cents too.  Since we’re in the midst of contest season — in fact, the Writers’ League of Texas manuscript contest deadline is February 24, 2010 — and often a one-page synopsis is required with a contest entry, I suggest to my clients that they graph five major plot points in their book and then write the synopsis based on those points. 

By plot points, I mean the inciting incident that kicks off the book, i.e. the event that throws the lead character’s life into chaos; at least two other events that spin the character’s life out of control, again, just when he/she thinks life is about to get on track; and the resolution, which will show how the problem created in the beginning of the book (or subsequent problems) is solved and how the character has changed over the course of the book.  Plop those incidents down on a graph, write a few sentences describing each, as well as giving a bit of character description, and you’ve got yourself a rockin’ one-page synopsis.

 3.  For Joe’s last tip, he says, “Artificial deadlines work.  That’s why I’m writing along with my class!  That’s also the ‘gift’ of the course for them.”

I partially agree with Joe.  For me, that artificial deadline has to be outside myself.  If I tell myself I have to write five pages a day, I won’t do that unless I know my book deadline is three months away and the only way I’m going to meet that deadline is if I write five pages a day. 

Knowing I’m that way, I knew I never would finish a book on my own.  And that’s exactly why I got my Master in Professional Writing degree.  To graduate, I had to complete a book.  So, in reality (and that’s an intended oxymoron to artificial), I completely agree with Joe’s tip that artificial deadlines work because my MPW forced me to finish a novel, just like his class is forcing Joe and his students to finish a novella. 

Similarly, my client has her “artificial deadline” of the Writers’ League contest.  And I’ve got to tell you, she’s making that deadline.  After reading Struggling, she sent me a bare-your-soul piece of writing that got her past the struggle and a few days later she sent me some new pages.  Those pages are filled with passion and they rock!  I’ve also got to tell you that she had to go through a time-consuming, gut-wrenching process in order to write such passionate, quality words.  What I’m back to saying is that you’re not going to get great writing at 50, 400-word articles written in one day. 

That almost sounds like I’m contradicting Joe and his novella-in-a-semester.  No, I’m not.  Absolutely not … because you have to get something on the page to begin the writing process.  The difference between publishers that pay $7 an article and Joe and my client is those publishers will publish anything – whether it’s factual or not, whether it’s good or not – and Joe and my client will go through a long, slow, tedious process of rewrite and more rewrite and often painful soul-searching until they know that their truth is written in their words and those words are crafted and polished as beautifully as possible.

And maybe that’s the universal message in this post – beauty comes in slow, tedious process and often, painful soul-searching.

My next blog post will offer three tips on coping with the struggle from award-winning novelist John Pipkin.

 *  In 2007, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times stating that the publisher of Pasadena Now, a Pasadena, California publication, was outsourcing reportage of the Pasadena City Council meetings to writers in India.  Yes, that’s India that’s on the continent of Asia, not India, Texas.

These writers in India watched a video feed of the Pasadena, California, meetings and wrote their news stories based on the video feed.  They missed any and all important happenings that took place off-camera and any opportunity to ask follow-up questions or questions of clarification.  Admittedly, they made mistakes in their reporting but dismissed such concerns because, also admittedly, they are not journalists.  The pay for their work was $7.50 for each 1000-word piece … or, as the publisher said to Maureen Dowd for the New York Times, “I pay per piece, just the way it is in the garment business.”

 **  I just read a CraigsList writing gig ad seeking someone to write 50 articles, at a minimum of 400 words per article, for a total pay of $100.  That’s $2 per article or .005-cents per word.  In 1966, the year after Helen Gurley Brown became editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, she paid freelance writers a minimum of 60-cents a word.  Cosmo articles generally run from 1000 to 1800 words.  So let’s look at this again – 2010, .005-cents a word v. 1966, 60-cents a word.  2010, $2/article v. 1966 $600/article.  Is there any doubt why the quality of journalism has declined?

Over the past few days, I’ve heard from a friend struggling with juggling work, motherhood, marriage, and graduate school and a client struggling with her writing.  I understand.  I struggle too. 

Right now I’m struggling to write this because I’m sitting in Whataburger.  Let me back up.  For years, I had a set writing routine.  I’d wake up, check my email, shower, check email again, get dressed, check email again, and walk out the door to Whataburger — hence, the Whataburger cup on the home page of my website. 

I’d order a number one meal (Whataburger, fries, and soda), fill up my cup with ice and Diet Coke, sit down at one of my three favorite tables (next to the door or windows), pull out a hard copy of my previous day’s writing, and start editing.  By doing that, by the time I left the WB, I knew exactly where I needed to began writing, what I wanted to write, and how I wanted to start it.  And, and this and is important, I thought about that opening all the way home so that all I had do to when I got home was flip on the computer and start writing. 

Other times, I’d take my laptop to Whataburger and start writing there, sometimes getting so lost in my work that I’d stay for hours.  I’d “wake up” to realize I’d written through an entire Whataburger shift change.  I loved that.  I loved that the Whataburger employees found my work and me intriguing enough that they’d let me sit for hours and leave me alone.

But as some of you know, I moved, which meant a switch in Whataburger’s.  While my new WB is filled with great employees, I’ve never felt comfortable working here.  Only one employee seems curious about my work, and that’s because he wants me to edit his school papers for him, which I would do if he’d ever remember to bring them to me.  Plus, this store is too small to let me take up a table for hours.  And the clientele is different.  Musicians and homeless men frequented my old Whataburger.  Retired corporate executives and blue-collar workers fill this Whataburger.  Some people would consider that an improvement.  I don’t.  They don’t feed my creative juices.

I remember sitting in my old Whataburger when Jennifer Gale walked in, her brown hair flowing over the shoulders of her apple red Christmas sweatshirt.  For those of you who don’t know Austin, Jennifer was a transgendered homeless woman who frequently ran for mayor.  She was a sweetheart.  I can say that from personal experience because as she walked out the door one day, she stopped, turned around, came over to me, and with a big, beautiful smile on her face told me how much she loved my eyeglasses and that she hoped I had a wonderful day.

Jennifer Gale

Such kindnesses don’t happen at my current Whataburger.

And, indeed, Jennifer made my day wonderful.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t feel the emotional support at my current Whataburger that I did at my old one.  And I’m sure I’m projecting myself on my friend and my client when I say that often we find ourselves struggling when we feel like we’re not getting the emotional support we need. 

I know that’s happened to me over the past few years as I’ve struggled with my sex book.  People who once supported it turned against it.  One person even told me that the book is going to destroy my career and … well, I don’t want to say what else she said.  But perhaps worst of all, the person I depended on to be my biggest, loudest-cheering champion gave me such harsh critique that I lost my self-confidence.  Initially, the harsh critique was done in the name of making me a better writer.  At first, that’s what it felt like – hard critique to make me better.  But over the years it seemed to turn into cruel, unnecessary digs intended to make me doubt myself.  And that’s what it did.  Like the cliché acid, it ate away at my self-confidence.  The scars run deep and red. 

I’ve thought about that a lot over the past hours … ever since I got the email from my client … saying her writing wasn’t going well … that her work (in essence, since I’ve been coaching her) is missing its former elegance, that it seems forced and clunky. 

She’s right.  And I know the reason why.  In the name of making her a better writer, I froze her with my harsh critique. 

“Stand up and shake,” I wrote her back.  “Literally.  Just stand up and shake me off.  Then go read my blog about writer’s terror.  Don’t think or worry about me.  Just write.  Just write for yourself … for your soul … like nobody’s listening.”

That’s what I said last night.  Today, all I’ve been thinking about is my mentor Ben Masselink.  Ben was my favorite instructor in the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing Program.  All Ben ever told me was go, go, go, go, go, you can do this.  You’re almost there.  Go, go, go, go, go, go … though Ben usually said it with a ton of typos as he pecked out the words on one of his black Underwood typewriters. 

So, to my client, I want to say I’m very sorry that I’ve made you doubt your talent. Truly, I have been hard on you because I do believe in you and do believe that you are talented.  In fact, you might be the most innately talented writer I coach.  I’ve been harsh on you because I thought you were strong enough to handle the critique and because I wanted to prepare you for the harshness of this industry.  I still believe you are strong enough to handle the critique, but I failed to remember that we all need a Ben Masselink in our lives.  So, girl, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go.  You’re almost there.  You can do it.  I believe in you.  Go, go, go, go, go, go.

And to my friend, I believe in you too.  I know it’s hard.  I wish I were there to help you juggle.  But I know you can do this.  Go, go, go, go, go.  Or, as Ben told me, “YOURE GOING TO DO IT!!!!”

No, you ARE doing it.

USC classmate, friend, and novelist, Mitchell Sam Rossi, me, and our beloved mentor, Ben Masselink

In my previous post, I mentioned that I have a tendency to start writing something, get halfway through it, take a break, and then never get back to finishing it.  Today, I went to my blog folder and discovered a piece titled “Writer’s Terror.”  I looked at it’s date — September 22, 2009.  As per my modus operandi, I’d gotten halfway through it and then lost my way.  

Just an hour or two before I made that discovery, Karl Duvall, the kind gentleman who owns the gym I go to, posted on Facebook that today he struggled to run his nine miles.  It was 33 degrees and for the first four miles he ran against a hard mental wall.  Then he started thinking about a question I’d asked him:  “How does one push oneself when training alone?” 

For the next two plus miles, he said, he thought about how to answer me.  And answer me, he did, comparing his runner’s wall to writer’s block.  Karl said to think about how I’d gotten through other struggles in my life because “somewhere deep inside we all have something that keeps us fighting through our struggles” — the huge ones like death and divorce, as well as what Karl called “the little huge ones like finishing a book, finishing a workout/run, losing weight and so many more things.”

“We have to step back,” he said, “reevaluate our goals, why we’re doing something and how to accomplish it.  Remember your Why? and it helps to reach it.  Also most importantly, remember those that can help you do it.  Think of the cheers and the pat on the back.  The size smaller jeans you want to fit in or the paycheck you’ll get.  When it’s gym related then ask for the kick in the butt* that we can/will give you.”

So,  four months after I started it, I try to finish my “Writer’s Terror” blog post.  I hope it — along with Karl’s words — encourages you.

Some people suffer writer’s block.  I suffer writer’s terror.  That’s when I’m so terrified of being judged or so terrified of repeating past mistakes, so terrified that I can’t live up to that talent that I know I have but fear I’ve lost, that I squander the day checking email and Facebook and researching other possible book and story ideas.  In other words, I never get around to writing.  Then I waste the night praying for God’s help and mercy in finding my talent again and praying for the discipline to sit down at the keyboard and actually type and write and expose my soul … because if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year is that I find my writing voice when I expose my soul. 

That’s probably the dilemma right there – I don’t want to expose my soul.  I want to write about other people, not me, seemingly forgetting that when I write about others that I’m really writing about myself.

For example, though I joke that my book Wasted is crap, and though I always add that like a Jackie Collins novel it’s riveting crap, I know there’s at least one paragraph I’m proud of.  It closes Chapter 13:

Folks just didn’t understand what it was like to feel you had another person’s blood flowing through your veins, making your heart beat, you skin tingle, your mind want to work, your arms want to reach out and touch and hug and love and breathe and feel loved and fulfilled for the very first time in your life, like you’re not alone in the world, like there’s a mother to care for you, a family who won’t abandon you, someone who accepts you even when you feel all ugly inside.  But Regina understood.  And it was worth life.

Regina was the murder victim in Wasted.  On the surface, we were nothing alike.  She was a young, wild, directionless lesbian.  Well, perhaps she did have a direction that she wasn’t even aware of – self-destruction.  Still, I could relate to Regina in at least one area of our lives and that area was a desperate need to be loved and accepted.  So when I wrote that paragraph, I tapped into my own (and, man, I don’t want to admit this) desperate need to be loved and accepted.  For those three sentences, I felt like I was channeling Regina and she was channeling me.

As many times as I’ve read those words aloud at book signings, I have never admitted that they’re really my thoughts and feelings, not Regina’s.  I didn’t want to expose myself.  After all, I want my writing to be about others, not about me.   But — and I know I’m repeating myself here – I know I find my writing voice when I expose my soul.  And when I find my writing voice, my writer’s terror … well, it is no more. 

*In 2008, through the Writers’ League of Texas, I taught a class called “The True Kick in the Pants:  Starting and Completing the First Three Chapters of Your Narrative Non-fiction Book.”  I’m tentatively scheduled to teach a similar class — for nonfiction and fiction — this coming May, again through the WLT.  This class won’t be limited to just the first three chapters.  Instead, it’s intended to help struggling authors prepare their manuscripts for the Writers’ League annual agents conference, a conference where writers can pitch their books to editors and literary agents and learn about the inside workings of the publishing industry.  I highly recommend this conference.