I’m the Moon
I missed church this morning. Didn’t wake up till 8 a.m. and I was out late last night with my younger twin daughter, Haley Bug.
On the way home, I got a series of email reminders cast through the voice of Satan attempting to once again convince me I’m not a person worthy of the love of God or my daughters. The fact is, no matter what, I’ll never be able to lower myself enough to try and measure up to their standards. I used to listen to that hate talk, but have found ways through the past years to just let the dog howl at the moon and me not reply. In those cases where the dog howls and the moon passes silently throughout the night, I’m the moon.
It was 54 degrees here in Mesquite, Texas this morning. Nice. If it could stay in this range more throughout the year, I might come to say I like living here, but alas, it’ll be 90 again in a few days, and if not then, give it a few months.
Walking With God
Maycee and I went for a 2.5-mile walk this morning. We haven’t walked regularly in months. It’s been 90 or more on most days and since I grew up in the North, that kind of hot just has always worn me out.
So we went on a walk into the woods this morning. My dog hears the “Start Workout,” voice on the MapMyWalk App and she doesn’t even turn toward our place from the dog potty pen. She knows we’re headed into the woods.
I’ve done a lot more walking with God the past few months.
Writing
In late June, I began a new book project that has consumed me the past three and a half months. When I say consumed, I’m not kidding. This was the most intense writing project I’ve ever done, complete at 87,000 words. Before I whittled it down, it’d had gotten to 93,000 words.
The story, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, is about a man who returns present day to the woods of K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, which closed in the mid-1990s. He goes back expecting and hoping to find the peace he once knew as a boy, and as he walks the woods of his youth, he remembers the frightening and tragic events of Day Two of a massive blizzard that hit the UP on Dec. 7-9, 1977, when he was 13 years old. That storm dumped 49 inches of snow on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Part of the story also includes May to December of 1977, and the events that led to what happened on Dec. 8.
In the story, the man realizes how much the world has changed over the course of his life and he finally comes to grips with the inner peace he’s been looking for as a consequence to many hardships he’s endured in his life. It’s not just the story of Kirk Carson, but the story of all of us.
He starts off saying he “wants to go home.” He’s an Air Force Brat, having moved dozens of times in his life, and having established many protective practices to keep from continual emotional scaring and pain from growing close to people who either move away, deceive and hurt him, or die.
The past six and a half years of my own life have been the hardest and the worst. Much of all that I worked for was robbed of me–family, friends, jobs, houses, cars, finances, dog, you name it, because of the greed, evil and hate of some very emotionally damaged people who I made the mistake of bringing into my world, thinking somehow I could help them, and of course, bringing them in before I realized how deceived I had been.
The past few years there has been some healing, but I’ve learned lots about how hurt people hurt people, even titling that as a chapter in the book.
What’s Next?
In The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, my character realizes several important emotional, psychological and physical lessons about himself. Lessons I hope can be passed to readers some day if and when I can get the work published.
Meanwhile, it’s also time to do editing on this year’s earlier novel, The Privacy Patriots, which per the instruction of my SMU writing program director, I put in the closet from June until now. She’d said not to touch it until August, but Voodoo Hillwas in the way of my mind.
Last night, when my youngest daughter was here, she saw the two binders encompassing both books–a total of almost 700 pages of double spaced, Times New Roman print. “Dang, Dad!” she said when she saw them together. That felt good to have one of my children acknowledge such an accomplishment. I start a project, and I finish it. They don’t see that modeled like they should.
So what is next? I’m doubling my efforts to bring in new work, and I’m about to start doing revisions on The Privacy Patriots, while also beginning the much harder process of finding an agent for my works.
Facing Out of the Woods
More importantly, on family business in September, I drove my mom to Indiana for her 50th high school reunion and then the next morning she told me to go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and go do the research I’d been needing to do to finish The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club. While in the UP, I also checked on our family land for my dad. What I found there is another story.
While in the UP, I also did the research I needed for the book by going to what’s left of the base, walking out into the woods where the story takes place and looking, listening, smelling, sensing and remembering things that did and did not happen there to make the telling of the tale more real.
As importantly, I found a new level of inner peace with God. There are many storms in my life attempting to rock my boat, to cast me about and to knock me off course, but there’s one sight I’ve found I must be true to, the love of my God. If I wasn’t supposed to have made that trip, if I wasn’t supposed to have written an 87-thousand word book in three and a half months, God would have had me doing something else. He would have put things in place that kept it all from happening. So when I say The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club was something that God wanted me to do, I have proof. The first draft, at least, is done and no matter how hard the dog above howls at the moon, baying about how much I don’t measure up to whatever standards I shall never be able to overcome, God is in control in my world. And no matter what I write, no matter what anyone else on this planet attempts to do to me to cause my ruin or shame or pain, they can’t take away him, nor the words that have flowed from him through me.
I met with my good friend and counsel this past week, nearing completion of the first draft of Voodoo Hill. There was a time in mid-September where two people in my life reached out to him or threatened to, saying they were worried about my mental state of mind; my emotions where as raw and low as they might could ever have been. Writing the emotionally wounded parts of book, I assure you, was that intense. My dad at one point suggested, as did my mom, that maybe I should not ever finish the work, that the nerves I was touching upon, the emotional triggers, were too hot to handle that maybe I should never try and finish.
God kept telling me that I needed to push forward, to go on and work through the pains and emotions and agony that I was in. He told me he had my back.
So when I met with Harold this past week, he asked how I was doing now in reference to where I was in mid-September, before the trip into those beautiful woods I loved as a child. My answer was simple, “For the first time in a long time I feel like I’m looking at what’s outside of the woods, rather than walking deeper into them.”
I know words like that will only make Satan want to turn up the heat and send me back into the depths of the woods where I cannot see the forest but for the proverbial trees. But like my preacher Gordon Dabbs likes to remind me time and again, the last pages of human life have been written. No matter what, in the end, God wins.
God Wins! God Wins! God Wins!
I’ve been doing some writing lately. Hashtag #amwriting is how we let others know on Twitter.
This week, I began with around 61,000 words written on what is a second novel. Today, I have 91,000 words.
It took almost 16 months to figure out how to write a book by attending multiple courses in the Southern Methodist University’s Writer’s Path program, and then getting that first draft written. The Privacy Patriots came out about 95,000 words and though I sort of began officially writing it sometime in November of 2014, I didn’t get really going with it until this spring. At the end of April or early May I was at 56,000 words and wrote the rest of it in three or four weeks.
That draft has been sitting in a binder in a closet since early June. I was advised strongly not to think about it. Not to touch it. To let the words marinate so that when I open them back up, there won’t be a sacred word in them too sacred to revise or eliminate.
So to keep my mind from going soft, I began working on a second, completely unrelated topic in July. Almost three months later, here I am.
AGONY
I tell you that history so that I can explain something more intense, more complex.
There is a new word I understand better than any other in the English vocabulary right now and it’s “AGONY.”
While I played around with some deeply emotional topics in my first book, I brought just about everyone of them I could think of out into the open for the second. One of my writing mentors calls it “Full frontal nudity of the soul.”
The process is gut wrenching.
I’ve pulled triggers back to the surface of my emotions, things that I had long ago suppressed and kept shut away in a box, and I hauled them all out into the open.
As Kirk Carson my latest hero character dealt with issues from his youth and even ones he still deals with today as a man in his fifties, (I’m not that old) me, myself and I had conversations with t
he ghosts of those past events, with those fears, some as real as they were or might have been had I ever really had to deal with them.
At one point last week, someone wrote a counseling friend of mine and had him do an intervention check on me. I’ve gotten numerous texts and emails and messages asking “Are you okay?”
PUNCHING THRU TO THE OTHER SIDE
Now that the first drafts of my sixty-plus scenes are done, I feel somewhat relieved. This morning, I began at Page One and over the next few days I’m going to read to the end, revising, editing, cutting, trimming, adding where necessary until I can say I’ve gone from beginning to end and it’s in as good of a shape as I can get it for the meantime.
I’ve been through some hard days and hard times in my life, worse the past seven years than any other time in my life. But I have to say that the past three weeks, dealing with the rich, emotional wounds of the past, confronting them head on in the mind of a character I created, one who I understand very well, has been therapeutic. It has also been a living, mental hell. My brain aches. Even right now. My jaws are sore from clenching constantly.
I saw a quote today from Twitter that said, “The only thing more tormenting than writing is not writing.”
I understand that sentiment now more, having completed, or very near completed the first draft of a second book. My mind, I have found, is already probing where the next story should come from.
Maybe the first one, in the form it’s in in my closet was just my starter novel. I don’t know. When I open it back up, perhaps, as a result of the emotional hell I’ve been through to construct the second book, revising the first and then polishing it is going to make it that much more richer. I just don’t know yet.
But what I have felt, even as I tried to sleep last night, is more at peace.
FINDING PEACE
There is a suggested series of sequences to writing a novel. You don’t start at the beginning and write to the end. You can, but it’s not recommended.
I found myself last writing the “reward” scenes.
And the last one of all of them I had mapped out was a scene called “Finding Peace.”
How wild was that, that somehow, through all the emotional turmoil and hell I’d endured to write the second book, to end it, I was left to write a scene about finding peace.
To a person who doesn’t write, maybe this won’t make a lick of sense. Maybe even to those who do, this won’t either. But it does to me.
After going through all that I have to carefully choose and pick the words to make up the total for The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, I finally have found peace in my mind. How long it lasts? I don’t know. As I started reading through the first 28 pages this morning, I felt my heart hurting, aching and the agony returning. There’s just 300 more pages like that I want to read again before I print them and put them in a binder to sit for two or three months.
I hope this has helped. Maybe for those who are worried about me this shall give you some peace and some empathy to better understand what all is going on inside my head. Maybe you’re living through a similar storm of life. I have no way of knowing.
But thanks for reading. I can’t thank you enough for checking on me.
In July 2015, as I read Nelle Harper Lee’sGo Set A Watchman, a point arrived when I thought the title should change to Go Set It Aside. But the story compelled me to keep going. At another point in the book, I thought Besmirching the Character of a Character would have worked better. But I endeavored onward.
Editing
A photo of a page from Nelle Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman
HarperCollins, the publishing company, does not seem to have edited this book. There is just no other way to put it. From misspelling Judgement (Sic) Day by adding an extra letter E on Page 65, to the absolutely ridiculous changes from first to second to third person interchangeably, worst on Page 120. The second paragraph on Page 170 begins with a lower-cased letter L, I do not understand how these things would have bled over with red ink pens by the first or second editor at HarperCollins. Italics would have been nice when we jumped into Scout’s head in first person from the previous sentence being in third. Or in second (think of listening to the world’s worst quarterback Tony Romo trying to talk sense … you, you, when you…)
Nelle Harper Lee most likely did not revise or have editors pour over this book
A friend of mine says there’s no way Nelle Harper Lee would have penned the sentence atop Page 24 where Scout is studying her beau Henry and says to herself, “I never tire of watching him move, she thought.” No, said my friend, “That’s a line out of Thelma and Louise, but the only way to know if Harper Lee wrote that would be to go visit her in the nursing home and ask. It’s clear they did not involve her in editing this book.”
My theory about the manuscript
This leads me to my theory about what happened. Harper Lee never revised or had editors comb over this book. Maybe I’ve just not dug deep enough online, but it appears they took this work in progress by Harper Lee and published it like an archaeologist would leave a find in situ—undisturbed—as they found it.
One of my most valued writing mentors told me she was going to pass on Go Set A Watchman and not read it in order to not damage her perspective of Atticus Finch and “Keep my childhood intact.”
Another writing colleague intends to juxtapose Go Set A Watchman with To Kill A Mockingbird and use them as examples of GREAT writing and not so much.
Is it worth reading?
Go Set A Watchman is worth reading. The subject penned in this story is still being dealt with today and applied to more issues than just relations between white and black foke. Maybe that’s what some of the foke who are reading it are getting upset about. It’s been a bitter summer in 2015 for many across the land and in many of the same ways, the liberal Yankee media they complain about in the book and the Supreme Court still does not have a clue as to the mindset of most Southerners and probably never will. What happens because of that eventually is going to get far uglier than what we have seen already. For every action, there’s a reaction and the pressure cooker’s steam is on the rise.
A Writer’s Declaration
After reading Go Set A Watchman, I now declare that if after I have died or a debilitating stroke, my daughters, loved one, an /or my agent or someone else goes through my drawers of umpteen notecards, notebooks of drafted manuscripts yet unpublished, or finds files on my computers they think the world should be privy to, they CANNOT release them unless they have been well-edited. And by that, I mean no style errors, no head-hopping, no changing tenses on one page without logical breaks in between. No, nothing that would make people as frustrated as I was Tuesday afternoon trying to figure out what in the world Nelle Harper Lee was trying to share with us in her book. Got it?
Solid sources for anything Nelle Harper Lee, should start with Wayne Flynt, is University Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Auburn University. Professor Flynt made regular trips to Monroeville, Alabama through the decades, and was a good friend to the late author. In fact, he was with her often during the last days of her life. He has written a book about the late, talented author.
Another solid source is Nancy Anderson, formerly, sort of still at Auburn’s Montgomery campus.
Buy Nelle Harper Lee books from Amazon. (I declare to you that these are affiliate links and when you make a purchase via these two links, I earn compensation from Amazon. What I am give does not affect the cost of the book(s).
Per full-disclosure, I need to make you aware that these are affiliate links to Amazon. With each sale from here, you provide me the opportunity to receive a small part of the purchase cost. This transaction does not affect the price of your item.
As I write this morning, a friend from high school is on the verge of losing her father. She’s either 49, 48, maybe has eclipsed 50. Like any time a person we know passes, a certain amount of reflection is involved–similar to the decade when I worked in the Alabama Governor’s Office and oft reminded my colleagues–“Every day is one less day we’re going to be here.” Four-year terms in office do that to you–remind you that every second, every minute, every hour, every day, every week, every month, every year, count. (It’s shorter if you throw in a dishonest attorney general and judge.) It’s easy to forget that.
Life.
It’s not what I thought it was going to be growing up in your home.
You did so much to care for us, protect us, and prepare us for a changing world it’s impossible to ever be prepared to take on. I wish I’d known that when I was a kid–how hard life could be, but I had to find that out much later in my life and on my own.
My friend’s father is dying. Maybe there are a dozen things she is trying to tell him before it’s too late. I don’t know. She seems like the kind who would have already said much of it.
But we are from that generation where many parents didn’t say the three words we kids needed/wanted to hear the most–I love you.
I don’t know what happened to make that so, but I made up for it with my three girls. In their younger years, when they were less busy trying to figure out the world on their own, I used to say it so often they would reply, “Dad, we know!” My response was simple–“A daddy can never tell his girls enough that he loves them. Never.”
Sitting here, I realize that can go both ways. So let me give it a try: “Mom and Dad, I love you.”
For years of my life I have cursed the US Air Force for having moved me around so much as a child. I went to schools in Indiana, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, California and Alabama. With my past work for Dallas Schools and the writing program I’m in at SMU, I can now add Texas.
I still don’t feel like I have a home. Mom was always quick to quote “Home is where your heart is.” That doesn’t help either; it’s scattered all over the country.
The blessing of Facebook has helped give me back part of the youth that was taken from me. There are kids from McDonald Elementary in Michigan, Mitchell Sr. Elementary and Atwater High in California, and Jeff Davis High in Montgomery, whom I’m now friends with again because of FB.com. (The cooler part, some of them I went to school with in Michigan and Alabama, or Michigan and California.) This alone has brought so much healing to my heart–being able to see how friends from my youth turned out and to hear about their life stories, their challenges, successes and things they’re doing now.
It’s been amazing to learn how much of who we are is already in us by middle school. So many of my friends from California to this day either sound like they did then, or still act in very similar ways. I thought older years would have bent us more, but they haven’t.
This morning, I’m writing you to say a few things that need to be said again and again and again, before it’s too late.
Thank you for the love you gave me as a youngster. You didn’t say the words “I love you,” near to what I wanted or think I needed to hear, but you showed it in your generation’s own ways.
Dad, when I needed track shoes, we were in the car headed to get some. When I played baseball you coached. When the umpire wasn’t applying the rules fairly, you objected–becoming the only parent in history to be thrown out of a little league baseball game. But the point was, the rules weren’t being applied fairly and instead of letting it go, you stood up and said something about it. That’s been a good thing to have learned, and something I’ve not learned to compromise on. Some have called it “whining.” I call it speaking the truth. (I’ve been wondering how someone in one of my old jobs can look himself in the mirror having compromised on so much. I couldn’t live like that. And didn’t. And don’t. Thank you.)
Mom, we had our rough times, but great ones, too. I love you. (It gets easier to say the more you say it.) I’m sorry for the heartaches I caused, and I’ve let the ones you triggered inside me to be forgiven and to be let go. Thank you for teaching me about Mama Cass and her song Make Your Own Kind of Music, the phrase, “Life is what you make of it,” cooking, and daring to step onto a stage at age 10 and deliver my first public speech.
Dad, the point of the baseball gloves when Field of Dreams came out was for us to play catch like we did in front of the house in Kansas, or in the backyard in Michigan. I still can’t watch those ending scenes and not think about being in first grade and you and I having a catch. That sputtered out in California and Alabama, maybe it was the heat, and then the humidity. Probably it was just the elements of Cat’s In the Cradle, a song I cannot bare to listen to, even to this day.
Who knows what today will bring. Life is hard. I know that now. In part, you taught me that. Much of it, I just had to find out for myself.
Thank you for teaching me to love God. I give Him things to solve, but you also raised a hard-headed person who sometimes still thinks he can fix them on his own. Maybe I won’t ever learn to give enough to God, but he hasn’t given up on me.
If we could go back in time there is much I would change. Regrets? No.
Dad, you once told me about how you’d watch me and my brothers run cross country, even at young ages. We’d be beat red in the faces, fighting to keep going, and you said you were so proud of us because we dug down deep inside and found another gear, pushing forward to the finish line.
There have been times since when I couldn’t find that gear and just gave up. I learned the hard way that there are some things that just aren’t ever going to be. But it is joyous when miracles happen.
I’ve learned to recognize that when God wants something to happen, it does. I left so many friends behind and longed to find them, searching through the years. But when God finally said I’d learned enough in isolation from them, he opened up the lines of communication like we’d not taken a thirty-year break.
I wish as the eldest of five I’d not been so scared to tell you how much I liked a girl in middle school. I wish you could have met her then, or seen her, so that you have the context I have of how she’s still just as special today. I wish I’d learned more than how to just meet people. My worst characteristic today is that I don’t know how to be close to people because every time we tried when I was a kid, we moved in three months. It got too easy to not open up because the pain of leaving hurt so much more each time. I wish I’d spent more time in Yosemite when we lived in California. I wish….
This is longer than I wanted it to be. Ha, how can I dare say that? I could go on. There’s a lifetime of things I want to tell you about. I’m sure you have so much as well.
We don’t talk enough these days. Life makes us so busy. Can we try to fix that, while there’s still time?
Today is one less day we’re going to be here; I’d like to make it count.
–PS: Dad, handshakes are nice; firm, a look in the eye. That’s nice. But bear hugs, like you mean it, are better.
This morning my sister sent me a text–“I wonder if you know the day Kip was born on.” I promptly sent her a copy of my Aeon Timeline, a timeline development software program compatible with Scrivener, the novel writing software, showing his pre-book life history and that of most every other character I’ve invented. But she wrote back, “No, the day he got into your head.” It was April 2, 2014 when the domain name was registered.
Let me explain.
I had the idea to finally begin writing a major work in March of 2013. Since then, it’s been a high priority among work projects and being a dad. I’ve now written more than 54,000 words in what Scrivenerproject’s is going to be a 94,700-word manuscript when Draft One is completed. In the process, I’ve gone through at least 1,000 4″x6″ notecards, which are all in various stages and stacks around the house. I’ve used Scrivener, which is a pretty powerful organizing tool, I’ve read dozens of books on “how to, how not to” and then I’ve really settled on some key guides–Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, Eric Edson’s The Story Solution, and Robert McKee’s Story.
There have been other works along the way that deserve mention–Brian McDonald’s Invisible Ink, Sally Hogshead’s Fascinate, Jonathan Gottschall’s The Storytelling Animal and Carol Pearson’s Awakening The Heroes Within. This weekend I devoured Larry Brooks’ Story Engineering and did some serious thinking about Concept and Theme enhancements that I’d not as deliberately developed using Vogler. (My Kindle is loaded with other books about writing, but none of them compare to this core group or the other titles pictured to the right. You might also notice, I didn’t skim these books–there are color tabs hanging out of many of them for quick reference.)
Character Name Generation
But it was a year ago, April 2, that I used Scrivener’s Name Generator to search for the right names to suit the characters I’d determined I needed for the story I want to tell. When I found a name I liked, I purposely went to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, WhoIs.net and Google to see what came up for that name. If I could not register the character’s domain name, get them an account on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the name was tossed. If something came up in Google or in Amazon it was discarded. That was the last test. When a name had cleared those six hurdles, they were allowed to become real–at least in my mind and my writings for now.
My book may not ever get published. I am not planning for that contingent, but moving forward positively. When it is published, my character’s names are already commercially protected. I own them and I’ve established use of them by locking down accounts for them in Social Media, which will be critical for commercial marketing when the time comes.
My Characters
So, sadly, I missed April 2, 2015 as the day they came into existence. But in the year and five days that have passed, they’ve taken on lives of their own. I have a two-inch thick binder of Myers-Briggs profiles on all of them (Read David Keirsey’s Please Understand Me II). I’ve done the Color Quiz. I’ve created a chart where I’ve taken the Hero’s Journey and applied Pamela Jane Smith’ eight Inner Drives chakras to each character and where I think they’re going to be during each of the 12 phases of the book. And like I said, over the past weekend, I took Larry Brooks’ “What If” exercise to new levels for my characters, really pushing to get to the drama that needs to be included to make my work as intriguing as I know how to make it.
They are nothing but names to you, for now. For me, they’re crowding my head with work, family and wonder. During the day, whether I’m sitting at my desk or a lonely table in Jason’s Deli–I do wonders sitting in a public cafe with all the noise and chaos around me, not there to eat, but just to be in an active atmosphere–I write about ups, downs, challenges, inner demons, ways to cause havoc in the world by hacking into places that are impenetrable and blowing things up, ways to fall in love, and ways to save the world.
My characters hurt, they find joy, mystery, and anguish. They sometimes are very sacral chakras centered and only care about sex, money and power, and others, even the same ones, at other times, are in the heart center, focused on the good for all mankind. And while they float the range of chakras, apparently, I do, too.
So I say Happy Birthday to Kip Rippin–Kip, a name I found by accident, means a “unit of force.” I’m writing a thriller. He’s going to need some units of force to survive and save us all. Maycee Vincent is into honey potting–she is from Menlo Park, CA, and works in a quasi-governmental Internet monitoring operation between Stanford and the NSA. (And yes, Maycee is also the name of my 11-month old Great Pyrenees.)
Colin Mistry is my villain, working for President Oliver B. Carr, and my Mr. Big Bad Guy, corporate America businessman, Josh Chi Dormin. (Spell Dormin’s name backwards and think of what he might want to do–this time with a computer.) (“Chi” coincidentally, is an “energy force.”) Purely by accident, I pitted a “unit of force” against an “energy force.
It was one of those forces of wonder that comes from creativity. It’s perfect. It spells one thing–CONFLICT. My other secondary characters include Zach Woodhall and Gwinn Bolynn–her parents were “Yoopers” in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Gwinn is a small town near Marquette where I lived several times thanks to the USAF.
It’s been a fun year with my characters. “A year?” you fellow writers might say, “That’s a long time.”
I thought that, too, this time last year. I thought I’d be finished with all of this. Chasing publishers and agents. But to make a book as close to right as possible, this is not something one goes and does on a weekend and comes back from the mount with it all on a tablet.
Amazon is filling up with those kinds of self-published half-baked, unedited books, full of typos and plot holes a semi-trailer truck would get stuck in.
For me, patience and discipline is so important now. I’m not saying it’s easy. Like an aging wine. It has to ferment, the tastes blend and become something more than it was when it was first poured into a bottle. It’s like preparing for life. You’re not ready for a massive journey into a special world any more than you can decide one day you’re going to go walk the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail on Friday and be back in six months.
Happy Birthday, again, to my characters.
If you’re on a similar journey, I hope you can take the time to let your characters grow as mine have. You’ll find they have much more to them as characters if you do.
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It was 54 degrees here in Mesquite, Texas this morning. Nice. If it could stay in this range more throughout the year, I might come to say I like living here, but alas, it’ll be 90 again in a few days, and if not then, give it a few months.
Walking With God
Maycee and I went for a 2.5-mile walk this morning. We haven’t walked regularly in months. It’s been 90 or more on most days and since I grew up in the North, that kind of hot just has always worn me out.
So we went on a walk into the woods this morning. My dog hears the “Start Workout,” voice on the MapMyWalk App and she doesn’t even turn toward our place from the dog potty pen. She knows we’re headed into the woods.
I’ve done a lot more walking with God the past few months.
Writing
In late June, I began a new book project that has consumed me the past three and a half months. When I say consumed, I’m not kidding. This was the most intense writing project I’ve ever done, complete at 87,000 words. Before I whittled it down, it’d had gotten to 93,000 words.
The story, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, is about a man who returns present day to the woods of K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, which closed in the mid-1990s. He goes back expecting and hoping to find the peace he once knew as a boy, and as he walks the woods of his youth, he remembers the frightening and tragic events of Day Two of a massive blizzard that hit the UP on Dec. 7-9, 1977, when he was 13 years old. That storm dumped 49 inches of snow on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Part of the story also includes May to December of 1977, and the events that led to what happened on Dec. 8.
In the story, the man realizes how much the world has changed over the course of his life and he finally comes to grips with the inner peace he’s been looking for as a consequence to many hardships he’s endured in his life. It’s not just the story of Kirk Carson, but the story of all of us.
He starts off saying he “wants to go home.” He’s an Air Force Brat, having moved dozens of times in his life, and having established many protective practices to keep from continual emotional scaring and pain from growing close to people who either move away, deceive and hurt him, or die.
The past six and a half years of my own life have been the hardest and the worst. Much of all that I worked for was robbed of me–family, friends, jobs, houses, cars, finances, dog, you name it, because of the greed, evil and hate of some very emotionally damaged people who I made the mistake of bringing into my world, thinking somehow I could help them, and of course, bringing them in before I realized how deceived I had been.
The past few years there has been some healing, but I’ve learned lots about how hurt people hurt people, even titling that as a chapter in the book.
What’s Next?
In The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, my character realizes several important emotional, psychological and physical lessons about himself. Lessons I hope can be passed to readers some day if and when I can get the work published.
Meanwhile, it’s also time to do editing on this year’s earlier novel, The Privacy Patriots, which per the instruction of my SMU writing program director, I put in the closet from June until now. She’d said not to touch it until August, but Voodoo Hill was in the way of my mind. 
Last night, when my youngest daughter was here, she saw the two binders encompassing both books–a total of almost 700 pages of double spaced, Times New Roman print. “Dang, Dad!” she said when she saw them together. That felt good to have one of my children acknowledge such an accomplishment. I start a project, and I finish it. They don’t see that modeled like they should.
So what is next? I’m doubling my efforts to bring in new work, and I’m about to start doing revisions on The Privacy Patriots, while also beginning the much harder process of finding an agent for my works.
Facing Out of the Woods
More importantly, on family business in September, I drove my mom to Indiana for her 50th high school reunion and then the next morning she told me to go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and go do the research I’d been needing to do to finish The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club. While in the UP, I also checked on our family land for my dad. What I found there is another story.
While in the UP, I also did the research I needed for the book by going to what’s left of the base, walking out into the woods where the story takes place and looking, listening, smelling, sensing and remembering things that did and did not happen there to make the telling of the tale more real.
As importantly, I found a new level of inner peace with God. There are many storms in my life attempting to rock my boat, to cast me about and to knock me off course, but there’s one sight I’ve found I must be true to, the love of my God. If I wasn’t supposed to have made that trip, if I wasn’t supposed to have written an 87-thousand word book in three and a half months, God would have had me doing something else. He would have put things in place that kept it all from happening. So when I say The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club was something that God wanted me to do, I have proof. The first draft, at least, is done and no matter how hard the dog above howls at the moon, baying about how much I don’t measure up to whatever standards I shall never be able to overcome, God is in control in my world. And no matter what I write, no matter what anyone else on this planet attempts to do to me to cause my ruin or shame or pain, they can’t take away him, nor the words that have flowed from him through me. 
I met with my good friend and counsel this past week, nearing completion of the first draft of Voodoo Hill. There was a time in mid-September where two people in my life reached out to him or threatened to, saying they were worried about my mental state of mind; my emotions where as raw and low as they might could ever have been. Writing the emotionally wounded parts of book, I assure you, was that intense. My dad at one point suggested, as did my mom, that maybe I should not ever finish the work, that the nerves I was touching upon, the emotional triggers, were too hot to handle that maybe I should never try and finish.
God kept telling me that I needed to push forward, to go on and work through the pains and emotions and agony that I was in. He told me he had my back.
So when I met with Harold this past week, he asked how I was doing now in reference to where I was in mid-September, before the trip into those beautiful woods I loved as a child. My answer was simple, “For the first time in a long time I feel like I’m looking at what’s outside of the woods, rather than walking deeper into them.”
I know words like that will only make Satan want to turn up the heat and send me back into the depths of the woods where I cannot see the forest but for the proverbial trees. But like my preacher Gordon Dabbs likes to remind me time and again, the last pages of human life have been written. No matter what, in the end, God wins.
God Wins! God Wins! God Wins!
It was 54 degrees here in Mesquite, Texas this morning. Nice. If it could stay in this range more throughout the year, I might come to say I like living here, but alas, it’ll be 90 again in a few days, and if not then, give it a few months.
Walking With God
Maycee and I went for a 2.5-mile walk this morning. We haven’t walked regularly in months. It’s been 90 or more on most days and since I grew up in the North, that kind of hot just has always worn me out.
So we went on a walk into the woods this morning. My dog hears the “Start Workout,” voice on the MapMyWalk App and she doesn’t even turn toward our place from the dog potty pen. She knows we’re headed into the woods.
I’ve done a lot more walking with God the past few months.
Writing
In late June, I began a new book project that has consumed me the past three and a half months. When I say consumed, I’m not kidding. This was the most intense writing project I’ve ever done, complete at 87,000 words. Before I whittled it down, it’d had gotten to 93,000 words.
The story, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, is about a man who returns present day to the woods of K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base, which closed in the mid-1990s. He goes back expecting and hoping to find the peace he once knew as a boy, and as he walks the woods of his youth, he remembers the frightening and tragic events of Day Two of a massive blizzard that hit the UP on Dec. 7-9, 1977, when he was 13 years old. That storm dumped 49 inches of snow on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Part of the story also includes May to December of 1977, and the events that led to what happened on Dec. 8.
In the story, the man realizes how much the world has changed over the course of his life and he finally comes to grips with the inner peace he’s been looking for as a consequence to many hardships he’s endured in his life. It’s not just the story of Kirk Carson, but the story of all of us.
He starts off saying he “wants to go home.” He’s an Air Force Brat, having moved dozens of times in his life, and having established many protective practices to keep from continual emotional scaring and pain from growing close to people who either move away, deceive and hurt him, or die.
The past six and a half years of my own life have been the hardest and the worst. Much of all that I worked for was robbed of me–family, friends, jobs, houses, cars, finances, dog, you name it, because of the greed, evil and hate of some very emotionally damaged people who I made the mistake of bringing into my world, thinking somehow I could help them, and of course, bringing them in before I realized how deceived I had been.
The past few years there has been some healing, but I’ve learned lots about how hurt people hurt people, even titling that as a chapter in the book.
What’s Next?
In The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, my character realizes several important emotional, psychological and physical lessons about himself. Lessons I hope can be passed to readers some day if and when I can get the work published.
Meanwhile, it’s also time to do editing on this year’s earlier novel, The Privacy Patriots, which per the instruction of my SMU writing program director, I put in the closet from June until now. She’d said not to touch it until August, but Voodoo Hill was in the way of my mind. 
Last night, when my youngest daughter was here, she saw the two binders encompassing both books–a total of almost 700 pages of double spaced, Times New Roman print. “Dang, Dad!” she said when she saw them together. That felt good to have one of my children acknowledge such an accomplishment. I start a project, and I finish it. They don’t see that modeled like they should.
So what is next? I’m doubling my efforts to bring in new work, and I’m about to start doing revisions on The Privacy Patriots, while also beginning the much harder process of finding an agent for my works.
Facing Out of the Woods
More importantly, on family business in September, I drove my mom to Indiana for her 50th high school reunion and then the next morning she told me to go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and go do the research I’d been needing to do to finish The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club. While in the UP, I also checked on our family land for my dad. What I found there is another story.
While in the UP, I also did the research I needed for the book by going to what’s left of the base, walking out into the woods where the story takes place and looking, listening, smelling, sensing and remembering things that did and did not happen there to make the telling of the tale more real.
As importantly, I found a new level of inner peace with God. There are many storms in my life attempting to rock my boat, to cast me about and to knock me off course, but there’s one sight I’ve found I must be true to, the love of my God. If I wasn’t supposed to have made that trip, if I wasn’t supposed to have written an 87-thousand word book in three and a half months, God would have had me doing something else. He would have put things in place that kept it all from happening. So when I say The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club was something that God wanted me to do, I have proof. The first draft, at least, is done and no matter how hard the dog above howls at the moon, baying about how much I don’t measure up to whatever standards I shall never be able to overcome, God is in control in my world. And no matter what I write, no matter what anyone else on this planet attempts to do to me to cause my ruin or shame or pain, they can’t take away him, nor the words that have flowed from him through me. 
I met with my good friend and counsel this past week, nearing completion of the first draft of Voodoo Hill. There was a time in mid-September where two people in my life reached out to him or threatened to, saying they were worried about my mental state of mind; my emotions where as raw and low as they might could ever have been. Writing the emotionally wounded parts of book, I assure you, was that intense. My dad at one point suggested, as did my mom, that maybe I should not ever finish the work, that the nerves I was touching upon, the emotional triggers, were too hot to handle that maybe I should never try and finish.
God kept telling me that I needed to push forward, to go on and work through the pains and emotions and agony that I was in. He told me he had my back.
So when I met with Harold this past week, he asked how I was doing now in reference to where I was in mid-September, before the trip into those beautiful woods I loved as a child. My answer was simple, “For the first time in a long time I feel like I’m looking at what’s outside of the woods, rather than walking deeper into them.”
I know words like that will only make Satan want to turn up the heat and send me back into the depths of the woods where I cannot see the forest but for the proverbial trees. But like my preacher Gordon Dabbs likes to remind me time and again, the last pages of human life have been written. No matter what, in the end, God wins.
God Wins! God Wins! God Wins!
The process is gut wrenching.
The subject penned in this story is still being dealt with today and applied to more issues than just relations between white and black foke. Maybe that’s what some of the foke who are reading it are getting upset about. It’s been a bitter summer in 2015 for many across the land and in many of the same ways, the liberal Yankee media they complain about in the book and the Supreme Court still does not have a clue as to the mindset of most Southerners and probably never will. What happens because of that eventually is going to get far uglier than what we have seen already. For every action, there’s a reaction and the pressure cooker’s steam is on the rise.
energy force.”) Purely by accident, I pitted a “unit of force” against an “energy force.