Even before I reached Week Four of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, where she says to stop reading for a week, I had scaled back my time on Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook because the noise from the Petulant Left–largely haters of President Donald Trump, largely haters of anything that goes against Judeo-Christian principles of the past 2,500 years–has become too shrill to bother with.
One of my true friends sent me this picture of the sun setting in Mariposa, CA this past week. It’s just amazing.
And thanks for Julia Cameron, thanks to Rick Warren and The Daniel Plan, and God and myself, I’m doing a reset of my life regardless.
I am focusing my life on what’s most important–God, me and what I put into my body so that I might continue to serve him.
I just went through the worst year of my life. Surgeries from severe pain, opioids, doctor appoint after doctor appointment, and more and more pain.
To boot, the person I have been most in love with my entire life copped out on me, succumbed to the threats of her daughter and mother–they are the ones who decide who she’s in love with, not her–and a week before Christmas she walked out of my life. Boom, gone. She lied to her kids and mom for four years about me. Treating me like a mistress. Hiding my contact information in her phone under the graduate college she’s attending so in case I called and they were around, they’d see the school calling, not me.
Shame on her for lying to her family. Shame on me for letting her treat me like that. It won’t happen again.
That led me to write a perfect iambic pentameter Shakespearean Sonnet Tuesday night expressing in very poignant terms how I feel about what my friend did. For now it’s folded over and put into the book. The temptation is there to record audio, then lace it with video of all the places we went in the past four years so that those who need to know she’s a balled-faced liar will finally know the truth as she parades around as some sort of super Christian. That’s not meant as judgmental. It’s just the truth.
But as importantly, I’ve stopped looking at the news feed on Facebook and the top hits on Twitter. Most of it is rage at the president. Hate.
I have no time or inclination to listen to that bull any longer. President Obama did a lot to wreck this country and Trump is trying to fix some of it. He’s also trying to make America safe and why the Petulant Left is in favor of leaving the country vulnerable to people who like to commit mass shootings or blow things up is beyond me. That’s not us, they say. Well, I’d rather be alive than have been shot or blown up by a terrorist, or have a family member or friend who was.
Such craziness.
I’m focusing on God. My healing. Eating healthier. Walking. Getting my life back on track. If you or your noise is set on being a distraction to that, I really don’t need/want/like you being in my life at all. So, like Julia Cameron talks about in her book, I am putting new, healthier boundaries in place. And walking every day with my Lord. Much closer than ever before.
I recently had the opportunity to read Chris Pavone’s The Travelers, a spy thriller and a great example for anyone living on the edge of morality not sure if their actions can or will have consequences.
Will Rhodes is living on the edge and makes a costly mistake after making every attempt, well, a fair attempt, to keep from being persuaded to do something he should not. It is succumbing to that temptation that gives this story it’s thrust. The bad guys trick him and then begin to make him do their bidding, or else what he did will get out.
Mix on top of that the questionable operations of his employer and you have a four-hundred page thriller that leaps from one continent to another with guns, knives and bad guys a step ahead or behind, depending on where in the story one is.
Largely this is a page turner that hangs its hat on a couple of basic principles—obviously the one noted above—what can happen if you’re unfaithful to your spouse in a world of spies when your wife is a spy and you don’t know it—but the application is there for all regardless.
Pavone also explores the essence of society on page 208:
“Everyone is acting all the time. Smiling and laughing, great to meet you, that’s awesome. Wearing this and not that, keeping quiet when you want to scream, saying things you know aren’t true. You do it every day … and you did it before you ever met me. We all dot. That’s what keeps society going. That’s what life is. Acting.”
“Organizations are like organisms. They have deeply ingrained survival instincts. Which isn’t surprising, is it? After all, organizations are made up of people, and people are motivated by self-interest. We’re all self-preservationists. First and foremost, what people want is what’s best for themselves. We want to survive, we want to flourish. We get jobs, then we develop loyalty to our employers, and our loyalty helps our employers achieve success, which in turn help people survive. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
“The vast majority of espionage is committed for a very simple reason: money.”
The book obviously has some darker perspectives on humans in general, and that’s what helps supply the gasoline for the fire this book burns.
I don’t regularly read thrillers like this because I normally read books that seem to have more to say, but I read the book in the matter of a few days and am glad I did. If you’re headed to the beach in the next few months and need something that will keep you company in the sand, this is a great book to take with you.
ABOUT THE TRAVELERS
A pulse-racing international thriller from the New York Timesbestselling author of The Expats and The Accident
It’s 3:00am. Do you know where your husband is?
Meet Will Rhodes: travel writer, recently married, barely solvent, his idealism rapidly giving way to disillusionment and the worry that he’s living the wrong life. Then one night, on assignment for the award-winning Travelers magazine in the wine region of Argentina, a beautiful woman makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Soon Will’s bad choices—and dark secrets—take him across Europe, from a chateau in Bordeaux to a midnight raid on a Paris mansion, from a dive bar in Dublin to a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean and an isolated cabin perched on the rugged cliffs of Iceland. As he’s drawn further into a tangled web of international intrigue, it becomes clear that nothing about Will Rhodes was ever ordinary, that the network of deception ensnaring him is part of an immense and deadly conspiracy with terrifying global implications—and that the people closest to him may pose the greatest threat of all.
I’ve seen Aaron Sorkin’s letter to his daughters about Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday night. Maybe he should go back and binge watch his HBO TV series, The Newsroom this weekend and remember what all he had to say in it.
Here’s a few sobering thoughts about the news business that should be considered after Donald Trump’s “surprising victory” in spite of the efforts of the news media to collude against him:
–Maybe we don’t need to have news 24/7 on cable channels. Perhaps needing to fill all hours of the day with advertising and something new to say isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. It certainly isn’t easy work to come up with NEWS, so we get mindless, unintelligent babble from hacks with agendas to fill up the space, to say the things that the network wants said, not news.
–Maybe Aaron Sorkin got it right in his HBO series “The Newsroom,” one that was despised by the mainstream news media who scoffed at his call for a return to genuine journalism where the facts are what drive stories, where double- and even triple-source verification is practiced, and where tough questions are asked of those who come on TV shows, not where professional hacks get offered cream puff softballs where they can speculate or drive their own agendas. At the end of the pilot Charlie Skinner, the news director of the fictitious news channel in the series says, “You know how we used to report the news? We just decided to.”
–Maybe there needs to be less reliance on social media in the news business and the pursuit of factual information. Maybe instead of relying so much on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, news agencies should go back to paying JOURNALISTS to gather information. Maybe the model of not paying those who actually went to journalism school and relying on what you can get for free isn’t working out so well after all. Who knew….
–Maybe temporary heads of a political party shouldn’t be a regular contributor, paid or otherwise, unless all ties have been severed. Maybe there should even be a length of time between when a person left a paid position with a political party, campaign, or lobbying group–you know, like a person leaving government can’t come back the next day as a lobbyist. Donna Brazille comes to mind.
–Maybe someone should really weigh the value of the integrity of political polling in this day and age now that most people don’t have landlines and many, many people hang up when they get called, and we step back and do a hard, harsh look at the practice of exit polling as was done after the 2001 debacle in Florida.
–Maybe news agencies should give less credence to claims that “The Russians illegally broke into our servers,” and actually look at the value of the information that’s being presented as fact and then ask for someone who is denying the integrity of a hacked email to produce the original material, unaltered.
–Maybe when a guest ponders “what am I going to tell my children?” the answer is that not everyone in real life gets a trophy just for playing and sometimes there are victories and sometimes there are defeats in life. It’s a good lesson for all children to learn, no matter how old they are.
–Maybe the news business needs to get off the focus group bandwagon and start presenting news to Americans so that the American populace, whom the East Coast elite view as too stupid to make a fair and balanced decision, are allowed to do just that–because they did in this election cycle in spite of all the efforts of the MSM to influence the election.
–Maybe just because you’re good at singing or acting in Hollywood you don’t have the street cred to tell the rest of for whom to vote.
–Maybe news reporting should once again be focused on the facts, not the bent agenda of the editorial department, the publisher, or advertisers.
–Maybe, and just maybe, it’s NOT the job of journalists to decide how Americans should vote. Maybe it’s actually the job of the electorate to decide. (I know, that’s a frightening thought for so many in the news business.)
–Maybe the American people aren’t as stupid as the NE elite think–that maybe jobs, the economy; the ever increasing costs of health care–the rising costs of Obamacare premiums–ones that were promised to stay low; terroristic threats to our country; gay-marriage; maybe those things actually matter to Americans and aren’t something to be dismissed openly by the NE elite.
I’m certain, fairly certain, little is going to change in the news business as a result of Tuesday. Instead of trying to see that things need to change in this industry, there will continue to be the perception that Americans–the ones who voted and turned the map red, that the red voters are the ones who need to change.
The fact is we all need to change. There has to be a coming together as a country. We can not continue to stake out our positions on polar extremes and have the pendulum swing back and forth every eight years and expect for things to improve. The anger over the past eight years came out Tuesday and those who kept calling someone racist, bigot, sexist, and all that other crap got knocked back, though probably not for long.
But wouldn’t it be great if out of all of this, the news media “just decided to” report the news?
I’ve now finished the first draft of my third book–each one unique and completely unrelated to the other. That’s three written since I began the Writer’s Path program at Southern Methodist University in August of 2014.
The word count of Pretty Has A Price, draft one.
The working title of Book Three is now “Pretty Has A Price.”
The book begins with newly widowed Sterling James leaning over the casket of her husband Harvey, saying a few last words to him before the graveside ceremony is to begin when she opens her eyes to see Annabelle, her nemesis approaching those gathering around. A cat fight, at a funeral, begins, with pallbearers ushering Annabelle back to her car.
Caught in the middle of these two women is Kent Jackson, a New York Times bestselling author who is in Montgomery, Alabama to write so he can meet the terms of a book deal. I enjoyed writing about Kent, who lives in a fictitious house on Old Cloverdale Park, around the corner from the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum on Felder Avenue. At nights he walks down the brick paved street on Old Cloverdale Park and strolls over to sit on the porch of the museum at night, looking up at the stars, listening to the crickets and night traffic, while wondering how Scott must have felt with Zelda there in the house, or the emptiness he must have felt once she’d gone back east again to be institutionalized. Kent, Sterling and Annabelle all end up at the annual Gala in front of the house in April and enjoy the amazing sights, sounds, and amazing food that even you can enjoy in real life.
Throughout the pages, readers learn about the high society balls that are still held in Montgomery–their elegance, their grandeur and the impact they have on those around them.
This book isn’t about anyone I know, but I’ve heard stories and embellished them from there. The story has humor, love, and explores the impact of pain and societal pressures.
I was told the other night it borders on literary fiction and straight fiction. Revision is next but I’m going to take a month’s break from it and let the characters breathe.
Writing is my life passion. There is no greater joy that to find a blank screen or piece of paper and put two or more characters in a precarious situation and see what happens next. Hopefully you’ll be able to read this story some day….
If you have seen author and editor Shawn Coyne’s website, you’ll see the points below and know that I’m not giving anything away that he hasn’t already posted or put into his book The Story Grid, but I have to tell you, being conscious of the five aspects he identifies necessary for every scene, act and an entire book has made a difference in my writing.
In previous posts I’ve talked about how I am a student in the SMU Writer’s Path program. There we have learned to keenly focus on the power of Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey–the Hero’s Journey which was largely spelled out by Joseph Campbell.
In March I learned of Coyne. In late March I began constructing the organizational details for my hero’s journey for my latest draft manuscript–“First Things and Final….” As I developed the wheel of the hero’s journey for my characters, I also printed out a sheet for each scene I anticipated being necessary to tell my story.
Making sure these five elements were in EVERY scene, and that I could pull the camera back and look at each of my three/four acts–Act I, Act II-A, Act II-B, and Act III–and then pull the lens back even further to understand the compositional structure of the whole book, made every bit of difference in how I wrote this third manuscript versus how I wrote my first two books on completely different subjects. In fact, as I’ve been working to revise the first two, I have been developing and printing out scene worksheets for each of the scenes in the other two books to help with my revision process.
This is the Hero’s Journey I outlined in mid-April 2016 for First Things and Final…
Is this a sure fire way to get published? We will have to wait and see. I seem to excel at cranking out stories. What I need to do is find a way for my mind to be able to enjoy the tediousness that is involved in seeking out an agent, writing a query and then sending them out and following up as appropriate. I also need to develop greater discipline in going back into my previously written material and striving to make it better.
Having been unleashed to write stories, my mind is happier doing the writing and doesn’t like to be bogged down in the query process. That is something I must address lest I become a famous writer posthumously.
So what is this structure all about? It’s this simple–Every scene of your book needs to have these five elements. Otherwise, as Coyne puts it, it’s a nice collection of words, not a scene.
Inciting Incident--Something bad happens to a character that they were not expecting. They thought one thing was going to happen, but it did not. (Think of princess Kitty at the ball in” Anna Karenina” and she thought Count Vronksy was going to ask her to marry her.)
Progressive Complications–Insult to injury. Things get worse than what was initially expected. (She’s got that one lad calling her his first conquest as he’s asked her to dance and she’s promised him her third, as if she was confidently thinking it won’t be necessary.)
Crisis–Best of two bad decisions. (Anna has begun to dance with Kitty’s heart’s desire and Kitty is forced to accept dances with the others so she will stay in front of him in hopes that he will return to her, but all the while she can see there is something going on between Anna and the count.)
Climax–Fingers bent, things are getting worse. (Anna and the count continue and it’s now clear that he won’t be having much of anything further to do with Kitty.)
Resolution–The character has gone from an initial state to almost the complete opposite of where they were at the beginning. In Kitty’s case she was positive and excited about her future prospects of being swept away in a fairy tale with her prince–the count–and in this case, that dream has been shattered by the likes of Anna, a married woman with a son.
Recognizing these five elements as applied above to the three facets of every book–scene, act and over all story, made a difference to me when I constructed my present work, “First Things and Final…” Now whether that will ever lead to my books being published remains to be scene, but for me, it has made a significant difference and I encourage you to learn more about Coyne’s Story Grid.
In March of 2014 I began doing something I’d only tried once before–to write a novel. I spent several months buying up whatever book I could find that offered advice on how to write the perfect novel.
It was not until July that year that a successfully published author who was actually a client of mine told me about The Writer’s Path program at SMU run by J. Suzanne Frank.
Since August of 2014, I have been enrolled in the program having worked my way through Story, Plot, Heroic Chapters, and Chapters. Revision is not far ahead.
All the books I bought until I got into the SMU program were not anywhere as helpful or as insightful as the SMU program itself. There are several amazing already published authors who teach the program–from Suzanne, who I have dubbed “The Jedi Writing Master” to Keith Goodnight, Amanda Arista, and Kay Honeyman to name just a few. Each of them has taught me things about writing I did not know from having written so much the past 40-plus years of my life and I am forever grateful to all four of them.
The program’s foundation is centered on Christopher Vogler’s The Writers Journey. Complimenting it is a book by Eric Edson–The Story Solution. And in a pre-revision class Suzanne was teaching in March there’s a new amazing book to use–Shawn Coyne’sThe Story Grid. If you do not live in Dallas and cannot enroll in the program, spending hours, days and weeks in these three tools will help improve your storytelling in ways you will not believe.
To date, I have written three full-length novels.
The first one, The Privacy Patriots, is about a reporter who is given Edward Snowden-like information about the forthcoming launch of the world’s first fully-functioning quantum computer. When Kip Rippin writes about it in The Washington Broadcaster, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea–known as CRINK in the book–go nuts because they can see the computer, code named IBIKTUS–(I can’t tell you what that stands for–it’s Classified)–is nothing but a first-strike weapon. It’s the Red October of computing, designed for one purpose–the get into the computer networks of any on the planet–in a millisecond–or the flash of a few quibets. Cyber Winter ensues. That’s my word. It’s not in Google, yet. But just as there would be a nuclear winter after a nuclear attack, there would be a cyber winter, after the attack described in the book. Kip has paired up with Maycee Vincent, who works for a Menlo Park cyber honey potting group that tracks online viruses worldwide. Getting the lights back on in America–as well as utilities, banking and anything else that’s hooked up to a computing network–becomes the unofficial mission of the two, who are being chased by the government as well as terrorists in America who want information about IBIKTUS. It is a thriller and about 93,000 words in length.
The second book, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club, is about Kirk Carson, a thirteen-year-old boy who creates a tree house club with three of his best friends on what was K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base near Marquette, Michigan in 1977 after he has been dumped by his girlfriend, Sadie, for another guy. The boys must deal with the meanness of base housing bully Billy Banks–who is also the wing commander’s son and the one who stole Sadie away–as well as overcoming their deepest fears. This includes a trip into a cemetery at night, climbing to the top of the base housing water tower at 10 p.m. to play Revelry right after Taps has been played, sticking their hands in a bunch of gooey worms, and crawling into a cave thats entrance gets shut off by an unknown person who is clearly not happy with their tree house’s location. Kirk has to overcome his betrayal by the other boys, who kick him out of his own club thinking bringing Billy Banks in will keep them safe. The book is a reflection of life while building the fort, while going out in the middle of a Dec. 8, 1977 blizzard where 49 inches of snow fell in three days in order to find Sadie and the four others, and what it’s like now, with Kirk near 50 and longing to once again find the peace of “home,” that he has never been able to find in his life. The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club is a middle-grade work about 75,000 words in length.
The third book, First Things and Final… gets its title from a line in the Old English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “First things and final conform but seldom.” It is the story about Sterling James, who was a poor country girl growing up in Chilton County, Alabama, and married Harvey, knowing he was gay, but rich enough to elevate her into the social status of Montgomery necessary for her to be a part of the elegant ball system that continues to this day. The book begins with Sterling stuck in a bathroom stall at the ball when her monthly bill comes due and her arch rival, Annabelle Fitzpatrick, comes in with her toady Meredith Head-Alexander and is talking about proving Harvey is indeed gay–not knowing Sterling is in the last stall listening to every word. In that conversation, Annabelle also insists she will be bedding down Kent Jackson, a novelist from Los Angeles who is near defaulting on a second book contract and has come to Montgomery to write a book while living in a home around the corner from the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum–one of only four houses the Fitzgeralds lived in. (Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was the belle of a ball in Montgomery in the early 1920s, before she met F. Scott.) In the book, Kent walks over to the museum at night to sit on the front porch and try to capture the feelings the master writer might have felt while sitting there while Zelda was living there with him, or after she returned to the East. To keep Annabelle from her prize, Sterling intervenes and finds herself embroiled in an adulterous relationship with Kent–putting her at odds with Harvey, Annabelle and her morals. The book, 94,000 words in length, paints a picture of the modern South, where thousands of dollars a year are still spent on glamorous dancing balls, adultery is still practiced but not condoned, and Bibles are still thumped loudly on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. Colorful, passionate and full of Southern pageantry, the book asks the question of whether we ever get unstuck from the stuckness of our lives, and if we do, can we stay free or do we retreat back to where we know the street names of our own Hell?
I could not have written these three books without the guidance and direction of my mentors at SMU. I just could not.
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