Two weeks ago I sent the manuscript for The A-List to New York.  It was a book I had struggled with for months.  As a result, I had rewritten and re-polished the beginning so much that by the time it went to New York, my editors decided to send it directly to production.  In almost sixty books, that’s only the second time that’s happened.  As a result, instead of doing editorial letter changes, I’m sitting here with some time on my hands, waiting for copy-editing to arrive.

So what did I do—go on vacation?  Nope, Bill is still recovering from surgery.  Did I go shopping?  Nope, there’s nothing I need or want—well wait, I did go out and splurge on a Krispy Kreme, but that was a one-time-only extravaganza.  No, what I did instead was go to work on the next Beaumont book.  I’ve given my editor a tentative title, but she’s not said yea or nay, so I’m not posting it here.

But here’s the thing.  Starting to write this book was fun.  I’m already 15,000 words to the good.  It only took a few sentences to get back into step with Beau.  It you’re one of those fortunate people who is still friends with someone who has known you since you were knee high to a toad stool, you know the drill.  You meet up after months or years, and in minutes it’s as though you’ve never been apart.  You talk about things that are happening in your lives right now and things that happened long ago, and you both know where all those bodies are buried.

That’s the kind of conversation J.P. Beaumont and I are having right now.  Because this story features a few characters from one of the earliest Beau books, we’re both examining that time in his life with the benefit of hindsight and more than a little regret.  The character he is right now grew out of all the things that have happened to him in the intervening years.  And isn’t that where we all are?  Whether we’re fictional or not, we are who and what we are due to what happened to us in the past.

So this morning, while I was getting my steps, I was thinking about what I was going to put in the blog, and I was thinking about the people who have written to me over the years, telling me that Beau’s struggle with alcohol helped them in their own journeys.  Because sometimes that happens. You pick up a book.  You’re reading along, minding your own business, when suddenly, WHAP! Something hits you upside the head, and you unlock a piece of your own history.

Growing up, I was a perpetual outsider.  There was a four year gap between me and my next older sibling and another four year gap between me and the next younger one.  That made me too young to play with the older kids and too old to play with the younger ones.  I often said that, in a family of seven, I was an only child. That outsider situation occurred in the rest of the world as well.  I always attributed it to my being too tall and wearing glasses. Since I wasn’t one of the in-crowd anywhere, I retreated into the world of books—fiction especially—and that history of reading eventually led me to writing.

My reading “WHAP” moment occurred when I was supposed to be writing the second Joanna Brady book was struggling to figure out exactly who Joanna Brady was and what made her tick.  Not having any immediate answer to that question gave me a terrible case of writer’s block.  The only possible antidote was, of course, to read someone else’s book.

While doing a signing at Seattle’s University Bookstore, someone presented me with a copy of Richard Shelton’s Going Back to Bisbee.  He’s now a retired professor of Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, but that book was a memoir of his early years as well as his first teaching gig which happened to be in the Bisbee School District.  Although he was there while I was in both elementary and high school, we never crossed paths back then.  Instead, we met for the first time when I was working as a clerk in the English Department at the U of A.

In reading the book, I encountered his mentioning how “segregated” Bisbee was in terms of job status.  He said that as a teacher, he was expected to interact and socialize with the white collar members of the community—the doctors, the lawyers, the mining executives.  The only time he encountered brown collar workers—the parents of most of his students—was at PTA or school related events.  And that’s when the light went off in my head.

When we first moved to Bisbee, my dad went to work underground as a miner.  Later he worked as a truck driver.  Eventually, he and a friend created a construction company and started a cement mixing business that, as far as I know, is still in operation today.  After all that, however, he turned over a new leaf and ventured into the life insurance business from which he retired some thirty years later.  It was in the insurance business that he switched over completely from brown collar to white—with a tie thrown into the bargain.  He was encouraged to join the local Kiwanis Club, something he participated in long after he retired.

Suddenly I understood that my outsider status had nothing to do with my being tall or wearing glasses.  The other kids had no idea where I fit in the social scheme of things.  My dad had started out as one thing and had morphed into the other, and that left his kids standing on the outside looking in.

And that’s what happened to Joanna, too.  Her father started out as a miner and then joined the sheriff’s department where he eventually ended up running the joint.

No wonder Joanna’s such a contradiction!  And as soon as I figured that out, I was able to write the next book and the ones after that with no problem!

But reading Going back to Bisbee, not only took me back to my hometown, it also accomplished something essential. It unlocked a piece of my own history that I hadn’t been able to sort out on my own, and I’m guessing those readers who’ve seen their own struggles with booze reflected in Beau’s fictional background shared a similar experience.

Sometimes the missing pieces to the puzzles of our lives can be found in books—both in reading them and in writing them.