Two weeks ago I sent the manuscript for The A-List to New York. \u00a0It was a book I had struggled with for months. \u00a0As 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. \u00a0In almost sixty books, that\u2019s only the second time that\u2019s happened. \u00a0As a result, instead of doing editorial letter changes, I\u2019m sitting here with some time on my hands, waiting for copy-editing to arrive.<\/p>\n
So what did I do\u2014go on vacation? \u00a0Nope, Bill is still recovering from surgery. \u00a0Did I go shopping? \u00a0Nope, there\u2019s nothing I need or want\u2014well wait, I did go out and splurge on a Krispy Kreme, but that was a one-time-only extravaganza. \u00a0No, what I did instead was go to work on the next Beaumont book. \u00a0I\u2019ve given my editor a tentative title, but she\u2019s not said yea or nay, so I\u2019m not posting it here.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the thing. \u00a0Starting to write this book was fun. \u00a0I\u2019m already 15,000 words to the good. \u00a0It only took a few sentences to get back into step with Beau. \u00a0It you\u2019re 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. \u00a0You meet up after months or years, and in minutes it\u2019s as though you\u2019ve never been apart. \u00a0You 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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the kind of conversation J.P. Beaumont and I are having right now. \u00a0Because this story features a few characters from one of the earliest Beau books, we\u2019re both examining that time in his life with the benefit of hindsight and more than a little regret. \u00a0The character he is right now grew out of all the things that have happened to him in the intervening years. \u00a0And isn\u2019t that where we all are? \u00a0Whether we\u2019re fictional or not, we are who and what we are due to what happened to us in the past.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s struggle with alcohol helped them in their own journeys. \u00a0Because sometimes that happens. You pick up a book. \u00a0You\u2019re reading along, minding your own business, when suddenly, WHAP! Something hits you upside the head, and you unlock a piece of your own history.<\/p>\n
Growing up, I was a perpetual outsider. \u00a0There was a four year gap between me and my next older sibling and another four year gap between me and the next younger one. \u00a0That made me too young to play with the older kids and too old to play with the younger ones. \u00a0I 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. \u00a0I always attributed it to my being too tall and wearing glasses. Since I wasn\u2019t one of the in-crowd anywhere, I retreated into the world of books\u2014fiction especially\u2014and that history of reading eventually led me to writing.<\/p>\n
My reading \u201cWHAP\u201d 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. \u00a0Not having any immediate answer to that question gave me a terrible case of writer\u2019s block. \u00a0The only possible antidote was, of course, to read someone else\u2019s book.<\/p>\n
While doing a signing at Seattle\u2019s University Bookstore, someone presented me with a copy of Richard Shelton\u2019s\u00a0Going Back to Bisbee. \u00a0<\/em>He\u2019s now a retired professor of Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, but that book was\u00a0a memoir of his early years as well as his first teaching gig which happened to be in the Bisbee School District. \u00a0Although he was there while I was in both elementary and high school, we never crossed paths back then. \u00a0Instead, we met for the first time when I was working as a clerk in the English Department at the U of A.<\/p>\n In reading the book, I encountered his mentioning how \u201csegregated\u201d Bisbee was in terms of job status. \u00a0He said that as a teacher, he was expected to interact and socialize with the white collar members of the community\u2014the doctors, the lawyers, the mining executives. \u00a0The only time he encountered brown collar workers\u2014the parents of most of his students\u2014was at PTA or school related events. \u00a0And that\u2019s when the light went off in my head.<\/p>\n When we first moved to Bisbee, my dad went to work underground as a miner. \u00a0Later he worked as a truck driver. \u00a0Eventually, 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. \u00a0After all that, however, he turned over a new leaf and ventured into the life insurance business from which he retired some thirty years later. \u00a0It was in the insurance business that he switched over completely from brown collar to white\u2014with a tie thrown into the bargain. \u00a0He was encouraged to join the local Kiwanis Club, something he participated in long after he retired.<\/p>\n Suddenly I understood that my outsider status had nothing to do with my being tall or wearing glasses. \u00a0The other kids had no idea where I fit in the social scheme of things. \u00a0My dad had started out as one thing and had morphed into the other, and that left his kids standing on the outside looking in.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s what happened to Joanna, too. \u00a0Her father started out as a miner and then joined the sheriff\u2019s department where he eventually ended up running the joint.<\/p>\n No wonder Joanna\u2019s such a contradiction! \u00a0And as soon as I figured that out, I was able to write the next book and the ones after that with no problem!<\/p>\n But reading\u00a0Going back to Bisbee,\u00a0<\/em>not only took me back to my hometown, it also accomplished\u00a0something essential. It unlocked a piece of my own history that I hadn\u2019t been able to sort out on my own, and I\u2019m guessing those readers who\u2019ve seen their own struggles with booze reflected in Beau\u2019s fictional background shared a similar experience.<\/p>\n Sometimes the missing pieces to the puzzles of our lives can be found in books\u2014both in reading them and in writing them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two weeks ago I sent the manuscript for The A-List to New York. \u00a0It was a book I had struggled with for months. \u00a0As 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. \u00a0In almost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-rB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1712,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1711\/revisions\/1712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}