My Heart In Aurora

As I was at work this morning, at exactly 5:47--I had just looked at the clock--my boss comes up to me and tells me about a shooting at a midnight showing of Dark Knight Rises. She told me about it mainly because I've been incessantly talking about the movie for the last two days at work, prattling on about how excited I am to see it. 

Since then I've felt this awful sadness whenever I think about seeing the movie. I'll be going out with my wife and best friend on Sunday morning. It isn't often I get truly emotional about things like this. When Virginia Tech happened, I felt bad for the victims but it didn't hit home for me. Maybe because I've been thinking about going to see the final Chris Nolan Batman film, putting myself in that chair mentally for weeks now. Maybe that's why I feel such serious disquiet about the shooting. 

Not that twelve people's deaths isn't enough. You hear about these kinds of things on the news and your brain transforms it into a sense that it won't happen to you. My brain is telling me that it could. That could have been me, my wife, my best friend Patrick. We live in Kentucky, of course, but the idea is the same. One minute we might be enjoying the film, the next just gone. 

The randomness of it staggers me. So senseless and terrible. I write a lot of deaths into my work, some of them gruesome and truly awful. I talk about the waste of it and the loss of human potential and love and wonder that happens when a person passes away. 

And I feel that so much right now. As if those folks were my friends. 

I posted a tweet about the shooting when I got home this morning, expressing love for all the victims. Shockingly, one of my fans on my author page on facebook responded to that tweet when it was posted there. She says here that she and her husband were in the theater when the shooting started. They ran like hell to get away. 

That struck me hard. We live in this huge world, but the connections between us are so startlingly close. Here I am, a guy trying to entertain with his words on his couch in central Kentucky, and I almost lost someone that supported me. Someone I didn't know but was there as a part of my life anyway. It's weird and wonderful and terrifying all at the same time. One single degree of separation from this tragedy. 

I found myself feeling genuine relief that the lady in question and her husband made it out okay. She's a reader--describing herself as a 'loyal reader'--but before today she was a profile on a page. A number in my 'like' column. Now she's someone that I know, a person whose potential and impact on the people around her, including myself, could have been gone in a blink. 

Is there a point to this? I don't know. I'm feeling more grief for an event outside my own personal sphere of experience than I have at any point since 9/11. I want to do something for those people, and for Jaqueline Lader, the fan herself. I wish I could help. Even if just to give comfort to the injured, to the families of the slain. Maybe it's selfish because I think it would make me feel better, but I also deeply want every one of them to know that I care. We care. 

Human beings let unimportant things get between us too often. I'm as guilty of it as anyone. In the wake of tragedy it's vital that we remember that we're all human. I don't know what drove the killer to act as he did, and I'm sure the media will have theory after theory and people all over will place blame on whatever issue is their pet peeve. 

I don't want to do that. I don't care what made him do it, and I don't care what happens to him now other than hoping justice is served. I care that all too often we see awful things happen and get sucked into argument and finger-pointing. We forget the real human impact of the event itself. My hope is to avoid that. It may be a silly dream, but I want to see sympathy and love for all those affected to a degree that no one can imagine. 

Surely, if one man can cause so much pain, ten thousand--ten million--of us can at least begin to heal it. 

Excellent Authors and Friends

I promised I'd post this today, and I feel pretty good that I'm doing it. I've been meaning to mention some of my author friends again, as it's been a long time since I've done that. So while you're waiting for Monster to come out, please check out each of these links.

Annetta Ribken can be found at Wordwebbing, which is her website and blog. Normally I'd link to all the stuff Netta has written, but the list is pretty long. Instead allow me to point you to her Amazon author page, where you can peruse her works.

Netta and I became friends after she read the first installment of Living With the Dead and contacted me on facebook. She has been a font of great advice, wisdom, and deeply inappropriate humor for me. She's awesome and talented as all hell, one of the few authors I know that excels equally as an editor and writer. If you're having a hard time picking one of her works to read, let me suggest her novel, Athena's Promise. I've read several of her collections of flash fiction, but this novel has a special place in my heart, as she allowed me to beta read it. It's fun and funny, with moments of beauty and darkness. You won't be disappointed.

Lori Whitwam theoretically writes romance, but I'll be damned if she can't bend genres better than almost anyone I've read. Her debut novel, Make or Break is damn good. But it's the novella she wrote for my Year One collection of Living With the Dead--Monsters Unmasked--that really and truly blew me away with her talent. Maybe because I read it before her novel. Monsters is a sort of romance set in a world overrun by the living dead (my world, in fact) that manages to convey the most vile deeds a human being can do, yet show the strength and power one woman has to overcome them.

Lori is, much like Netta, snarky and hilarious. She has been a sounding board, and our mutual love of dogs and being as smart-assed as possible has been sort of a bonding experience. I've been promised that when she and Netta take over the world, I'll be spared. Even if I have to work as an oiled-up manservant.

If you already have Year One and don't want to spent the money to buy Monsters because it's in that collection, then consider buying Make or Break. Or if you're feeling generous and want to support a talented lady, go ahead and buy both.

Joseph Paul Haines  is the third person (counting the above ladies as the first two) who just wrecks my brain with how good he is. Joe wrote Marooned under the name P.J. Druce, a young adult novel that I also beta read. When Joe and I first became friends it was through Lori and Netta, and the ladies suggested I buy Joe's short story collection Ten With A Flag. I did. Then I bought the collection Brave New Worlds just because he has a story in it.

Joe is awesome. I mean that on a lot of levels. He's supremely capable of creating darkness and making you enjoy it, and I couldn't have been happier with Marooned. That book is a lot like Joe himself--complex, honest, and layered in ways that keep you interested.

It's hard to put into words how much I want you to support these folks. As writers they're awesome, but as people they're even better. I can't explain how funny and fun they are, because that's like trying to map out why your best friend is your best friend with dry words and no context.

It helps that their personalities come out in their work. You get to see pieces of them in their characters: Lori, snarky romantic, Netta as the take-no-shit badass with a heart full of hope and love, and Joe studying the things moving around in the shadows but laughing at them instead of cringing away.

I support them. If I won the lottery I'd fulfill a dream of mine and start a publishing house just for indies. I know that seems like a contradiction, but it isn't. I wish I could give them advances and pay them to do the thing they love full-time, do a lot of the work for them, promote and advertise. Because they're worth it as authors and people.

But I can't do that. Not yet, anyway. Maybe when I'm making Stephen King money someday. For now, all I can do is urge you to take a chance, spend on their books what you would spend on a cup of overpriced coffee, and let them take you away for a while.

You'll enjoy the trip.

'Monster' and Real Life Things

I've been meaning to write this post for a while. I've been working on Monster, the sequel to Beautiful, for almost a year. In fact, it will be a year in a few weeks. I want to let you all know the status of the book and why it isn't done, and you can throw metaphorical rotten fruit at me in the comments if you like.

First, please understand that I am extremely busy. I write two Living With the Dead books a year, each of them the length of a novel if not in the same format. That's more than a lot of full-time writers manage. And I'm not full-time at this. I work a regular job as a nurse aide, and that figures in to the problem.

About this time last year the way our schedules are set at work changed. Now, being a CNA is a hard, physical job. It's also pretty emotionally draining. Ever had a loved one pass away or deal with a long-term, serious illness? That's rough for a lot of people. Imagine doing it every day.

Right now I work four days and am off two, rinse and repeat. That means that I get two days off with my wife out of every six weeks since my days off change with each cycle. So not only have I been exhausted by work, but I've been trying to spend the time I have at home with Jess, between writing LWtD and trying to work on Monster.

I'll be honest: for the last year I've been struggling to even move at times, because I'm physically and mentally worn out. I changed the schedule for LWtD so I had a free day every four in which I could research, because I just didn't have the focus to write and research, much less the time.

And the big one, the one that will probably have my mom calling or messaging me shortly after I post this because she's my mom and she worries...

I've been depressed. Not depths-of-my-soul despair, the kind that keeps people in bed, but it has been there. It has been a struggle for me to get out of the low points that the depression has been trying (and occasionally succeeding) to put me in. Don't worry about me, please; I'm okay. I'm dealing with it and over the last few weeks I've been able to get to a much better place.

But these are the reasons that Monster isn't done. I'm stretched thin and trying my best, but on top of everything else this book has become something much different than what I originally planned. It's darker, more focused on the consequences of the main character's choices, and it's hard for me to write it for that reason as well as all of the above. The book won't be out this month or next, I can be pretty certain of that. All I can ask is for your patience and maybe a little understanding.

I've also been meaning to post some links to some other Indie authors you might enjoy, but I'm saving that for my next post. I want to give them all a place to shine without my emo inner child overshadowing them. I'm going to post that tomorrow for sure, so you'll at least have some damn good fiction to read while I work on this book.

I'll also be doing a post about Monster itself within the next week, what you can expect and why it's a very different book than Beautiful.

Back to work.

Josh