Category: Random Mutterings

That’s the cover on the right for Throwaway Jane, the first Karen Pantelli novel. The book is entering the production stage (copy edits, final proofreading, etc) and should be out in the world by mid-May.

I’ll have a book description soon, but for now I’ll just say that those of you who’ve read my Garrison Gage series may remember Karen as the FBI agent introduced in A Desperate Place for Dying and (after a tragic mistake compells her to leave the Bureau and become something of an aimless drifter) plays a more central role in The Lovely Wicked Rain. What happened to her the last couple years? What has she been up to? I wrote a book to find out, and I enjoyed it so much it’s a good bet I’ll be writing many more, assuming readers like her as much as I do. More detail soon.

Other updates? I’m about halfway done with next Garrison Gage book — who, by the way, has a cameo in Throwaway Jane. It’s relatively brief, but it definitely contains a few tantalizing hints of some changes in Gage’s life, changes that will definitely come to bear in his next adventure. More than that I can’t say, except I’m really putting him through the ringer this time, poor guy.

Nearly six months in to working as a full-time writer, I can’t decide if I’m working all the time or hardly working. Benefit of loving what you do, I guess. Even when it’s hard, it seldom seems like work. That’s not to say it’s always easy. I’ve had good days and bad days, productive days and not so productive days, especially considering the anxiety-inducing state of the world at the moment. Yet even on the toughest writing days, I still feel like I’m following my bliss, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell. That’s all I think you can ask for on a personal level as a human being, to engage in work, hobbies, pastimes, whatever the case may be for each person, that provide you a gateway to a deeply meaningful life.

But the family’s healthy, which is the important thing, and life goes on as it must. With two teenagers in the house nearly all the time (like most of the world, their schools are now online), I guess it’s a miracle I’m sane at all, but we’ve actually had a lot of great conversations and lots of laughter, too. House and yard projects. Teaching my daughter to drive. Some drawing here and there, when I’m not writing. Binge-watching fun escapist television with my wife to forget about the world for a while (Hart of Dixie, I’m looking at you). Mostly, I stay busy. It’s spring here in the Willamette Valley, lush and beautiful and what I always consider a reward for our long, gray, drizzly winters (which I actually don’t mind all that much — they drive out the Californians who dabble with retiring here).

The flowering plum trees outside my office are in full bloom, and on windy days their petals cover the sidewalks like pink snow. It’s a reminder to appreciate beauty wherever you find it.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the world’s gone a bit nuts lately, so I thought I’d start with a picture of some ducks. Just because. Who doesn’t like a picture of ducks? It was taken by my daughter a few days ago, when we took a long bike ride down to the river, passing through a number of parks along the way.

We’re engaging in good social distancing practices, which are getting easier and easier to do as Oregon continues to close up shop and the whole world tries to fight its way through the COVID-19 pandemic. I truly hope all is well with you and yours. We’re healthy here, which is the important thing.

It’s pretty clear that disasters like this one bring out both the best and the worst in humanity. Fortunately, I think we’re seeing more of the former than the later. If nothing else, it’s proving what a tightly interconnected world we live in now. There really is no pretending otherwise, and as we come through this thing, I hope it’s a lesson we carry forward. As a species, we’ve got some big challenges ahead of us.

I’ve been fairly silent online, but mostly that’s because I’ve channeled that energy into full-time writing. How’s it going, you might wonder? Four months in, I still feel like I’m trying to get the right balance to things, and of course the last month or so the extra pandemic-induced anxiety made getting into that creative space especially difficult. Seems like a pretty small problem in the grand scheme of things, no? But most days, I get in my ten pages. (In fact, the sign over my writing computer is pretty simple: “1) Write 10 pages. 2) Everything else.”) I was beating myself up a few months back, because my process seems to take longer than I’d prefer, but then I stumbled across a post by Nora Roberts, the world’s bestselling romance writer, and the next day reread parts of Stephen King’s On Writing, a man who, at his best, I consider our modern day Charles Dickens, and realized that my mutli-phase process, such as it is, is somewhere between the two of them. And if it’s good enough for Roberts and King, well, that’s pretty good company to be in.

In the end, as I’ve gotten older, I do think most writers have no idea, really, how they do what they do. That includes me. We just make up little stories about our processes after the fact. Like all good fiction, sometimes these stories have an element of truth to them, and you can certainly learn plenty from storytelling giants like Roberts and King trying to make sense of their craft, but I wouldn’t take what any writers say about how they do what they do too seriously.

For me, writing is still done one word a time. Describing it as anything else is like trying to explain a rainbow to a four-year-old. Either you get too metaphysical and sound like an idiot. Or you get too scientific and rob the rainbow of all its mystery.

I’ve mostly finished one book that’s just starting into production, the first Karen Pantelli novel. If you don’t remember Karen, she appeared at the end of A Desperate Place for Dying and more fully in The Lovely Wicked Rain, as a love interest of Garrison Gage and as an erstwhile FBI agent who’s coming to terms with a terrible mistake. You won’t need to read those books to enjoy this one, but it will give you a glimpse into her character. I’d always wanted to write a drifter-type character at novel length, but I didn’t realize that’s what I had until I started writing her story. One writer friend of mine pointed out that I essentially came up with my own variation of Jack Reacher, but I have to admit, as much as I’ve enjoyed many of the Reacher novels, that never occurred to me as I was writing her story. When Karen walked onto the stage, I just wanted to find out more about her. I hope my readers feel the same.

More on Karen Pantelli soon, as I’m still awaiting feedback from some of my first readers and the book goes into full production (copy editing, proofing, design, etc). Wrote a few short stories between books, some of which sold and I’ll announce down the line when they appear. And for you Garrison Gage fans, yes, I’m well into the next book now, so hopefully it won’t be too long. My production has definitely increased dramatically, but it may be a year before it’s obvious to anyone else but me. The Run of the House comic is still on hiatus, as I try to figure out what I want to do with it, but I’ve got some ideas. It’s back to that balance issue. I’ve been trying to come up with a “unifying principle,” some kind of approach or process (ah, that word again!) that creates a structure that works for me and creates some extra motivation. Toying with a few ideas. We’ll see.

For now, take care of yourselves!