Book Review: ARARAT, by Christopher Golden

tl;dr? watch here instead

Christopher Golden has constructed a place you never want to go but that you cannot stop reading about.

The novel Ararat takes place on the mountain of the same name, where Noah’s Ark is reputed to have come to rest. That’s exactly what the novel seems to be about, when an earthquake unearths what appears to be remnants of a giant ship. But when scientists ascend the mountain to study the discovery, they quickly find that there’s something in there that should not be. Whether it’s Noah’s ark at all becomes secondary to survival as the team squares off with a chilling and brutal entity that will feed off the reader’s worst fears!

As a horror writer, I have many different tools available to scare you. One of those tools is dread, which is not the same as horror, terror, or the gross-out. Dread is a tough one to do, because it requires patience and precise words and pacing. Golden has done that here. He doesn’t hide his monster, it’s in plain sight the entire story, yet the dread just builds and builds until you are forced to stay up long after dark, reading to see when things will finally burst.

The author and I were both nominated for the Bram Stoker Award the same year in different categories, and Ararat won that year. I have not met Christopher Golden, but I have met Joe Hill and other horror authors who speak highly of him and there’s no question he’s at the top of his game when it comes to dread. So whether you are a reader who loves horror novels or a writer who’s looking to sharpen that particular tool in your toolbox, I highly recommend reading this Bram Stoker Award winner.

Book Review: BUTTER, by Erin Jade Lange

tl;dr? watch instead here

 

“Butter” is the name of a high school boy who once, allegedly, ate an entire stick of butter. That’s not the entire story, of course, but we may not even learn Butter’s actual name until after he eats himself to death live on the internet in a bid to not only take his own life but achieve total internet fame.

Author Erin Jade Lange has crafted an all too realistic portrait of “influencer” culture and the impact it can have on lives on both sides of a computer screen. Butter himself, the main character, is dangerously overweight, so much so that his literal life may be in jeopardy even before he decides to commit suicide and broadcast his death to his local high school. The problem is, once his intentions get out, Butter becomes the opposite of everything he’s ever been: cool, desired, and talked about. But his popularity is predicated on the idea that he’s going to kill himself, so the book dives deep into asking its readers, just as its main character does: what price is too high to pay to be quote-unquote “popular”?

Now, be warned – Butter is not an entirely likable character when we first meet him, and in fact he makes a dozen choices over the course of the novel that may not endear him to readers. But that’s exactly the thing about great contemporary young adult literature – a willingness to show protagonists with all their flaws. These characters last so much longer in the imagination and compel much greater discussion.

Butter is a great read for schools and families needing to open some doors about popularity and using the internet, although it definitely not for most readers under the age of about 12. But it is fantastically written with a very realistic protagonist who inhabits a space all of us do when we’re sixteen: how the hell did I get into this mess and how the hell am I going to get out of it?

Don’t Lose It

5 a.m.

Kid Noisestm wake me up. I can’t quite fall back to sleep. Start obsessing over this novel I really want to write. Something new and different for me. But the more I study it, the farther away it gets. The character’s all wrong, the plot won’t work, the structure is wonky.

And in this half-asleep mode, this near-darkness . . . I see my protagonist. I see her dad, then her mom.

I see the weapons.

Now I’m at a critical juncture: burrow deeper into the covers and let sleep take over, or get up and at least take some notes?

I get up.

Two single-spaced pages later, I have the intro to my new novel. Everything I need is now in place, and I can begin writing in earnest. I’ll probably have a draft by the end of February.

When that Thing comes to you early in the morning or in the middle of the night . . . don’t lose it. An idea for an improved golf club, the next great Widget, the opening to your novel. Whatever it is, get up and don’t lose it.

Because we both know if you say, “I’ll remember,” you won’t. Get up or stop whatever it is you’re doing and get that thing down.

Stephen King talks about The Muse in On Writing. The Muse is not something you wait around for; you just do the work. But when you just do the work, sometimes The Muse does show up and gives you a little gift. Like two single-spaced pages.

Don’t lose it.

Thanks for being here! Take care, and may you be happy.

~ Tom

 

Book Review: Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee by Mary G. Thompson

Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee may appear at first glance to be a YA thriller along the lines of my own novel, Shackled. That’s certainly what I thought I was getting into when I picked the book up in preparation for the World Fantasy Convention where I was going to meet the author, Mary G. Thompson. Mary is a brilliant woman who holds about eighteen different degrees including a J.D. and an MFA. While I’m sure some of that education played a role in the crafting of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, there are some aspects of storytelling that are harder to learn than others, some things that just sort of have to come naturally. One of those things is Voice, and that’s an aspect of fiction writing I’m constantly trying to hone in my own novels and in the work of the students I have in various writing classes or critique groups.

Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee is about one girl once named Amy, then named Chelsea, and now trying to reclaim her identity as Amy again after escaping from the kidnapper who took her and her beloved cousin Dee. The kidnapper, a disturbing man with a doll fetish, re-named both girls during their six-year-long incarceration with him in the forests of Oregon. How Amy came to escape is not something I can share without spoilers, but it drives the central plot of the book and explains why, after returning to her old life as a teenager, Amy is now plotting to go back to that scary cabin in the woods.

Overall this is an emotional journey through severe trauma, and I think it has great value for those who are sort of bystander-survivors: those family and friends who did not experience the victim’s trauma personally and therefore may have trouble fully understanding what the victim suffered. There’s great value in the story for that reason alone.

But again, one thing Mary has here in abundance is Voice, and for me that’s really the defining line between great contemporary YA and cheap knock-offs who got into the market when it was hot. Not to name any names, but, you’d recognize them. There is not a lot of external, physical action in the story, although what action Mary does write is handled very well. It’s the internal action that gets the lion’s share of the pages, and that’s good. It works. I start and do not finish a ton of books these days, as my friends at my book club can attest, but I came back to Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee again and again to find out what would happen next. Mary does an outstanding job of capturing inner turmoil and symptoms of what is most likely PTSD, though a diagnosis is never actually given. As someone who still struggles with some of those symptoms, I felt that Mary did an excellent and considerate job of handling Amy’s trauma and recovery.

As it pertains to writers, I recommend this book for the same reason I recommended The Girl With All The Gifts by M.R. Carey — there is no predicting what is going to happen. Even after one of the biggest reveals in the book, the story’s not over, and there is just no guessing how things will turn out from page one until the very end. Like The Girl With All The Gifts, it is not fast paced, but it is deliberately paced, and our attachment to the characters is such that we have to find out how all this tragedy is going to resolve. So for you writers, I recommend studying how Mary constructs this novel in such a way that readers can only keep reading to find out the resolution. This is well worth looking into.

So, grab a copy of Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee, and then let me know what you thought of it. Did the author keep you guessing? Did you feel for the protagonist? Am I way off base on this one? Let me know on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Bookbub, Goodreads…wherever! And be sure to follow Mary G. Thompson for more of her work as well.

 

 

Movie Review: GHOST SQUAD

GHOST SQUAD is not a breathtaking work of staggering genius, nor does it appear to be designed to be. It is, however, a fairly fun romp and taste of the supernatural perfect for young kids (or older ones) who aren’t ready to go full-steam ahead in this genre. The scares are gentle, for lack of a better term, with just enough thrill to keep kids engaged.

The film follows young friends off to spend the night in a haunted house after a dare by their local bully. That’s standard old-school fare, but the film gives it a nice update. This is not IT nor STRANGER THINGS, but the performances are admirable on the part of all the kids involved.

There is what feels like a rather forced subplot and theme about dads and sons, but a surprisingly gruff showing by SNL alum Kevin Nealon actually sells the idea pretty well — again, for the primary audience. The script is not shabby at all, though the pacing is off; not slow, but off. The performances keep the film going even though the central storyline takes a bit to find its feet.

Overall, GHOST SQUAD is genuine and heartfelt and even pulls off a pretty cute ending that hits the right note for any fretful parents.

GHOST SQUAD is not recommended for adults, and nor are they its intended audience. It’s a polished version of the Goosebumps TV show from days of yore, and a less scary version of the modern, updated films with Jack Black. If your kids aren’t ready for that film, GHOST SQUAD is a perfect place to start.

#HoldOnToTheLight – 2018

THE BAD PLACE

It is the end of September. I just now realized it is Thursday, not Friday.

I am in my office. I am in my bad place. My office is not a bad place; I bring my bad place with me, like a guilty photo ragged at the edges and stuffed unseen in my wallet. Everywhere I go.

My bad place is not tangible. It is not a room or a spot or an area. It’s a place in my head and I could feel it coming on this morning. It is a cross between a slow, oozing wound and a brittle snap. I could feel it coming. I didn’t know what to do. Now it’s here. Or maybe I’m there. Whichever. It doesn’t matter. The bad place is back.

As I sit here, literally and truly, with no exaggeration, I want to scream. I want to scream awful things. Horrible things. Wicked things. So the world will know how bad I am and why I should be killed.

I want to punch myself in the stomach. The thighs. The face. Like I have done so many times before.

I want to break everything in my house. Feel each bit of crockery shatter and send tremors up my legs that rattle my ribs together like windchimes.

The destruction feels good. The sound of shit breaking feels good. Punching myself feels good. Screaming awful screams feels good. This is the bad place. I don’t know why I am here or what to do about it.

Right now I am sitting and writing. I have to remind myself to breath because there is very little breathing in the bad place. I have not broken anything. I have not screamed. I have not hurt myself.

But one.

Little.

Thing.

Will do it. Will TRIGGER it.

Maybe it’s banging my pinky against a door frame. Maybe it’s misspelling a word in this article over and over and over and over and over and christ jesus fuck you in the face who the fuck ever let me near a keyboard you useless piece of shit die.

That’s all I can hear. That’s the echo of the bad place.

An hour ago I was doing “jazz hands” for children and their moms in a place that is nearly a second home. I teach children how to read! I should be proud of this. It should make me happy.

They don’t see the drive home. They don’t see the breaking and the screaming and the punching. They don’t see the visceral hate I see in the mirror. The face that says You must not just be destroyed, you must be torn apart.

This is the bad place.

What went wrong this time? What was today’s “trigger?”

There is no trigger. There is just this. This is its face. I listened to encouraging words on the way to my job. I tried to breathe on the way home. I put on a good show and got great feedback. I also got a rejection on a query letter, but that ain’t shit, that’s the business.

There is no trigger. There is just this. It just comes when it wants to.

My wife and children are healthy and safe. I have a home. My dog is loyal to a fault. My friends and family love me.

It’s never enough to stop the bad place.

There is no trigger. There is just this.

I should probably cry. That would probably help. But I don’t. I won’t. I won’t, I refuse, and I’ve been told this is bad for me. It is. I agree. So instead I come here, to the bad place, and try not to break, to scream, or to punch.

I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know how to come up for air.

There is just this. The visceral need to destroy and be destroyed.

All I can do . . . all I can ever do . . .

Is wait.

Wait just one more minute.

Wait one more minute.

Don’t give up for one more minute.

Don’t give in for one more minute.

Just stay safe for one more minute.

As of this moment—let me get a calculator—I have been here for more than 23,126,400 minutes. I just need to hang on for one more of those.

They start to add up, don’t they? A minute here, another minute there. One after another.

Pretty soon you have a life.

A life where not every minute must be spent counting the minutes, but one in which some are lost to the bad place, yes. I can’t have those minutes back. But there are so many other minutes…minutes with my wife. Minutes with my children. Minutes with my friends. Minutes with my art. Minutes for ice cream and coffee and pizza and walks around the park. My minutes. My good minutes. There are so many good minutes to be had, and so much potential in each one.

So yeah. The bad ones suck. But not every minute is bad and there’s only one way to find out: Stay here.

I am still here.

I am still safe.

I have made it one more minute.

Too many of us have not.

So today, I promise—I will wait just one more minute.

Now promise me: You will wait just one more minute. That’s not so much. Breathe with me. Even in the bad place, breathe. For one more minute.

23,126,401

23,126,402

23,126,403

One more minute.


About the campaign:

 

#HoldOnToTheLight is a blog campaign encompassing blog posts by genre authors around the world in an effort to raise awareness around treatment for depression, suicide prevention, domestic violence intervention, PTSD initiatives, bullying prevention and other mental health-related issues. We believe fandom should be supportive, welcoming and inclusive, in the long tradition of fandom taking care of its own. We encourage readers and fans to seek the help they or their loved ones need without shame or embarrassment.

Please consider donating to or volunteering for organizations dedicated to treatment and prevention such as: American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Hope for the Warriors (PTSD), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), Canadian Mental Health Association, MIND (UK), SANE (UK), BeyondBlue (Australia), and the National Suicide Prevention Hotline.

To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to http://www.HoldOnToTheLight.com and join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WeHoldOnToTheLight

We All Have an Origin Story

My wife and I were driving home from seeing a superhero movie one night and talking about it as normal people do after a movie. I believe it was a sequel; possibly Spider-Man 3 or something like that. I mentioned that I really tend to prefer the first films in a series, not just because they are any better necessarily, but because I really love origin stories.

“That makes sense,” Joy said. “Since that’s what you write.”

And I thought–but had the common sense not to say–“Oh, no no no, sweetie love. No no no, I write contemporary young adult fiction, not superhero stories.”

What I said was, “Huh?” (Which I say a lot.)

She answered, “Well, what is being a teenager if not your origin story?”

BAM! She was absolutely right. All young adult (YA) and middle-grade (MG) fiction is, essentially, origin stories. We may not see where these characters end up as adults, but we see who they are in the process of becoming, and that process, universal certainly to Western civilization over the past 100 years or so, but possibly the world throughout, is the story we’re telling.

I’m fairly sure I’ve changed a lot since I was a teenager. At least, I hope so! But boiled down, how different am I really? How have my core beliefs and attitudes changed since then? What matters to me, what I care about, who I am attracted to romantically and otherwise? I mean, cripes, my best friends from high school are my best friends today. A lot of them still live within driving distance.

Why YA?

I don’t know why exactly I am attracted to these origin stories; maybe it’s because only recently have I become as … alive as I was back then, and so revisiting that deep well of nostalgia is somehow cathartic. Maybe there’s an ethos in being a teenager that appeals to me. (Probably that’s it.) Or maybe it’s just that things of the Adult World bore me silly. Dance clubs and alcohol and mortgages and credit cards and keeping up with the Whomevers and watching reality TV…yawn. My family is about as middle class and nuclear as they come (few and far between these days, I know), yet we don’t strive for the things others in our demographic seem to.

Or maybe I just haven’t accepted that I’m forty-something goddamn years old yet. A distinct possibility. But the best part of being older is you (usually) have money to buy all the crap you couldn’t when you were 14, so that’s a plus.

Part of my attraction to YA too I think is, frankly, the brutality of it. Not that this necessarily goes away as people age, but most of us become at least somewhat socially aware as we get older and stop making assholes of ourselves. (Some, not all!) But kids don’t have those filters in place yet, I think, as a whole. Shit just comes out of their mouths before they can stop to think about the ramifications of it, and while sometimes that’s straight up funny, other times–a lot of times–it is devastating. Even … fatal, I am sorry to say. So there is always drama to be teased out and studied, like I did with Random, a book inspired by very true and very awful circumstances. Being a teen is far too often a real-life Hunger Games.

On the flip side, though–the good side, the great side–I think it’s the bigness of everything at that age that I keep wanting to write about. Everything is new when you hit junior high and high school. You’ve learned so much about the world and yet know so little. My dad once said something like, “Tom, I’m sixty-five years old, and am just now realizing that I don’t know shit.” Teenagers, happily for us writers, don’t labor under this problem, as they have the solutions for everything. I know I did. I probably still do, actually, which is why I write YA…?

This is one reason I get so bent out of shape when teens are dismissed. Come on, man, it was mostly teens and very young adults who saved the fucking planet in the 1940s. They know the score. They have the passion to get things done, and I for one say let ’em. It’s not like adults have a great track record with human rights, amen?

But Why Else?

Maybe, too, it’s my theatre background, which is dependent on dialogue to function. I feel like my teenage years were filled with nothing but dialogue. Phone calls and hanging out, all the time. All night, all day. We didn’t have money or much else, and we were lucky if someone had a car. Three bucks, a Super Big Gulp, and a pack of smokes, we were good to go. I know this is an ancient and largely romanticized picture to paint, but it’s true. I’d say, on average, I spent five afternoons and/or evenings with one or more of my friends, away from school. After school, at night, on the weekend, whatever, we were together. For about a year, maybe two, my buddy Damon would come pick me up in his old blue Chevy pick up at least once a week, and we’d drive to some random location, pop in some Skoal, and talk for two hours or more on whatever-the-fuck.

So talking, dialogue, is very much a part of our teen lives, and since dialogue is what I was trained in, so to speak, maybe it’s only natural that I gravitated to YA.

Or maybe it’s simply that the first full-length novel I really completed was written at age 19, about 19-year-olds. That’s outer limit for YA these days, yes, but certainly its topics, tone, and ideas were squarely in the YA genre. (This book later became Zero.)

This Is Why:

My latest book, Mercy Rule, is definitely a YA novel, but the thing about that genre and most of the books in it — particularly the realistic contemporary stuff — is that it speaks not just to teens, but to a large swath of adults who remember those years vividly but who made it out the other side. Mercy Rule is a tough book, I’m not gonna lie, and it’s definitely an origin story for several of its characters. But it’s also about the origin stories that never got to be told to completion. (You’ll understand when you read it.) And to me, the most important part of all this is that someone who needs to read it gets ahold of it and says, “Yeah, this guy gets me.” It’s the biggest compliment I’ve ever been paid with my novels. I need these readers to Stay Here and help get the rest of the world out of the goddamn dark ages.

Teenagers are superheros, if we let them. Superman was not born Superman; he was Clark Kent long before he put on the cape. He’s a hero not for his powers, but for the way his family raised him to care about others. He could have just as easily been found by Lex Luthor’s family. “Kansas farm boy makes good” isn’t much of an origin story, but it turned out one hell of a super man.

I hope I do the same.

 

It’s About A Girl

I’d been wanting to start a novel with the line “It’s about a girl” for a long time. With manicpixiedreamgirl, I could cross that off my list. Because as a teen . . . man, everything was about a girl.

Turns out, this is the most autobiographical of my novels so far. Which is to say, like, five percent autobiographical. It is not a true story in the sense of it being nonfiction. Party and Zero were maybe two or three percent “true,” in terms of things that happened to me personally. But with manicpixiedreamgirl, I went a lot farther (further? Gah, who can keep those straight?) into my high school experience than in my previous novels.

Let’s call it “emotionally autobiographical.”

So, yes, it’s about a girl. I mean, what else is high school supposed to be about if not young/first/thrilling/doomed love?

There are two parts to this novel. There’s the semi-nostalgic, somewhat-regretful, true-ish part, where I got to relive those formative years and inspirations all over again, and that was fun. It stung a little, too, when I took the time to realize that, yeah, I was pretty much an idiot on my best days, and far worse on my worst days.

Still—we had a good time, and everyone pretty much turned out okay. Which is not the same as saying, “No one got hurt.”

Then there’s the grown-up, now-I’m-a-dad, author part. That’s the part that I want people to really take home with this novel. It’s the part that’s not so much about the protagonist, Tyler, but about his “dream girl,” Becky.

There are a lot of Beckys out there.

Guys and girls both who are willing to do pretty much anything to make the pain stop for a minute, or feel like someone at least knows they exist.

If you’ve read Party, you might think of Becky Webb as who Beckett Montgomery could have become had not things gone differently that night in Santa Barbara. Like so many of us, Becky is lost and abandoned and shattered. When we reach that point, no matter what our age, we often start doing things to ourselves not easily taken back or undone.

I’ve been there. Maybe you have, too. If you know what I’m talking about, then let me tell you this, too: Don’t give up. It gets better.

I hope you enjoy the story for the story itself. I hope you laugh at Tyler (and at me) for being such a doofblatt most of the time. (His heart’s in the right place, I think, but he’s also, you know…a boy, so.) I hope that, if you haven’t already, you find your own dreamgirl/dreamboy someday, like I have.

And I really hope that, on those days you feel like these characters, you’ll at the very least remember you’re not alone. ’Kay? Cool.

Take care.

For Teachers, As The Holidays Come To A Close

THE THIN CHALK LINE

Remember chalk? It was once used by teachers to illustrate things on a blackboard. Some older classrooms still have them, including on the main campus of ASU. I wonder if some teachers still prefer them. Me, I’m equally maladapted for handwriting no matter what the surface or medium.

So let’s imagine an old chalkboard in a class room. One piece of old yellow chalk. Draw a line horizontally across this chalkboard with that piece of chalk. Got it in your head? Cool. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

Over the past seven years, I’ve had the privilege and honor of going to schools where students of various ages — junior high to college — were in attendance to hear me talk about my novels. Here’s a sample of some of the things I’ve heard in that time:

English Teacher at a North Phoenix, upper-middle to upper-class district: “We know that if we built dormitories on this campus, we’d have students begging to be let into them. They’d rather live on campus 24/7 than go back to their homes and deal with the devastation there.”

Same teacher: “I’ve had kids ask if they could sleep overnight on my patio rather than go home. I have kids who come to school not know where they are going to sleep that night.”

Teacher, middle-class district: “You’ll have a lot of kids here after school because they don’t want to go home. They don’t have air conditioning.” (In August, in Phoenix.)

Student: “When did you know you wanted to be a writer…and what did your family think?

Student: “I wanted to direct a play, but my dad said no.”

Student: “I gave my mom a story I wrote. She read it and told me it sucked.”

I’ve got more. If you’re a teacher, you do too.

In eighth grade (at a private Christian school, mind you) I got my first cigarettes and my first joints. By freshman year, I was getting high as often as possible with people I thought were my friends because they laughed at me when I was high. I also joined the drama department that year. I was a pain in the ass to my drama teacher, Mrs. Ann Tully, who, by the way, will always be “Mrs. Tully” or just “Tully” no matter how old I get. Never “Ann.” And Mrs. Goldsen will always be “Goldie.” Period.

Our drama department put on two full length productions each year. Tully directed the first one, Goldie the second. Tully cast me in the first play that year, and the seniors were all beside themselves, saying, “Freshman don’t get cast in the plays!” I didn’t know that. Nor did I care. I had pot to smoke. But hey, the rehearsals were fun…

Toward the end of the year, I showed up to a speech and drama department meeting high as a kite. I have no idea what I said or did, but I know I laughed a lot. Loudly. Afterward, Tully pulled me aside and said, “I know you won’t remember any of this, but…”  And I don’t know what she said after that, so I guess she was right.

The next day, she showed up at my speech class, pulled me out, escorted me into a little windowless room down the hall, sat me down, shut the door, and sat across from me, so close our knees were practically touching. I looked at her feet the entire time. I know she said some things like “wasting your potential” and “have so much to offer” and “smarter than this” and so on. But what really stuck out was this:

“And if you ever, ever, step foot in this department for a class, a meeting, a rehearsal, anything, in that condition again, you will be out. No plays, no speech tournaments, no classes, no student assistant, nothing. Ever again. Am I clear?”

And I whispered, “Yes.”

It was the second to last time I ever got high, and the last time was terrible. Looking back at the direction I was heading, I have no doubt that had Tully not cast me in her show, and had she not had that little sit-down, there’s no telling where I would have ended up. Certainly not in a place where I’d have nine hardcover novels out at bookstores everywhere. (Years later, when Party came out, Goldie wrote to me and said, “See? I told you to do something with your writing!”)

Senior year, I went into their office, just a few days before graduation. Goldie was somewhere else, but Tully was there. By that point, I had become the department club president, won every possible acting award they had, become a speech team Letterman, ranked high in state speech competitions, attended three out-of-state actor training sessions with Tully at the Utah Shakespeare Festival…I was a drama department lifer. And I told Tully, “Thank you. Thanks for putting up with me, thanks for everything you taught me, thanks for being there.”

Mrs. Tully laughed.

“Don’t thank me,” she said.  “Thank Mrs. Goldsen!”

I said, “I’m going to…she’s just not here right now…”

Tully said, “No no, you don’t understand.  You really need to thank Mrs. Goldsen, because she’s the one who convinced me to cast you in that first play.”

I sat down. Hard. “What?

Tully nodded.  “You remember the kind of kid you were when you showed up here? There’s no way in hell I was going to put you in one of my shows. Mrs. Goldsen argued with me for more than hour, trying to convince me that you were worth it. The only reason I cast you was because she is my best friend. So thank her for all this. She’s the one who made it happen.”

Remember our chalk board, the one with the horizontal yellow chalk line?

That’s you.

You are the thin chalk line that separates kids like me from what they’re becoming to what they can be.  Junior high and high school teachers in particular are, in my opinion, the last line of defense for our nation’s children. After that, there’s no net, no safeties.

The friends I made in the drama department were also useless little hoods when they arrived. We had a guy with a criminal record for grand theft auto (one of my best friends). A struggling and recovering alcoholic at 16 (another best friend of mine). Too many more to mention. But you know where we are now? One became a combat medic with three combat tours on his sleeve.  Another became an English teacher. One founded a film festival, another joined him not long after.  All of us, at some point, worked together at a theatre company I started in my backyard.

On April 27, 2010, I got to hold my first-ever official book launch at a little indie book shop in Tempe, Arizona, called Changing Hands. We had about 100 people show up, which is incredible. And sitting together in the second row on my right were Tully and Goldie. They have never missed a book launch since then.

When I was 15, I wrote a play, and asked Tully if I could direct it for our annual showcase of one acts. She said I could do it.

She did not say that she “gave me permission.”  Listen closely to the difference: “I give you permission.”  vs. “Yes, you can do it.”  You. Can. Do this.  Fifteen years old.

Teenagers want you to teach them. They want to be driven.  They want to be pushed to excel.

Tully and Goldie expected and got excellence. They gave us authority and responsibility, and demanded not perfection, but our very best effort. And they got it. Every time. They were the thin chalk line.  And so are you.

You have kids in your class and school who aren’t sleeping at home tonight. I met one kid who joined the Marines because the risks of being sent to Afghanistan were better than being at home for one more year. I watched a counselor explain to a teenage girl how her parents’ joint custody of her was going to affect her college plans.

I know you are overworked. Underpaid. That the entire system is broken from the ground up. That our libraries are disappearing, along with our librarians, and good teachers are punished while bad teachers are rewarded. I know. And it’s not fair.

But we need you to hang in there. Don’t give up. You got into this gig, I hope, because you love teaching and you love students. Don’t stop. Fight back. You are all that remains between a generation of hopeless children and a generation that can take us beyond the moon. Raise your voices, be heard. Because in a few years, it’ll be my kids in your classroom. (I’ll do my part. Parents? Will you join me?)

There’s an old ’80s movie called Teachers, starring Nick Nolte and Judd Hirsch, and I hope some of you are old enough to even know who those actors are. The premise of the movie is that a former student is suing the school because he graduated without the ability to read. And I know there are schools in your city who are forcing you to give a kid who doesn’t turn in an assignment 50% instead of zero, and I know how absurd that is. I know middle schools are shoving poorly educated students right through the grade levels, and threatening teachers who don’t think a zero student should move up a grade. I know.

At the end of the film, a kid has pulled a false fire alarm, and the entire school empties out. In the movie, Judd Hirsch plays an administrator to Nick Nolte’s civics teacher. Hirsch has been beaten down by the system. In a tired voice, standing in the parking lot, he tells Nolte, “Half those kids aren’t even coming back after the fire alarm.”

And Nolte says, “But half will. I think they’re worth it. I’m a teacher.”

They are.

And so are you.

Thank you for all you do.

Why is writing endings so difficult?

Endings are tough on writers and readers alike. For authors of course it’s hard to know if we’ve nailed an ending; and for readers, we can all name at least a few endings that left us a little cold. (I can name one right now that I think I shouted, “WHAT?!” and then shook my head for the last page or two. No, I will not name it here. Ask me at Ace or Phoenix ComiCon.)

On the other hand, we’ve all read endings that really soared too; that left us weeping sadly (not me!!!) or weeping joyfully (also not me!!!). But as an author, how do you take a reader there?

I’ll go into more detail on this in a new project I’m working on, but for today, let’s stick with the following:

1. The protagonist needs to change. This is all but an absolute requirement, and I’d say it’s pretty much a requirement of all genre fiction. It needn’t be the basis of the novel, but do give us some sense that the hero is not who she was at the beginning.

2. The ending needs to be in context of the storyworld. I talk a bit about this in my new book How To Write Your Novel By Watching Movies First, which you should totally get right now, but the short of it is this: If you’ve presented us with a novel set in the real world, then there better not be any aliens showing up at the end (unless that was the inevitable thing we knew about at the start). You opened your book with several promises: this is the genre, this/these are the hero/es, here’s the story problem. Deviating from any of these at the end is not going to endear you to readers.

This brings us to twists and surprise endings, but we’ll come back to those another time. Right now, just know that you’ve established a premise in the novel’s opening pages; the ending should be the payoff.

3. Word choice and cadence or rhythm matter. Remember how Morgan Freeman said, “I hope,” at the end of The Shawshank Redemption movie? It’s the same last words of the novella. Now imagine him saying, “I have hope.”

Ehhh . . . it lacks somehow, doesn’t it? I think it’s because “I hope” is active; it has momentum and breathes on its one. “I have hope,” while not a bad sentence and is still true in the context of the story, sounds like something possessed; something inanimate like a pencil or a phone. “I hope” has a different cadence than “I have hope,” and is by far the stronger choice. So sound out those last few sentences, and make sure you’re writing and punctuating them the way you hear them out loud.

4. What have you liked about other novels? Think of the top three or more books that left you a little breathless or somehow emotional, and study how that author did it. You can’t (usually) rip off an exact ending of course, but ask yourself why a particular ending had the impact on you that it did. Then go back and compare those notes to your novel. You might discover something.

Good luck sticking the landing on those endings! It can be challenge, but it’s a good feeling when you know you’ve got something. Keep writing!

(And if you liked this post, please share it; if you want to learn more, drop me a line!)