Day 8 – Spies Arrives!

Yeah, I know these Novel Dare entries are intended to be about the work I’m doing on the book itself, but this one didn’t really go there.

Sorry about that.

I’ll do better tomorrow.

As fate would have it, the mailman brought me a contributor’s copy of the “Spies” edition of Fiction River. This came out earlier, but due to various understandable issues, the distribution of such copies were delayed until now. If you haven’t read it, of course I’ll suggest you get thee hence and pick up a copy—it’s got some great work in it.

Of note today, though is the fact that Lisa Silverthorne, my Novel Dare teammate, also has a hugely powerful story in this one titled “Trafficking Stops.”

When the book arrived, I picked it up and looked at it closely—I registered that Lisa and I were both listed on the cover of this one, along with Sabrina Chase, Angela Penrose, and the award-winning David H. Hendrickson (damn you Dave Hendrickson!). These are all great writers—and in fact, I (along with my daughter Brigid) have bought fiction from two of them. But, of course, it’s Lisa who I’m writing in tandem with right now, and it’s Lisa who I’ve essentially grown up writing with. I turned the book over in my hands and, probably because I’m particularly sensitive to these things right now, I remembered back to workgroups we’d been in together, and workshops we’d done together before we’d really done much in the field. And I recalled discussions at dinners afterward where we talked about things, mostly either dreaming about the idea of publishing fiction or complaining about how hard this was.

Standing there and paging through the book, it struck me once again how cool it would be to go back in time with this volume in hand, and to sit down with those two baby writers just to watch their faces as we let them know that, yes, they’d publish, and that maybe twenty-five years or more later they’d be appearing on covers together. That, like a Dare, there’s going to be steps backward for every two forward. That sometimes there’d be more than one step backward at a time, and that, yes, those times would suck more than you want to know…but that they’d be writers forever.

Yeah, I know.

Too much for a post like this, right?

It’s okay, though. That’s fine. It’s cool to remember these things, because I think it’s important to remember where you come from.

Still, it’s more important to keep the steps going forward, so that’s what I’m going to do now. I’ve got a book to write, after all, and it’s time to have fun making my character’s lives … um … interesting.