Tag Archives: friendship

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, editing, Writing

Monday Musings: A Strange Post In Times Of Personal Struggle

This has not been the best week for my family and me. It was, actually, the sort of week that not so long ago would have convinced me to take a break from blogging at all, to say “I need some down time” and withdraw from the social media world.

I’m not going to do that. After the last time, I pledged to all of you — and to myself — that I wouldn’t do it again, and I intend to live by that pledge. The fact is, as a self-employed writer, I have the luxury of being able to slip away when I want to, to take as many mental health days or personal days or vacation days as I please. Put another way, I am spoiled rotten.

I look at Nancy, who is dealing with the same things I am, and who goes to work every day to complete projects and interact with people, and I marvel at her strength. I look at my younger daughter, who also faces the fear and grief as well as issues of her own, and who also goes to work each day, in the health care industry no less, being reminded constantly of our own family struggles, and I am amazed by her resilience and self-composure. I look at my older daughter, who lives in the center of the storm, coping with this cruel, relentless illness, and who still manages to live her best life, and I am humbled by her courage, her resolve, her spirit.

And I think of the rest of you, who face challenges of your own — emotional, physical, familial, socio-economic, cultural, and more. Obstacles are thrown in our paths every day. All of us face them. Few are as privileged as I am in terms of the freedom I have to grapple with them on my own terms. The fortitude I see around me on a daily basis blows my mind and inspires me to do better.

Yes, my family and I are working through a lot right now, and it’s not going the way we would like. But we have the resources we need to face our problems, and too many others in this country, in this world, don’t. We have friendships old and new that sustain us when things get rough, and too many others have to meet their challenges alone. We have one another to offer love and support, to share laughter and tears, and we are so fortunate in this respect, as well.

This is an odd post, I know. My apologies for that. In the past, this would have been a post in which I tried to explain, in vague terms, why I was stepping back from my blog and my various accounts. And since I DON’T intend to step back this time, I thought maybe it would make sense to explain how I came to that choice. And the short answer is, it’s because of the amazing people around me — family, friends, colleagues, fans, acquaintances. You all have given me a standard of strength and bravery to which to aspire.

So, I will continue to write and edit. I will continue to blog and comment. I will go about my regular routine as best I can given the circumstances. I am getting help. I am taking care of myself. I am taking steps to maintain and improve my emotional health. I am enjoying time with my newly-liberated-from-an-overwhelming-administrative-position spouse. I am chatting regularly with my beloved daughters. I am reaching out to friends and extended family. And we have some fun stuff planned for later in the summer, which will help in all sorts of ways.

If you are struggling right now, facing obstacles of your own that seem insurmountable, I wish you peace and strength, comfort and compassion. Life throws all manner of stuff our way and none of us is immune to its vagaries and difficulties. One of the hardest things for me is something I listed in the preceding paragraph — reaching out to people, to my support network. None of us likes to be that person, the one who always seems to call with terrible problems. And so we pull back, waiting until we feel better, believing on some level that we ought to be able to get through this stuff on our own. Asking for help takes courage, and too often I shy from it.

But the thing is, speaking now as a friend, a brother, a father, spouse, I NEVER mind when the people I love seek my help. I am always eager to lend love and support. And I know the people I rely on feel exactly the same way. In the end, I think it’s about pride, which is silly. I know this, and still I struggle. I’ll work on that, too.

Anyway, thanks for reading this. As I say, a strange post, but one I felt I needed to write.

Wishing you a wonderful week.

Bell Bridge Books, Belle Books, Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Radiants, Writing

Professional Wednesday: Beginnings, Middles, and Endings, Part I — Openings

This week, I launch a new series here in the Professional Wednesday feature — “Beginnings, Middles, and Endings.” Sometimes I focus on minute details of writing in these posts, arcane points of craft or business that are helpful to some, but perhaps less so to others. With this series, I am, at least for a few weeks, returning to basics of storytelling. Because while we can focus on all sorts of small points to improve our writing, the fact is we’re all storytellers, and it never hurts to reconsider the fundamentals now and then.

Today, let’s start with beginnings (“A very good place to start,” to borrow from The Sound of Music). To state the obvious, your opening lines, paragraphs, and pages are where you want to hook your reader. I spend a great deal of time — a disproportionate amount of time — crafting my opening page. I want my readers to be wowed by the time they start reading page 2. I want them to have decided on that very first page that they cannot/dare not/will not put this book down until they have finished reading it. (Yes, they can pause for meals and sleep, but only because I’m a generous soul.)

There are, of course, as many ways to hook a reader as there are stories to be told and authors to tell them. My wonderful friend J.D. Blackrose (Joelle Reizes) begins her book A Wrinkle and Crime with a single sentence that is laugh-out-loud funny. Readers are hooked in mere seconds. Guy Gavriel Kay, another good friend and probably my favorite author, tends to ease into his novels a bit more, allowing his gorgeous prose and the slow build of his brilliant storytelling to draw readers in.

RADIANTS, by David B. Coe (Jacket art by Belle Books)I fall somewhere in between. I don’t think any of my novels have a single opening sentence that grabs readers by the collar (that’s actually pretty rare), but I do try to capture my readers’ attention early. My best book opening, I believe, comes in Radiants (Bell Bridge Books, 2021):

The first time I did it, my mom, who is about as chill as any parent anywhere, hit me. Slapped me across the face. This was after I confessed. She never would have known if I hadn’t told her, and still she hit me. That’s how pissed off she was.

She told me it was a violation, which I didn’t even understand at first. I thought she meant it was against the rules—like a violation in sports—and I had pretty much figured that out when she slapped me. But no, she meant violation in a way I’d never heard the word used.

An invasion. A rape of the mind. She called it that, too. Her slap shocked me. When she called it a rape, I started to cry. I swore I’d never do it again, and she made me promise on my dad’s grave, something she hadn’t ever done before. I did, and I meant it.

I was twelve at the time. About the age my brother is now, and you just know Mom is aware of that. Hyper-aware.

I honored the promise I made that day. I had been tempted in the weeks and months and years since. Many, many times. But never once did I break my vow. Not until today.

Why do I like this opening so much? Well, let’s break it down. Our opening should hint at conflict and tension. It should introduce a key character — a central protagonist or antagonist. It should establish voice. And it should intrigue or excite the reader with action or mystery or romance or some other compelling plot feature. This opening to Radiants does all of those things in about half a page. The conflict and tension are right there in the first graph, with the slap from an otherwise mellow parent. Clearly this narrator did something really bad — and we want to know what it was. These graphs, and her confession, establish the narrator as someone we trust and want to know more about. Already we know she has faced tragedy, as indicated by the oblique reference to her father’s death, and we know she has a younger brother. We get a sense of her voice from the informal tone of the prose. And with that last line we want to know more — about her and what she is going through. This terrible thing she did, this thing that angered her mother so much, she has just done again! Today!! Why? And we’re off and running . . . .

As I said, there are an infinite number of ways we might open our books. There is no single right way to do this (or really anything else in writing). But there are some things to avoid in our opening passages. One of the most common errors I see in the opening paragraphs of short stories and the opening pages of novels, is an over-reliance on exposition. Often beginning writers are so eager to explain their worlds, tell us all there is to know about lead characters, and show the cool stuff in their magic systems or imagined technologies, that they dive into descriptions and explanations. The problem with this? There is almost no tension or conflict in exposition and background. Tension and conflict come from character and narrative. So save the exposition for later. Or, better yet, do away with it entirely and find other, more creative and compelling ways to reveal your background information.

Some writers err on the side of the other extreme. They are so eager to plunge the reader into action that they have on page one some serious, terrible stuff happening to their characters. The problem here is that we don’t yet know the characters well enough to care about them the way we ought to before they’re put through the wringer. As in so many aspects of writing, we want to find balance. We don’t want to bore readers with too much character background, but we also don’t want to overwhelm them with spectacle at the expense of introducing our lead characters.

There are a few things beginning writers are told they should never, ever do with their opening lines. “Don’t begin with your character waking up.” “Don’t start with the literary equivalent of a weather report.” (“It was a dark and stormy night . . . .”) “Don’t open with a dream sequence (and then have the character wake up).” The problem with these sorts of openings is they’re overdone to the point of cliché. That said, it may be that you’ve found a way to open with a character waking up that is perfect for your story and is unlike any other waking-up-opening the world has ever seen. In which case, go for it.

As long as your opening feels original and organic to the story, you should be fine. And originality is most likely to come from your characters. Anchor yourself firmly in the point of view of whoever your narrating character is for the opening scene, and then tap into their emotions, thoughts, and sensations. Make it visceral, make it powerful. Ultimately, the best opening will be one that is compelling, intriguing, and, of course, written with eloquence and passion.

Next week (and perhaps the week after), Middles!!

In the meantime, keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: AI Content Creation? No, Thanks

I’ll start by assuring you that this is not one of those posts. I’m not going to share my feelings regarding AI generated content and then reveal at the very end of the post that everything you’ve read was actually AI generated. It’s really me. I promise. How can you be sure? Well, the best evidence is this: I’m too cheap to purchase the AI generator I’ll be discussing . . . .

That I would even think it necessary to say as much . . . well, read on.

An email appeared in my inbox this past week. It came from a prominent maker of WordPress plugins and it advertised a new AI content generator for WordPress sites. “Our latest product [is] aimed at enriching your WordPress experience . . . This tool utilizes the potential of artificial intelligence, adding a formidable ally to your writing process.”

Already, I can hear the Skynet airships hovering overhead. [Sorry — Terminator reference.]

I’ll admit, I was horrified. Wanting to know more, I followed the link in the email and was taken to the product page where I could see the generator in action. “Write a blog post about X,” the app is told, and in a second or two content populates the screen. (I should add here that we are guided through the product tour by what is clearly an AI-generated voice. It’s kind of creepy, actually.) The wording produced by the plugin is clean and flowing, free of typos and grammatical errors. In fact, that’s one of the features the developer trumpets. No more typos. No more wording mistakes. God forbid writers should just learn to write and take the time to proofread their work.

The AI generator can also provide snappy titles for its posts as well as summaries of the content, and it can even adapt the tone of the piece to our mood and preference — among the possible choices are “formal,” “informal,” “optimistic,” “humorous” (humorous AI? Really?), “serious,” “skeptical,” “empathetic,” “confident,” “passionate,” and “provocative.” The tour shows the imagined user switching from “formal” to “passionate.” The differences in the resulting text are minimal.

I’m not naïve, and I’m also not blind to the benefits such a generator might bring to, say, a travel enterprise that specializes in tours of various parts of the world. Rather than write separate essays about each region, which could take hours, a webmaster could input the parameters for each essay and complete the work in mere moments. The resulting prose would be safe, error-free, and quite likely good enough for the company’s purposes.

It would also be anodyne, soulless, utterly lacking in anything remotely human.

Reading the text generated in the product tour, I was struck by a few things. First, for now at least, the AI’s vocabulary and writing style are both quite limited. It repeats words and sentence structure so that there is a sameness to each paragraph and the treatment of each new topic. Also — and this is predictable, I suppose — the generated text is as dry as dust. It is long on fact, on the sort of information one might find in an encyclopedia entry, but it lacks anything to which one might connect emotionally. And it also lacks rhetorical flourishes — simile, metaphor, analogy. It is, in short, boring.

“Say goodbye to writer’s block and hello to effortless content creation,” the product tour says, missing the point entirely. I have written about writer’s block before, and the last time I did, I hurt and offended a writer friend whom I care about and admire. I have said in the past that writer’s block doesn’t exist (and I’ll get to what I mean by that in a moment). The fact is, though, this is not true. Writer’s block does exist. It is a debilitating void, an inability to create that can last months, even years at a time. Writers who are afflicted with it, as my friend has been, suffer greatly.

But writer’s block as it is used commonly, as it is used here in this AI generator product tour, is not at all the same. It is the difference between clinical depression and saying one is “depressed” because a favorite sports team lost a close one.

What most people — including the app developer — mean when they speak of writer’s block is the inability to write something in a particular moment. This form of “writer’s block” presupposes that writing is easy, that creating new content should come without effort, without hesitation, without forethought and contemplation. What most call “writer’s block” I call writing. Because writing isn’t easy. Creating new content takes tremendous effort. It is messy and slow and frustrating. It is fits and starts. It is staring out the window for fifteen minutes at a time, wracking one’s brain for that perfect turn of phrase. It is re-writing the same graph six times until it shines just as we want it to.

And that’s what’s wrong with AI generated content. That struggle to create, that wrenching, ugly, glorious process is what infuses our writing with emotion and energy, individuality and the spark of humanity that makes writing and reading joyous. When we take away the work, the messiness, the false starts and numerous rewrites — in other words, when we make writing “effortless” — we also render it gutless and vapid.

Is there a use for AI generated writing? I guess. I mentioned a hypothetical travel business earlier; AI would probably save its owners a bit of time and money. At what cost, though? How much dumbing down is too much? And where does this slippery slope lead? At the risk of sounding idealistic and giving the lie to my early claim that I’m not naïve, I have to ask: Wouldn’t we be better served as a society if we put as much effort into teaching our children to write and think creatively as we do teaching computers to do stuff for us? The answer seems self-evident to me.

Have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: A Letter To My Younger Self

Dear Younger Me,

Yes, that’s really our hairline now. Calm down. It’s not— Would you please calm down? Thank you. What did you expect? Seriously. Dad was bald. Bill and Jim had lost their hair by the time they were thirty. You thought we’d make it through middle age with hair like George Clooney’s? We didn’t make it through middle age with ANYTHING like George Clooney’s. On the bright side, our beard finally filled in, so there’s that . . . .

But this isn’t about how we look, thank goodness. This is a letter to you, my younger self, about other things I wish I had known when I was your age (whatever age that might be exactly). So read on, Younger Me, and if you happen to run across a time machine at some point, remember this stuff, okay?

Let’s start with this, because really nothing is more important: You know how you feel most of the time that you’ll always be alone, that you’ll never meet the right person? Well, I can assure you, you won’t be and you will. She is brilliant, caring, funny. She shares many of your interests and, more important, she shares your values. She is strong and insightful, charming and generous. And . . . What’s that? Yes, she actually loves you. I know: I couldn’t believe it either.

What?

[Sigh]

Yes, Younger Me, she’s also hot.

And together, we have two brilliant, strong, funny, beautiful daughters. You will be blown away.

More good news — and we can discuss this more on Wednesday: You will have that writing career you’ve been dreaming of since you were six. There will be a few detours along the way, some bumps and bruises. It won’t be exactly the career we imagined; it might not reach the heights to which we’ve aspired. But it’s our career. We made it, we sustained it (with the support and encouragement and love of the aforementioned life partner and children), we earned it. We should be proud of it.

Don’t know if you can do much about his one, but I should mention it — if, around 1993 or so you have a chance to get the rookie card of a Yankee prospect named Derek Jeter, go ahead and pick one up. Or ten. Or fifty. Slide it (them) into a nice plastic sleeve for protection and put it (them) away. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

You know those episodes we go through, and have since we were little — nausea, shaking hands, extreme ill-defined terror? Those aren’t normal. I know Dad used to tell us he experienced them, too, and he might well have been telling the truth. But that doesn’t mean they were routine or natural. He meant to reassure. He loved us and wanted to help. But by normalizing them, he kept us from doing something about them at a younger age. Along the same lines, you know how for so very long we brushed off our tendency toward unexplained worry and stress, saying that we were “high strung,” or some such? Turns out, that’s not high strung.

We have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and we have Panic Disorder. And we didn’t need to suffer with either for nearly so long. Do something about them. Soon. Please. For our well being. Friends have encouraged us to try therapy. I finally did when we were 58. I wish we’d done it forty years sooner.

For your sake and mine, please work harder at the guitar. Yes, we still play. Yes, I’m better than you are, which is as it should be. But with work and practice, with less laziness and self-satisfaction, we could have been so good. I can’t have expected us to work at guitar the way we did at writing — one was a hobby, the other a profession — but a bit more work would have brought us such joy.

Never ever ever take your car to Toyota of Palo Alto. Just don’t.

Look at your book shelf, the one with all the fantasy novels on it. You’re going to wind up meeting nearly every author represented there. Many of them will become good friends. Yes, including Guy Gavriel Kay. Pretty cool, right?

Spend as much time as you can with Mom and Dad. Be as tolerant as you can be of Bill’s flaws and idiosyncrasies. Love them. Cherish them. We won’t have nearly as much time with them as we deserve, and we will miss them every day for the rest of our lives. I know, Mom and Dad can be annoying now and then, and occasionally Bill infuriates us. They’re family, and sometimes family is like that. But the hole their absence leaves in our life dwarfs these temporary frustrations. Extend to them the grace and forgiveness you would want from all those we love.

Those amazing friends we made at Brown, the ones who enriched our life there and made it the most memorable time of our early life? Yeah, they’re still our dear friends, still enriching our life. Treasure them.

The rest is pretty much common sense. Dial back the weed — we will later anyway; might as well preserve a memory or two. Don’t drink too much — you don’t hold your booze as well as you think you do. Exercise. Eat right. Take care of yourself. Life is precious, and we don’t want to miss a thing. Read more. Yes, we read a good deal. Read more. Trust me. No one ever looked back from the vantage point of their dotage and thought, “I wish I’d put all those books aside and watched more TV.” Be good to the people we love. Slow down and savor all those things we enjoy doing. Let go of grudges and jealousy and regrets. They do us no good.

Oh, and along the lines of that Derek Jeter thing — those people at Apple who early on made all those weird-looking, quirky computers? Turns out they were on to something. If you get a chance, buy a few shares . . . .

Best wishes,

Older David

 

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Not at all Writing Related

Monday Musings: For Our Adult Children

We want them to be happy, but we know happiness is elusive, and we remember being their age and struggling to find joy ourselves.

We want them to be safe, but we know a safe life is not likely to be an exciting life, a rewarding life.

We want them to find love, but we know that with love often comes pain.

We want them to find success, but who is to say our definition of the word matches theirs? And shouldn’t their definition take precedence?

We want them to be healthy — we would give all to ensure their good health. And they’re so young; they shouldn’t have to worry about disease. But life can be cruel and unjust, and none of us is given guarantees.

We want to be part of their lives. We want them to want us to be part of their lives. But we have spent their lifetimes trying to make them self-sufficient — personally, intellectually, financially. If we do our jobs right and well, they will go off to thrive as independent beings. As they should. As we want. But we also want to be part of their lives.

We take pride in their growth, their maturity, the wondrous adults they have become. But — and we would never, ever tell them this — we still long for those days when they were small enough to clamber into our laps with a book or special toy, content to sit in our arms for just a few moments.

Every now and then, despite their growth and maturity, we find them just as trying as we did when they were two.

We don’t want to rush them — really there’s no hurry — but at some point, at their discretion of course — of course — we would like them to have children. We hear tales of the joys of grandparenting, and of the incredible love our parents and siblings and peers have for their grandkids. We want to experience that, too. And yes, absolutely, one hundred per cent, there can be no denying, we also want to see them deal with the same sort of shit from their kids that they put us through for all those years.

We remember things we did when we were young — stupid, foolish, reckless things. Things that are not all that different from some of the crap they have done. And we think of our parents with sympathy and with guilt.

We will take calls from them at any hour, no matter the circumstances. We read their texts immediately, always. Because we never know. And the truth is, most of the time those calls and texts make us smile or laugh or kvell (a Yiddish word meaning, essentially, to swell with pride). A good conversation with one of them is often the highlight of our day.

We love to hear about their classes or their jobs, their friends and colleagues, their routines as well as their adventures. It’s not that we live vicariously through them — at least it shouldn’t be — but we want to hear that they are having fun, and we want to share in their joys, as we did when they were young.

We worry about them. How can we not? We have since they day they were born. When we wake in the middle of the night, almost invariably our thoughts go to them. We think of things we ought to have mentioned the last time we spoke, and we wonder if they have followed that piece of advice we offered a week ago, or two, or six. Some nights we lie awake for hours with these thoughts.

We savor their visits. We treasure those moments when our core family is together. We listen to them make each other laugh, and it is the sweetest music.

And we end where we began — with wishes for happiness and love, safety and good health, success and excitement. We want the world for them, even knowing how unrealistic these wishes might be. We’re parents, after all. No one expects us to be rational.

Have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: Missing a Missing Friend

We lived in Australia for a year back in the mid 2000s, when our daughters were in primary school. Alex, the older one, turned 11 while we were there. Erin turned 7. Both girls were already swimming competitively here at home when we went Down Under, and so we found a swim league that was affiliated with the university where Nancy was taking her sabbatical.

Early on in our time with the league we were befriended by a family who volunteered to help run the weekly swim practices, and who had a daughter who swam with our girls. Graham and Dianna — Di — were friendly, funny, and so incredibly welcoming to us. Laura, their only child, was a couple of years older than Alex, but that didn’t seem to matter to her. She loved our kids and she was great with them.

The first place we lived that year in Australia was near the university and near the school the girls attended, but our lease there was only for about half our stay, and we were set to move after the Christmas holiday. At our last swim event before the break, I was chatting with Graham, and he asked me what we had in mind for our holiday.

“Well, we’ll be traveling a bit, and then we need to move to a new place.”

“Oh, where are you moving to?”

“Up the coast a bit to Woonona.”

“Really? We live in Woonona. What’s the address?”

I told him, and he laughed. “That’s right around the corner from us.”

When we became neighbors, Alex and Laura began to spend a ton of time together, and their friendship brought our families even closer. Like me, Graham was an avid photographer, and also a guitar player. In fact, he lent me his guitar for the rest of our stay. We had meals with them, we went on day trips, we still went to swim of course. Graham and I became close friends. Near the end of our stay in Australia, we all went to the Warrumbungles, a mountain wilderness in New South Wales, north and west of Woonona. It was beautiful, and our two families had a marvelous week together, hiking, sightseeing, cooking, hanging out in the evenings.

Graham and DiGraham was incredibly generous, kind, whip-smart, fierce in his devotion to Di and Laura, and one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. He and Di were both school teachers, both utterly devoted to education, to serving their schools and communities. They were active in their unions. They were political. They loved nature, loved good food and good drink. They were, in short, a lot like us. We knew that we wanted to maintain our friendship after our return to the States. And we did. The following summer Graham, Di, and Laura came to the States for their winter holiday (Southern Hemisphere and all that) and stayed with us for several days. Another great visit. We had tons of fun, but Graham and I also spent a good deal of time talking. He had just lost his father, something I went through a decade earlier. I can honestly say that even though we were now living literally half a world apart, our friendship had only deepened.

We chatted via Skype regularly, we messaged via social media all the time. We compared notes every time one of us updated his collection of camera equipment. When we lost my brother Bill, in the summer of 2017, he of course offered his love and support.

Only a few months later, Laura sent me a message that devastated all of us. Earlier that day, Graham had died suddenly. A heart attack. Totally unexpected. A thunderbolt. I felt like I had lost another brother. To this day, I miss him all the time. The loss remains raw and painful all these years later.

Graham would have been 63 this past Saturday. Yes, on April 1, and don’t think he didn’t make the most of having been born on April Fools’ Day.

We visited Di and Laura and Laura’s partner, Brad, in 2019, while we were in Australia to see Erin, who had taken a semester there. We had a fabulous visit — conversation, laughter, great meals, a couple of hikes. There was nothing maudlin about our time together. But Graham hovered over everything we did.

It is the most painful of clichés that we don’t know what life has in store for us or the people we love. With my brother’s death, and with the planning for his memorial, which occurred only a couple of weeks before Graham died, I had been out of touch with Graham for a little while when he passed. My fault entirely, although he would have understood. But I have thought about him a lot recently because the second book in my upcoming series is set in Australia, and it is dedicated to Graham, as well as to Di and Laura. And I have long wished for one more chance to chat with Graham, to share something funny or tell him about a recent photo shoot. So instead, I am going to take some time today to reach out to other friends, people I haven’t spoken or written to in a little while, people I miss.

Because we never know.

Have a wonderful week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: The Things We Say, The Things We Don’t Say

Let’s begin with a couple of quick exercises. First, I want you to pause for a moment and think of someone you’re fond of to whom you have something to say, something you haven’t yet said. Think of your feelings for this person. Maybe it’s a close friend, someone you have leaned on for support recently, someone who ought to hear directly from you just how much you appreciate them. Maybe it’s a friend who you wish was more, but you haven’t yet gathered the courage to say, “I think I’m in love with you.” Maybe it’s an acquaintance, someone you don’t know well, but would like to know better. Maybe you’re thinking it’s time to say to that person, “Hey, want to grab a coffee? I think we could be good friends.”

And now I want you to ask yourself why you haven’t yet spoken the words. Is it fear of being rebuffed, fear of making yourself vulnerable? Are you afraid it would just seem awkward? Have you convinced yourself there’s no time in the day for such things, that you simply haven’t had the chance? [Spoiler alert: At one time or another in my adult life, I have been in all those situations listed in the first paragraph, and I have not spoken up for all the reasons — and more — enumerated in the second.]

Second exercise: Now think of the Other People in your life, the ones who have wronged you, who have angered you, who have hurt you, or who have done the same to someone you love. And think of the one thing you would like to say to them. I’m not referring here to the simple “F____ you!” or “Go to H____!” I’m suggesting you think of something you would like to say to them calmly, rationally, something that would be substantive, that would convey to them the full measure of why what they did or said was wrong and hurtful and damaging.

And again, I want you to ask yourself why you haven’t yet spoken the words. Is it fear of confrontation, fear of their reaction? Is it an unwillingness to revisit something unpleasant that is now over and done? Is it your sense that you could never say completely and eloquently enough what it is you really wish they could hear? Or is it more immediate than that? Is it that the person you’re thinking of for exercise 2 is also one of the people you thought of for exercise 1, and you fear bringing up the hurt again lest you kill a still-valued friendship or romance? [Again, over the course of my adult life, I have been in all these situations as well.]

This being a Monday Musings post, it will come as no surprise to any of you that I have been giving these issues a good deal of thought in recent weeks and months.

I was brought up in a family that did not suppress expressions of love or anger. We were an affectionate family, and we followed the example of our loving, affectionate parents. We could be a combative family, and we followed the example of those same parents, who actually bickered quite a lot, and occasionally had some pretty heated arguments. I was brought up believing that expressing emotions was healthy (mostly), that just as it we owed it to one another to say the extra nice thing, we also owed it to ourselves to speak our minds when put out (mostly).

When I was in graduate school, I shared a house with someone who remains to this day a cherished friend. Her family did NOT express anger, and so the first time I expressed annoyance with her about some trivial household thing, she grew very upset. I tried to explain my upbringing, to make her understand that just because I was angry, it didn’t mean I no longer wanted to be her housemate or her friend. She caught on quickly, and by the time we moved out of our place, she was much more comfortable giving voice to her anger. Funny, her spouse has never thanked me for this . . . .

Still, speaking freely with family and close friends is relatively easy. Doing so with people we don’t know as well can be a challenge. As I have grown older, I have grown far more comfortable sharing the extra kind word with people I know less well. Most respond well to expressions of appreciation or regard, and I am ALWAYS conscious of saying what I wish to say in words and in contexts that will not come across as creepy in any way.

But then there’s that anger thing. Just as expressing ourselves with those we know best is easier than it might be with looser acquaintances, so is kindness easier to share than anger. This may seem counterintuitive, especially given the breakdown of civil discourse across so much of present-day society. Again, though, I’m not talking about the verbal equivalent of flipping the bird, which IS easy. I’m talking about opening up and saying, “You wronged me, and here’s why it made me feel hurt or angry or diminished.” That is an act of intimacy, which is why many who find it relatively easy to say, “I love you,” can barely fathom saying, “I’m angry with you.”

There are in my life right now a number of people to whom I would like to express resentment, my sense of having been wronged. For myself, for a loved one — when the bonds are close enough it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. And as I contemplate such encounters, as I try to game out the conversations in my head, anticipating where they might lead, I find myself asking those questions I brought up earlier. Why haven’t I done this already? What do I believe such expressions if emotion might cost me (or my loved one)? What do I think I would gain from speaking my mind, and is it worth the potential risks or fallout?

As with so many of my recent Monday posts, I have no clear answers for the questions I’m asking. I know there are things I want to say, and at times in the past I have dealt with similar feelings by writing letters — letters I know I will never send, but which allow me to put words to my emotions so I can move on and look in the eye the objects of my anger.

Perhaps that is what I’ll do again. Or perhaps the time has come to speak my mind.

Have a great week.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Writing

Monday Musings: About That Birthday I Was Dreading . . . .

“You want to complain about a birthday?” Life said. “I’ll give you a birthday to complain about.”

Last week, as usual, I wrote two posts. On Monday, I ruminated about my approaching birthday, making it clear that I was feeling a bit down about growing older and was having trouble putting myself in the birthday spirit. And then, in my Professional Wednesday post, I began a new series of posts — “What Holds Me Back” — about the things that sometimes limit my productivity. And I began the series with an entry about coping with life issues in general.

As it happens, I managed to write both posts ahead of time. I had them ready to go before the weekend was over. And boy did those posts come back to bite me in the ass.

In the Wednesday post, I wrote this about life, or rather Life, which I anthropomorphized to make a point:

“Life is a fickle bastard, with a cruel streak a mile wide, a perverse — at times evil — sense of humor, and a preternatural knack for intruding at the absolute worst moment. But Life can also be charming, deeply attractive, kind, generous, and downright fun . . . . Life is as changeable as March weather, as unpredictable as the best storyline, and as relentless as time itself. Life happens constantly; Life will not sit quietly in a corner reading a book and respecting our need for calm just because we have a looming deadline or a new idea we are eager to explore. Life lives to mess with us.”

Given how well I seem to understand Life’s perverse nature, you’d think I would have known what would happen if I complained about an upcoming birthday.

My birthday was yesterday. I have spent the last week sick with Covid. Nancy and I made plans to travel for the weekend, to get down to St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge to do some hiking and birdwatching and photography. We had to cancel the trip. She made me a cake last weekend, while I was writing the aforementioned posts. We wound up freezing it, because with Covid stealing my sense of smell, I couldn’t taste it at all.

“You want to complain about a birthday?” Life said. “I’ll give you a birthday to complain about.”

Jokes and sarcasm aside, I have to say, “Message received.”

Birthdays, someone once said, are the price we pay for growing older. We love them as kids, of course. We want nothing more than to add to the running total, to get Older, because with Older comes perks, not to mention presents. The presents get better with age. The perks too, for a while, and then less so. But my dad always used to say about getting older, “it’s better than the alternative.”

I won’t spend a lot of time on the “yes, life is hard, but I have so much to be thankful for” thing. I touched on this last week and it remains true. My life IS hard these days. I know precious few people who have it easy. And I am deeply grateful for the life I have, private and professional. But reading back through last Monday’s post, I realize I wasn’t complaining so much as struggling to accept what I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to prevent. I was down, and I wrote about it.

And again, Life was, like, “You’re think you’re down now? Hold my beer.”

So, here I am, on the day after my birthday, at the end of a truly crappy week of fever and coughing and isolation and in-home masking and tasteless, aroma-less food . . . and I feel much better about turning a year older than I would have imagined possible when writing last week’s post. Like some Jimmy-Stewart-from-It’s-A-Wonderful-Life wannabe, I have seen that things could be substantially worse than they are, that being a youthful (not to mention immature) 60 is really not half bad. It’s not that I was imagining myself as a Covid patient forever, but rather that I was made hyper-aware of all the things I value in my routine, all the things I love to do — things that were denied me by the fever and taste-loss and social distancing. My morning workout, my walks, my regular work schedule, relaxed time with Nancy, get-togethers with friends, bird walks and photo walks and signing along with my guitar (my voice is still recovering), good wine and good whisky and all the wonderful foods Nancy and I make and eat.

The everyday, the humdrum, the same old same old — it turns out, I love that shit. My routine is pretty darn good, and the little things I enjoy each day — my morning smoothie and afternoon iced coffee, our household guac recipe — mean more to me than I realized, at least until I couldn’t taste them anymore. Life’s challenges remain, and, yeah, I’m sixty fucking years old. But I’m good, thanks. And when I’m not, I know that the people I love have my back. There are far, far worse things.

Wishing you all a wonderful week.

Bell Bridge Books, Belle Books, Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe, Invasives, Writing

Professional Wednesday: What Holds Me Back, part I — Life Issues

As we turn the calendar to March, I thought I would turn to a new series of posts in my Professional Wednesday feature. This month, as I struggle with a bit of work-related inertia, I have decided some might find it helpful to read about “What Holds Me Back.” Because let’s be honest — those of us who seek to make a living as professional creators face no shortage of obstacles to productivity. We have to be self-motivated, we have to be disciplined, we have to be imaginative and prolific on demand. None of this is easy and at times it seems hobgoblins lurk in every corner, threatening to undermine even the most sincere determination to get stuff done.

What — or who — are my hobgoblins? How do they disrupt my work patterns, and what do I do to keep them at bay? These are the questions I hope to address in the next several Wednesday posts.

This week, I address perhaps the most obvious and formidable hobgoblin of them all: Life.

Life is a fickle bastard, with a cruel streak a mile wide, a perverse — at times evil — sense of humor, and a preternatural knack for intruding at the absolute worst moment. But Life can also be charming, deeply attractive, kind, generous, and downright fun. This is part of what makes Life such a difficult opponent in the battle over productivity. Life is as changeable as March weather, as unpredictable as the best storyline, and as relentless as time itself. Life happens constantly; Life will not sit quietly in a corner reading a book and respecting our need for calm just because we have a looming deadline or a new idea we are eager to explore. Life lives to mess with us.

All strange metaphors aside, in my experience, relating to my own work output and also my interactions with other professionals, general life disruptions are responsible for the vast majority of missed deadlines and punted obligations. Sometimes it’s the (relatively) small stuff — a kid with a bad cold or stomach bug, a blown car engine or flat tire, a flooded basement or loss of power. Sometimes it’s more serious than that — an ailing elderly parent, a dire illness in the family, a failing marriage, the death of a friend or relative. I’ve faced my share of such things — not all, but enough; every one of us has.

And in the short term, there is nothing we can do about them. Life imposes its own exigencies. When our kid is sick or our parents are fading or a relative or friend is in need, we have no choice but to prioritize the people we love and the obligations we’ve taken on as parents and partners, offspring and siblings and friends. No one with a thread of compassion or decency should punish or blame us for this. Those who would, do so at their own risk, because eventually they, too, will be on the receiving end of Life’s caprice.

The problem comes later, after the crisis has passed, but while the aftermath lingers. Nearly two years ago, when our daughter received her cancer diagnosis, I withdrew from . . . well, pretty much everything. I told my agent and editor that I wouldn’t be able to make a deadline that was still a couple of months away. I stopped seeing friends. I hunkered down with my fear and my grief and my anger, and I essentially surrendered to this terrible thing Life had done to my family and me. I was sure I couldn’t work through it, and so I didn’t even think it worthwhile to make the attempt.

Nancy responded differently, not because she is better or stronger than I am (although she might well be both . . .) but because she deals with emotional strain differently. She is great at compartmentalizing, which is good, because at the time she had a high-stress, high-profile job. In the time since, she has advanced to a position that is even more high-stress and high-profile. Her ability to compartmentalize has served her well.

I don’t have that ability. I can’t compartmentalize. But, I realized, I had a different ability I could harness. I had learned years ago — when we lost my parents, and later when we lost my eldest brother — to channel my grief and pain into my art. And it didn’t take me long after hearing the news of our daughter’s illness to understand that was precisely what I needed to do. Within a week of calling my agent and editor to tell them I was pulling back, I sent them new messages. I am working through this. I will make my deadline.

INVASIVES, by David B. Coe (Jacket art courtesy of Belle Books)And I did. The book was Invasives, by the way. It contains the best character work I’ve ever done, and that is no coincidence.

I suffer from anxiety and panic disorder. I sometimes walk the edge of depression. I know as well as anyone that coping with life is hard, and that glib, easy-fix solutions to the shit life throws at us are worse than useless. Such facile responses can actually hurt, because they suggest to those of us who struggle that the problem isn’t the circumstance but rather our inability to deal with it.

But I know as well, from my own experience, that we don’t have to be whole to create. Life elicits emotion and those emotions can overwhelm and paralyze. The thing is, though, we’re creators, and emotion is our bread and butter. Yes, at times the emotions we feel in life’s rawest moments are like a downed electrical wire. We touch them at our own risk. As I found a couple of years ago, however, we can be resilient in the face of the worst circumstances. Long before I was ready to interact with other people, I was ready, even eager, to take hold of that live wire and use it for something constructive and healing.

Life can disrupt our art. We all know this. But we are alchemists at heart. We can turn grief and hurt and fear and anger into golden moments on the page (or the canvas or the guitar or the stage — whatever). And, for me at least, that is how I keep life from holding me back.

Keep writing.

Blogging, D.B. Jackson, David B. Coe

Monday Musings: Facing Down a Big Birthday

I am staring down the barrel of a big birthday. This time next week, I’ll have passed a dubious milestone, and the fact is, right now I’m struggling a bit with the whole getting older thing.

Yes, I know the clichés. Even on my birthday, I only get a day older. Age is a state of mind. Growing older beats the alternative.

None of them is helping right now.

I remember feeling similarly ten years ago, as I neared my last milestone birthday. I was (and am again) acutely aware of being far closer to my dotage than to my youth. Since that last big birthday, I’ve lost a brother, watched as my older daughter battles serious illness, lost my mother-in-law and a brother-in-law, and more friends than I care to count. Life has been challenging, and at the same time wondrous and fun and rewarding, making it feel all the more precious.

Sometimes I write posts with a lesson in mind, or as a way of dispensing what little wisdom I might have. Other times, I write searching for answers. This post doesn’t fit neatly into either of those patterns. I have no wisdom today. I don’t know what lesson I might offer to myself, much less to someone else. And, frankly, I am not seeking advice from others. As I say, I know the platitudes. I am deeply grateful for all I have and all I have accomplished. And I am certain the answer for what ails me right now lies entirely within.

I think in part I am eager — impatient, even — to get on with the next phase of my life. Nancy and I have raised our children, we have enjoyed our careers, we have worked hard to set ourselves up financially for what we call “retirement,” although I don’t think it will really be a retirement in any traditional sense. I don’t intend to stop working, and while Nancy is ready for whatever might be next, she is also open to any and all possibilities in that respect. All I know is that I am looking forward to changing the pace of the life we share so that we can enjoy each other and the things we love doing together.

And so in a way, my resistance to this birthday is rooted in that impatience, but also in the understanding that the work we did to get to this point in our shared life took thirty-plus years and swooped by in a flash of laughter and love, struggle and grief. The time we have left to enjoy the fruits of that work feels potentially too brief by comparison.

When Nancy and I started dating (in our mid-late twenties), we told each other we would give the relationship eighty years, and if at the end of those eighty years together we felt the relationship wasn’t working anymore, we’d go our separate ways. Obviously, we said this with tongues firmly in cheek. But in all honestly, I want my eighty years. Every one of them. Right now, that romantic fantasy is bumping up against the reality of my 60th birthday.

I have written before of my emotional health issues. I have been candid about my struggles and also about the comfort and growth I have found in therapy. I have learned that whatever I am working on at a particular moment rarely impacts my mood and health in a vacuum. It’s all connected, even if I don’t always see the connections right away. I am certain my current hyper-awareness of my own mortality is tied to my brother Bill’s death five years ago, and also to my ongoing worries about my daughter’s health. I know it is connected as well to lingering professional ambitions and dissatisfaction with elements of my career path.

This is what I meant when I said the answers lie within. I know that next week I will only be seven days older than I am now, not a year. I know as well that the coming decade will be filled with . . . well, with life — with pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, good days and bad. Many have told me that they have LOVED life in their sixties. I intend to as well.

But to draw inspiration from the incomparable Ned Ryerson, I also know that first step is going to be a doozy . . . .

Have a great week.