The woman waves me down outside the hospital and climbs in, talking on her phone. She’s in nurse’s garb, her hair tired up in a scarf over her head. I pull away, and it’s rush hour, the streets are clogged, so I hit some alleys in an attempt to keep moving.
She is on her phone for most of the trip, but as we turn onto her street, she hangs up, stares at the phone, and sighs.
“What a day.”
“One of those?” I ask quietly.
“One of those. You know, it’s hard working in a hospital sometimes. The stuff you see. And then you see that same stuff in your own family. It’s hard.”
“My aunt died in that hospital a year and a half ago,” I say. “Cancer.”
“All kinds of cancer today,” she says, almost as if she’s talking to herself. “What stage is it? Everyone wants to know. ‘It’s in the bone,’ the doctor says, or, ‘It’s in the stomach.’ And at this time of day, you can’t find out anything.”
She tells me how long she’s been in Lancaster. She tells me about where she worked before she came here.
“But today,” she says, smiling, “they took me off the regular floor and put me in the psych ward. There are all kinds of personalities on that floor.”
She laughs, and it’s a lively sound. Outside the car, the leafless trees move together in a slight wind. Brake lights ahead. We stop.
“You know,” she says, “today I was in a woman’s room, and she told me she was the author of Harry Potter. I said, ‘Really?’ and she told me yes, she is the author of Harry Potter, and now she’s working on a book for her future husband’s ex-wife. So she knows she’s going to be married, and she knows her future husband will have an ex.”
She laughs again.
“You can pull over here,” she says. “This is fine.”
I stop the car. She gets out, then leans back in the door.
“So, keep your eyes out for that book!” she says, laughing again.
2018 is shaping up to be an exciting year. On July 3rd, the sequel to The Day the Angels Fell enters the big, wide world: The Edge of Over There. I have had such a generous response to the first book, and I know a lot of you are looking forward to the sequel. Stay tuned as we get closer to the release date.
But one of the most exciting things about this year is that I’ll be at a few retreats and book-signings. Here are a few places our paths might cross in 2018:
On February 13th, I’ll be at the Christian Product Expo here in Lancaster, signing copies of The Day the Angels Fell. If you’re a bookstore owner and you plan on being there, stop by and say hi.
On Saturday, April 7th, I’ll be doing a fiction-writing presentation at the Lancaster Christian Writers one-day conference. I’ll be talking about writing magical realism, from idea to publication. If you pre-register, it’s only $55 for the entire day, including lunch!
From April 12th to the 14th, I’ll be at the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. I’ll be presenting on a panel about co-writing (with Seth Haines and Kathy Khang), and I’ll also be doing a fiction writing workshop on how to develop new ideas and jump-start them into novel length. I was at FFW two years ago and it was amazing, both the content of the panelists and the online friends I finally got to meet in real life. I highly recommend it.
From John Steinbeck’s journal entry on January 29th, 1951 [Monday] as recorded in the book, Journal of a Novel
“Dear Pat: How did the time pass and how did it grow so late. Have we learned anything from the passage of time? Are we more mature, wiser, more perceptive, kinder? We have known each other now for centuries and still I remember the first time and the last time.”
“We come now to the book.”
January 4th, 2018, Entry #0
I will begin this next novel in the dark days of a Pennsylvania winter. Hopefully, by the time the summer sun stretches the hours into the longest day of the year, the first draft will be finished. I am aiming for 80,000 to 100,000 words (because the lower number is what’s in my contract), but how can you ever know how long it will take to tell a story?
First, let me tell you why I’m journaling my way through writing this next novel.
Steinbeck’s Journal of a Novel has always fascinated me. It is made up of his morning writing exercises, the ones he wrote every day before working on his masterpiece, East of Eden. He wrote by hand, and he would write one journal entry on the left-side page, and then he would write one page of the novel on the right-hand side. I found the journal entries compelling in their honesty, but I have also been intrigued by the premise because of how deliberate and important the journal entries seem to him. I have often wondered if I need to slow down my writing, think more clearly about it, explicitly talk about what I’m trying to accomplish in each day’s words. I wonder if this will help me work through various issues surrounding the story.
So, that’s what I’m going to do. Or at least begin to try to do – I can’t guarantee I will finish it. I can’t promise that, once I begin, it will not feel more like an obstacle to the writing of this novel than otherwise. I guess we’ll see.
I am writing this particular entry, dubbed #0, as an introduction of sorts, explaining what I want to accomplish and what I’ve done up to this point. To bring you up to speed: I started work on this unnamed novel – I’ll have to come up with something better than “Unnamed Novel” for the purposes of this journal – about nine months ago, stumbling my way through the first 23,850 words. I say stumbling because I am learning this about myself, that when I start a story it emerges first from a character, and then from a trouble this character has. From there it lurches forward of its own accord for quite some time, but I know now from experience that I must begin guiding the lurching beast at some point or it will meander off into some dark and unrecoverable place. At the 23,000-word mark, I could tell it needed guidance. But it was also at that point that another project took my attention. I had to set this story aside all these months, but now it is the next book in line, and I am eager to write it.
This is not to say the last nine months have been without work on this story. It has simply been interior work. It is kind of a weary metaphor, perhaps overused in the world of creativity, but here it is, nonetheless: pregnancy comes to mind. The last nine months have been full of mostly unseen work, interior work. I have spent many hours, mostly while driving for Uber, thinking about this book, getting to know the characters and places and problems in my mind. The story has changed and solidified during this last nine months. It begins to feel less like a story I am making up than a story someone once told me, or a family tale passed down. I am ready to write it.
To clarify, for those who have been following my writing up until this point:
– My first novel, a YA book of magical realism, came out in September, 2017, and was called The Day the Angels Fell.
– The sequel to that book, The Edge of Over There, is already written and comes out July 3rd, 2018.
– A work of nonfiction that I wrote with the help of my Syrian refugee neighbor, called Once, We Were Strangers, releases just after that, in October of 2018.
Those three books are all written, so now I finally have time to work on this novel, which has no name and will come out in the summer of 2019.
Here are my goals – to write one, short journal entry and then to write at least 1,000 words in the story every weekday. Simple, right?
Come along on this journey, if you’d like, and I’ll send you the journal entries I write about writing. I won’t give too many details about the plot or the story itself (although I’m sure a few things will slip in). But I will talk about what I’m trying to accomplish with the development, pace, and all manner of other things having to do with writing this story. I’ll talk about where I’m writing and how it’s going. I’ll talk about how many times the children interrupt me and when I feel like the writing is no good and working past the voices in my head. I’ll probably talk about that last one a lot.
I’ll be emailing these out every morning as soon as I write them. Expect plenty of typos. And some entries that are boring or don’t make sense. And some that arrive first thing in the morning and others that hit your inbox at 10pm. If you’d like to receive the inside story behind the the writing of this novel, you can sign up here:
I’m entering 2018, not with a word, but with a question.
* * * * *
Leo is three years old. We walk into his room at bedtime. The city is cold outside his window, and the radiator at the foot of his bed is hot to the touch. I hope he never has to know the cold of those streets on a winter night having nowhere else to go. We draw a little closer to each other in the dark.
He wants to go to bed in a “fort,” so I tuck a blanket in the top bunk, draping it down over the bottom bunk where he sleeps. I turn off the light.
He is a creature of habit, although I haven’t yet figured out if this is due to age or personality. We sing the same songs every night. We pray the same prayers.
“Daddy,” he asks. “Will you stay with me?”
“Daddy,” he asks. “Will there be storms or fireworks tonight?”
“Daddy, will you lay beside me?”
So, I climb into the bed like a giant and he moves over and we lay there quietly in the dark. Sometimes, I start to drift off, and I turn over on my side. My eyelids are heavy. The warmth from the radiator slips into his bed. I take a deep breath and close my eyes. But he is not a fan of when I turn my back towards him.
“Daddy,” he says quietly. “I want to see your face.”
* * * * *
Many wise people throughout the ages have written about seeking the face of God, and at the beginning of this new year, I’m wondering more and more what that means. Crack open that phrase and what will I find? This force that moves the universe, that keeps everything racing away from everything else, that wakes up the maple trees in the spring and circulates the air in the atmosphere and reminds the fish and birds how to get home…what does the face of that force look like? And what could it possibly mean, seeking the face of that incredible force?
I don’t know about all of that, and I’m not sure exactly what it means to seek God’s face, but I know what Leo wants when he wants to see my face. He wants to know that I’m aware of him. He wants to know he is not alone in the world. He wants to know that even when he falls asleep, even when he is at his most vulnerable, even when the scariest things in the entire world have a tendency of turning up, that I’ll be there, eyes on him.
Is this what it means to seek the face of God?
I confess: I don’t know. But it seems a compelling question to unpack this year.
* * * * *
In his book, The Man Who Was Thursday, GK Chesterton writes,
“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front…”
Could that be it? In seeking the face of God, are we actually seeking something in the world that is not brutal, but instead something in the world that is the kindest and gentlest and best thing we could ever find?
How does that change the way I live, if my main motivation in living is to find the beautiful things in the world? How does that change every interaction I have with someone else? How does that change the way I think about myself?
* * * * *
Daddy, I want to see your face.
In about a week, I start work on my next novel. I’ll be journaling before each day’s writing session, and you can receive those journal entries, a sort of look inside the writing of a novel, in your inbox by signing up here: http://eepurl.com/dfxFoP
It’s after 9pm in this small city on a week night which means light traffic, empty alleys. It’s cold outside. The long-haired, younger-than-middle-aged man slides into the back seat. He sits up very straight. He has perceptive eyes behind his glasses.
Usually, I can tell in the first ten seconds or so if someone wants to talk. Either they’ll start a conversation or I’ll ask a question that sets them off to the races. After a few seconds in the car with this guy, I figure he is the non-talking type, so I settle in for the ten-minute drive. I give him the courtesy of a question, basically my way of saying, if you want to talk, you can talk.
“How’s your night going?” I ask. He surprises me. Turns out he’s a talker. And there’s something striking about his voice. He sounds like he’s straight off of NPR or the national news.
He teaches at one of the local colleges. This was a night course, one of those three-hour freshman communication courses everyone dreads. He laughs. He knows it’s the truth, and he says it again. I go through my normal round of questions.
“How long have you been in Lancaster?”
“Do you like it here?”
“Where are you from?”
When he says he is from the deep south, I do a double-take.
“Did you grow up there?” I ask him. “Because you have absolutely no southern accent.”
He smiles.
“Everyone says that. Actually, when I was young, my grandmother paid for me to take speech classes so I wouldn’t have an accent.”
“Really?” I ask him. This amazes me. This intrigues me. That someone would pay to change the way their grandson sounds, purely for aesthetics.
“Yeah,” he shrugs. “She wanted me to be taken seriously. She didn’t think I could reach my full potential with a southern accent.”
“Huh,” I say.
“Yeah, it’s a little strange,” he says. “When I go home, and people ask where I’m from, and I say I’m from there, they don’t believe me. I feel a little bit like I’m not from anywhere anymore.”
I think to myself that it says a lot about his grandmother. I’d love to hear her story.
“Have you read this book?” the woman asked as she picked up a copy of The Day the Angels Fell. The question was directed at my wife, Maile, while she worked at my mom’s market stand. Mai was taken aback – the woman’s question came out intense, pointed.
Have you read this book?
“Actually,” Maile said. “My husband wrote it.”
“Really,” the woman said, examining the back. “Could it be possible death is a gift?”
Maile waited.
“You know,” the woman said, “This was me. I almost died ten years ago – the doctors gave me a 10% chance of living. My son was eight years old at the time. He’s never really recovered from that. He’s very anxious about death.”
She turned the book over.
“What gave your husband the idea of writing about death like this?” she asked Maile, and Maile told her the story of me spending time in Turkey with a missionary who was dying of cancer.
“I need to read this,” the woman said quietly. “Maybe it’s a book I could work through with my son. Maybe it will help him be less afraid.”
She bought the book, and before she left she stared intently at Maile again.
“This is a God thing,” she said before she walked away. “I know it is. This is a God thing.”
* * * * *
There are few things that make me happier than when someone is caught up in the main question from The Day the Angels Fell: “Could it be possible that death is a gift?” I don’t know the answer to that, for sure. I have my suspicions. And I love it when you folks come along for the ride, enter into the questions with me.
Maybe you know someone who needs to read this book? Here are just a few places where you can grab a copy in time for Christmas:
