Today I have the honor of sharing my bookshelves over at Modern Mrs. Darcy, a blog run by my friend and fellow writer, Anne Bogel. Head over there to see the book I’m proudest to own, the books I keep within reach, and how I organize my books (spoiler: I don’t).
If you like to read books or talk about books or if you just enjoy a well-written blog, then you need to add Modern Mrs. Darcy to your list of must-read blogs. Check it out.
When I started this whole Kickstarter thing three weeks ago, I was fairly confident I could raise the $3,500 I was trying to raise. Then you guys came along and shattered my expectations (in all the best ways) and we hit the initial goal in two days. You had me scrambling to come up with some stretch goals that would make the next 28 days exciting.
At the end of last week I met with someone who wants to help me hit my $10,000 goal, sending me and the family on a fun little tour promoting The Day the Angels Fell. You won’t see the grand total on Kickstarter because we’re working out a payment plan, but as of right now, it looks like this is going to happen, so…
The Day the Angels Fell is hitting the road in April, 2015! But I need your help (again). We need places to go. We need you to introduce us to your book-loving friends. So here’s what I’m asking you to consider.
1) Anyone who contributes to the Kickstarter campaign at the $199 level (by Monday, November 17th) will automatically become a stop on our book tour. You get 10 free paperback copies of the book and one limited-edition hardcover – you can sell the books or give them away to your friends. We’ll come to you, anywhere in the lower 48 states and spend the evening with you and your friends talking about the book. I’ll do a reading, and it will be loads of fun (don’t worry, you don’t have to put me, Maile and the kids up for the night – we’ll find a hotel close by).
2) Maybe you don’t have $199 to spend on books. If you’d still like to be a stop on the book tour, and you think you can get at least ten people together at your house or a nearby coffee shop, then let me know and we’ll consider adding you to the tour.
As most of you know, my family is always looking for an excuse to travel, and ever since our four-month, cross-country trip a few years ago, we’ve been itching to hit the road again. So we’re going to. And we’d love to stop in and say hello to you at some point on the journey.
So, get over to Kickstarter and make your $199 donation to solidify your place on our book tour (we’ll arrange a date in April 2015 that works for you). Or send me an email at shawnsmucker(at)yahoo(dot)com if you think you’d like to organize a gathering of people to talk about the book.
Thanks again for all of your support with this book. I can’t wait for you to read it.
(If you’re interested in any of the other rewards, such as pre-ordering a paperback copy, purchasing a hard back copy – which comes with an invitation for two to the book launch here in Lancaster – or signing up for a writing class I’ll be running, check out the Kickstarter campaign HERE.)
I am not a morning person. I am also not a new clothes kind of person. I am also not a shower-every-day person. I can’t decide if I lack these things because I write for a living or if I write for a living because I lack these things and therefore am not qualified for anything else.
I can relate with something Anne Lamott once said about herself: I am completely unemployable.
But on Wednesday morning I rolled out of bed for an early-morning (7am) coffee with a good friend. There are few other things that will get me out of bed that early. I put on a baseball cap, the clothes I had worn the day before, and as I was stumbling out the door I remembered to brush my teeth. Which is a major win.
Whenever I wake up early and go outside I wonder why I’m NOT more of a morning person. It’s actually pretty invigorating, walking out into the city early in the morning when the traffic is just beginning to slip out on to the roads. I heard somewhere that the morning is the safest time to be in any city, because the trouble-makers are mostly in bed. It seems this is true, as everyone I crossed paths with that morning was very kind and wished me a good morning.
As I turned down Duke Street I was finally starting to wake up, otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed what I noticed. A carpet moved. That’s right: just a normal, indoor/outdoor carpet on someone’s large porch rustled, as if it was alive. I slowed down. Then I saw the man.
He was sleeping under the carpet. It was a rather chilly morning, and he turned over under the carpet much the way I had been tossing and turning in my warm, soft bed all night. He had a flat, rather white pillow and wore a winter cap on his head. His black hair was long and greasy. I sighed and kept walking.
“The kingdom of the heavens is among us!” Jesus called out to the crowds, and what an amazing idea, that heaven is here, in the streets and the houses, the alleys and the railroad tracks. The porches and the breezeways. The kingdom of the heavens.
But as long as there are men and women sleeping under thin carpets on cold nights, we still have a lot of work to do.
Please keep doing what you’re doing. Please keep feeding the hungry, visiting the widows and the imprisoned. Please continue to fight human trafficking and free us from our addictions. Whatever you are doing for the least of us, you are doing for Christ himself.
Please keep doing what you’re doing. And if you’re not doing anything, find someone who is and then help them.
Today I’m over at Deeper Culture writing about the flannel boards from my childhood Sunday School and how they’ve led me to make up my own ending to one of the stories:
But there was one story that always left me wondering. It was the one with flannel Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden in their new clothes of flannel animal skins. They looked sad and dejected. Behind them, two flannel cherubim guarded the entrance to the Tree of Life, and a flannel flaming sword glowed, reminding me of Saturday morning cartoons and the sword of He-Man, Master of the Universe.
That story of the first two people being sent out of the garden stuck in my mind because when I was a child I always wondered, “What happened to those two angels guarding the Tree of Life? Are they still standing there, flashing sword burning fire?”
You can read the rest of the post HERE.
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Today I’m giving away a free copy of Matthew Paul Turner’s wonderful children’s book, God Made Light. All you have to do in order to be entered to win the book is leave a comment here letting me know your favorite children’s book. Good luck!
“Blessed are the meek,” Father David reads, “for they shall inherit the earth.”
There’s a weight to those words as we sit in St. James Episcopal Church. Outside, the sun emerges from behind the clouds and, for a moment, the church is lit up, the stained-glass windows glowing. But then the clouds sweep in again, and the light fades.
* * * * *
I walk through the early-morning city, traffic not yet lined up on the streets, the sun not yet risen above the eastern line of buildings. There are cars on the street, but not many, not yet. As I walk, steam billows from my mouth, from the exhaust vents of buildings, from those few cars that drive past. We create small, impermanent clouds that a nearly-winter breeze is quick to blow away.
Then I see him, a man approaching on a wheel chair. His lifeless legs are folded up under him, and he pushes himself along, strong arms, hard features. He has gray hair and hasn’t shaved for a few weeks. His eyes are nervous. He glances up at me as we cross paths, and he mutters something so quietly that I can’t tell if it’s to me or to himself.
“Cold, sure is cold.”
I stop and turn and watch him roll away from me, up Prince Street, and I wonder.
Workers pull their trucks to the side of the road and jackhammers began tearing into the sidewalk, exposing the earth inches below the concrete, exposing just how shallow these cities of ours really are.
* * * * *
I come home later in the day and the sun is warm and the traffic is heavier. I approach the stretch of sidewalk that had been torn up and in its place is wet, shimmering cement, dark gray and waiting. They’ve made quick work of it and wrapped it all in yellow caution tape.
I have this urge to run home, collect my family and bring them back to that spot so that we can each put one hand in the wet cement. I picture the seven hands in a row, drying, filling with dust and dirt, the years wearing away at the prints. I want to leave something permanent behind, some reminder that we have been here. Though the rest of this shallow city may pass away, I want to remain.
But that’s not possible. Not really.
I turn the corner and there’s Melinda sitting on her milk crate across from our house on James Street. She waves, and I wave back. I wonder if she’s been evicted yet, as she had predicted. I wonder where someone like Melinda would go, in this cold. There’s Water Street Rescue Mission and a few other places. Where would I go, if that was me?
On Sunday, just a few days later, I ask my kids what they would do on that cold day if they were homeless.
“I guess I’d climb into that dumpster,” Cade says. We walk slower as we pass the large bin full of trash, and the weight of that thought makes a deep impression in the wet cement of our minds.
* * * * *
“…for they shall inherit the earth.”
In my naivete, I always thought of “the earth” in that phrase as meaning “everything.” The meek will, eventually, have it all. But maybe it’s not that, not even close. Maybe the meek will inherit the actual earth, the dirt, which at first sounds like a raw deal, right? Who wants to inherit dirt?
But then I think about this city and the impermanence of so much of what we create. These streets, these buildings…it wouldn’t take long for them to crumble and erode away. But long after that happened, you know what would still remain?
The dirt beneath it. The earth.
Maybe when the meek inherit the earth, what they’re really inheriting is the stuff that is permanent. The stuff that isn’t a few inches shallow. It’s not “the glitz,” as a friend of mine recently said, but the stuff on which everything else is built.
It makes me wonder what I’m inheriting, and what I want to inherit.
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We hit the first Kickstarter stretch goal for my upcoming novel, so there will be some awesome illustrations in the book! I can’t wait to show you a few. The campaign is currently at $4,511, and if we can get to $6,000 in the next few weeks that means all the contributors will receive a free audio version of the book in addition to their regular rewards. Keep spreading the word!
I’ve been on a few podcasts lately in which I’ve been interviewed about my upcoming novel, The Day the Angels Fell. I had fun recording them with some great folks and you might enjoy listening to them. Here are the links:
“How to Crush Kickstarter,” recorded with The Storymen: Matt Mikalatos, JR Forasteros, and Clay Morgan.
“Fallen Angels, Runaway Truck Ramps, and Kickstarter Campaigns,” recorded with Eric Wyatt
“Shawn Smucker on Writing Fiction” on the Schnozcast with Bryan Allain
And coming soon, an interview I did with David Mantel on “The Broken Light Show.”
I remember being a freshmen in high school, a bundle of nerves and hormones on the first day. I remember going into History class and sitting in the back – I was not a front-of-the-class kind of guy. The teacher was a young lady out of college only a few years, and to start off the class she took a small piece of chalk and, beginning on the far left side of the front chalkboard, drew a long straight line. It stretched through that dark background, finite and sharp.
Then she went back and listed off some of the more important events in the history of North America during that time: exploration, revolution, independence, Civil War, industrial revolution, Vietnam. Etcetera, etcetera. Event after event, and we sat there taking it all in. Five hundred years in twenty feet.
But now, 23 years later, I have to smile when I think of that long straight line. That’s not how time works.
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My parents dropped off a box yesterday full of old game systems from my growing up years: Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64. My kids thought Christmas had come early, so tonight we broke out the N64 and I introduced them to the greatness that is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. They were as impressed as I had been when I first played that game as a senior in college.
We turned on the game, and there it was: SHASHMAI. The mashed-up username my girlfriend, my sister and I had used to save our progress. Shawn, Ashley, Maile. Our old game was still on there, 16 years later. I had flashbacks of playing that game in my parents basement (then making out with Maile). I remembered it was a game Maile and I had enjoyed even after we were first married and living in Florida, far from our family and friends.
In that moment, time circled back on itself. Maile came into the room, sat down with Leo on her lap, and smiled.
“We never imagined we’d be playing that with our five children, did we?”
Time is not a long straight line, flying past us. Time is a circle, always rotating, always doubling back, taking your breath away with its unexpected returnings.
* * * * *
Later in the night I began to load the dishwasher, but I can’t do such mundane work without music, so I went into the dining room and turned on David Gray.
Please forgive me if I act a little strange
For I know not what I do
And suddenly I was back in England again, driving the Mini out of London after a fourteen hour work day. Or I was sitting in our little dining room with Maile, just the two of us again, starting a new life 3500 miles from anything familiar. Or we were hitting a pub on a Saturday night with Ben and Shar, or friends from church, ordering Bangers and Mash, Shepherd’s Pie, or Lemon Chicken with Breaded Mushrooms.
For a moment, one sweet fleeting moment, I was there again! I was! Right back there in the dreary winter weather and the fireplace. I was splitting wood in the winter and listening to the lambs in the spring just outside our window.
Time is not a long straight line on a blackboard. Time returns for those who are vigilant.
