Today is a Very Big Day

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(If you’d like to head straight over to my Kickstarter campaign, click HERE.)

Today’s the day. My Kickstarter campaign for The Day the Angels Fell begins. This means that if you’d like to help me publish my first novel (by preordering a copy, or by hosting a book party, or by taking a writing class that I’m offering, or in a number of other ways), all you have to do is head over to my Kickstarter page and make a donation in exchange for your preferred reward. If I raise the entire amount of $3,500 in 30 days, then I get the money and you get your reward. If I don’t raise the total amount, no money changes hands and no rewards are given.

It all feels rather adventurous, I have to admit, sort of like the day we packed up the Big Blue Bus and hit the road for four months. I’m hoping to avoid any sudden loss of brakes, any major pitfalls, and any wrong turns…but producing a Kickstarter campaign is probably like any other adventure, which means the unforeseen will definitely happen.

So, if you want to help me publish my first novel, head on over to my Kickstarter campaign. I’ve got more information over there about the book itself, including a video where I explain the origins of the story and how my kids helped me create it.

Some of you have asked me how you can help. One of the best things you can do is to help spread the word on Facebook, Twitter, and to your friends via email or in real life. If I sell about 250 paperback copies of the book, I’ll hit my goal, and this is totally possible with your help. If you have a blog or a podcast and are willing to talk about this campaign there, do an interview with me, or post a guest post by me, just let me know.

Thanks, once again, for the ways you all support my writing life. I continue to be humbled and amazed at how many of you show up here every week to read my blog. I was blown away last week by the incredible support you all gave me when I shared the news about this upcoming novel – a few of you even reached out to me privately with donations and words of encouragement. Thank you.

Seriously.

Thank you.

So…here we go.

To check out the Kickstarter campaign, click HERE.

The Big Announcement

Concentration from Flickr via Wylio
© 2011 John Morgan, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

So, the big announcement:

I’m doing it. I’m publishing a novel.

* * * * *

Thirty years ago, if you turned on to South New Holland Road off of 772 and drove for about a quarter mile, past the Amish schoolhouse, to a strange little intersection where Hershey Church Road bore off to the right, and if you followed Hershey Church Road for a few hundred yards until you came to the first lane on the left, and if you drove back that long lane to the farmhouse, and if you walked past the large vegetable garden and under the two large oak trees, you might have seen me sitting on the front porch, reading a book.

If it was thirty years ago, you probably would have found me reading The Hardy Boys or The Black Stallion. Twenty-seven years ago? I was probably knee-deep in The Chronicles of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings.

I wasn’t picky, though. I read anything my school librarian recommended. I devoured books.

Years passed. We moved away from the farmhouse. But I kept reading. Soon, I didn’t want to only read stories – I wanted to create them myself.

* * * * *

This first book that I’m releasing, The Day the Angels Fell, is a book I wrote for my children because it’s about a very difficult subject: death. As Madeleine L’Engle so aptly said,

“You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

But I’m hoping adults will pick it up and enjoy it, too. Even if it’s too difficult for them.

* * * * *

I’ll tell you more about the book when the Kickstarter releases on Monday. For those of you who don’t know how Kickstarter works, here’s a quick summary. People pledge an amount of money to help a project come to fruition. For this project, people will pledge money to help my novel get published (because it costs money to publish a book – $3500 in this case for editing and cover design and digital formatting).

There are various levels that you will be able to contribute: $15 gets you a signed, paperback copy of the book; $49 gets you a limited-edition hardback copy and an invite to the exciting book launch party. $169 gets you the hardback plus a spot in a writing class I’ll be running early next year. Some of the other rewards include personal writing coaching, me helping you self-publish your own book, and even me writing a small book for you about your family or yourself or your business or your charity.

And there are all kinds of other rewards as well, which you can check out next Monday when the project releases.

But the important thing to remember with Kickstarter is this: if I don’t raise the entire amount, I don’t get any of the money. And the rewards go unfulfilled.

How can you help? Donate to the project and help me spread the word next week. Mark your calendars for Monday, October 20th, and help me get off to a good start.

* * * * *

How do I feel about it? I’m still kind of terrified. What if I don’t raise the money? What if I do raise the money and then release a book no one likes?

But I’m also kind of over it. I’ve gotten to the point where I have written a story I really love and I want to share it. It’s time to tell fear to stop being a jerk. It’s time for me to move on, through the fear, and see what lies on the other side.

Stay tuned!

Help Me Decide: Should I Use a Pseudonym For My Fiction?

Red Masked Josh from Flickr via Wylio
© 2006 Bill Stilwell, Flickr | CC-BY-SA | via Wylio

So, what’s in a name?

When I write fiction, I feel like an entirely different person, certainly not the same individual who writes the projects that I write for other people. There’s a separation in my mind. Healthy? I don’t know, but there’s the fiction writing me, and there’s the writing books for other people me, and the two feel very separate.

Which is why I always imagined that when I finally wrote a novel, I’d write it under a different name, a pseudonym, something like Shawn Merrill (Merrill is actually my first name). Why?

1 – It feels like a different person writing, so a different name feels appropriate.

2 – I’d like to keep a soft line between the writing I do for other people and the writing I do for myself. What if I write something in my fiction that turns people off from using me to write their nonfiction?

3 – The novels I write are not “Christian.” Ugh. I hate using that term to describe writing, or books, or music, but it’s how people talk about these things. I think I’d feel more free to write the fiction I want to write if it wasn’t as closely tied to the writing I’ve already done, which has been mostly Christian memoirs.

4 – If someone loved my fiction and looked up my author page, I don’t think they’d be interested in reading the nonfiction that I’ve written. And probably vice versa.

On the other hand, someone I was talking to recently discouraged me from using a pen name. She said that the world needed more Christians writing “secular” fiction, and that I should embrace the tension.

What do you think?

Who I Found on the Other Side of the Hospital Curtain

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“But I’m ready to go home,” the man said on the other side of the curtain. “You said I could go home today.”

“That’s not true,” the nurse said in a whimsical voice, as if she was play-acting with a child. “No one said you can go home today.”

“But it is true!” the man insisted. “The male nurse with the handlebar mustache told me I could, as long as I went to the bathroom and ate my Jello.”

The nurse gave the man a tsk tsk tsk and sighed.

“We’ve had this discussion before – there are no male nurses on this floor, and none in the building with a handlebar mustache.”

That seemed to shut my roommate up, at least for the time being. We had shared a room ever since I had arrived, and he rarely stopped talking, even in his sleep. I hadn’t gotten a very good look at him though. At first I was in such rough shape that I didn’t know what was going on around me, and more recently, if I toddled past him on my way to the bathroom at night, he was usually completely under the covers, like a covered corpse. During the day he kept the curtain pulled all the way around his section of the room. But whenever he spoke I thought his voice sounded familiar, and I found myself spending more and more time trying to find him in my memory.

The hospital room was split in half by a thin curtain that didn’t quite reach the ground, and the bottom of the curtain was some kind of tan material while the upper half was mesh to let the light through. My bed was on the side of the room with all the windows, but I kept the shades drawn. After three weeks in the hospital, the light still hurt my eyes, but after I had gained some mobility and was able to push myself along on my walker, I’d slide over to the huge windows during sunrise or sunset, dragging my IV cart along with me, and look out over the city from my 8th floor hospital room.

I couldn’t see my own street, where the car had hit me, but I could see the roof of my house. I had never realized Virgil was such a green city – most of the streets lay hidden under a canopy of trees. Everywhere, that is, except just south of my house, in the center-of-the-city section of endless alley ways and dead ends. There, building after building swallowed up the pavement with their long shadows and exhaust-stained walls, staring through broken windows.

“Get out of Virgil while you can,” the man said from the other side of the curtain, and something had changed in his voice. Before he had sounded old and senile, as if his words, on their way out of his mouth, were slipping on his saliva. Now his voice was clear and measured.

“Get out of Virgil?” I asked.

Silence.

“Why should I get out of Virgil?”

“Trust me,” he said. Then he chuckled. Then he was silent.

I slid my walker along the smooth, hospital tiles towards the edge of the curtain.

“I don’t think we’ve officially met,” I said, pulling back the curtain, then freezing in place when I saw the man’s face.

Because there, lying in the bed, staring up at me…was me.

On most Fridays I post stories about Virgil, a made-up city with a host of strange inhabitants. If you’d like to check out the first story, click HERE.

What Bird Found at the Top of the Vacant Building

Barely opened door? from Flickr via Wylio
© 2007 Chloë Rae, Flickr | CC-BY-ND | via Wylio

The twin boys walked through one of the back alleys in the heart of Virgil, the part of the city that was nothing but narrow spaces turning into smaller alleys and walkways you had to squeeze through, even if you were a boy. The city had never been planned out very well. There were ninety-nine dead ends for every way out, and each one was bordered by closed doors and broken windows. Locked eyes and shattered teeth.

But the two boys didn’t seem to mind. They walked slowly, kicking at rocks and jumping with two firm feet into every puddle they could find. And there were many puddles, because the tiny alleyways were littered with potholes, and the storm had lasted for days.

The two boys each had hair as dark as the rooms behind the windows and fair skin that had been slightly burnt a summer red. They both wore the same tan shorts, the same dirty sneakers, and old socks, wet and muddy water brown, pulled up to just below their knees. But one wore a gray t-shirt and the other wore a blue button-up shirt that he had ripped the sleeves off of. The collar was still on it, and he wore it flipped up, like a 60s gang member. They were around ten years old. Everyone in the city recognized them. No one knew where they lived or who their parents were.

“I’m bored, Bird.”

The boy reached up and nervously itched around the top of his gray t-shirt. He didn’t like when his brother called him Bird, and it made him anxious when his brother got bored. It meant they were going to do scary things. He shook his head, but he didn’t say anything, he just jumped two feet into the next puddle, hard, as if trying to jump into the earth.

“C’mon, Bird, let’s do something fun.”

“I don’t want to. Let’s play a game.”

“Okay, but if I win then we have to do something fun,” the boy spat.

“Okay,” Bird shouted back, “but if I win you have to give me that picture of the girl. You know, the one that lady on Genna Street gave you.”

Both boys stared at each other.

“Fine,” said the boy with the cutoff sleeves. “Fine. But I pick the game.”

“No way, Ike. We both decide.”

“Fine,” Ike said again. “Fine. The rock closest to the wall game.”

“No, you always win. Riddles.”

“Yeah, right,” Ike said. The two boys stood there silently. The sky was blue, but the alley was narrow and the buildings on either side tall, so you had to look straight up to see it.

Ike jogged ahead to where a broken pallet had been left to rot. He bent back two loose pieces and charged back towards Bird with one in each hand. He raised one of the clubs over his head and shouted a warrior cry. The look on his face was terrifying, and Bird thought for sure he was going to hit him. But Ike froze in place, like a painting, then laughed.

“Catch a rat,” he said, handing over one of the wooden sticks.

Bird sighed and itched his collar bone again.

“Okay. Sure.”

Ike smiled and ran off, trying one door after another until he found one that wasn’t locked, then he disappeared inside. Bird ran after him but tried the next door. Locked. The next door. Locked. He skipped a bunch of doors and tried the one at the end of the alley that faced the way they had come from. It clicked open and he walked into the darkness.

“This isn’t a game,” he shouted back into the alley. “This is your idea of doing something fun.”

But Ike had already been consumed by the building, so Bird stood there and let his eyes adjust. Dirty furniture. A fridge leaning forward with its door stuck in the floor. A rusty oven. Abandoned, but not too nasty. He wondered if it might be a good place for him and Ike to stay for a while.

Then he saw it, a twitching movement by the stairs. The rat was half the size of a full-grown cat. He clenched the stick and took a few very slow steps in the rat’s direction. It stood up on its back feet. Bird froze. The rat held something between its paws, something it was eating. Then it turned and scampered lightly up the steps. Bird followed.

The rat kept going up, up, and at each landing Bird followed the rat to the next stairway. He went up four or five floors, to the very top, wielding his stick and waiting for a chance to bean that rat and win the game. But when he got to the top floor, it wasn’t there anymore. There was a door at the end of the hall, and it was cracked open.

Bird crept over the wooden floor, grimacing as each board groaned under his weight. He clutched the stick, no longer in attack mode. No, this was for defensive purposes only. There were no windows on that floor, only closed doors and the one barely opened at the end, the one letting through a beam of dim light. He looked around for a light switch but couldn’t see anything.

He got to the door and peeked inside. What he saw surprised him.

It was a spacious apartment, and light streamed through the windows. He could see the blue sky above all the surrounding buildings. The apartment was immaculate with shining hardwood floors, exposed brick walls and wooden beams in the ceiling. He crept just inside. He didn’t hear anyone. He turned on the light.

All around the entire apartment were rows and rows of paintings. Some were strange, with battle scenes involving mythical creatures eating the heads off of one another. Others were peaceful landscapes. But as he looked down the row, one caught him as a little strange. He walked closer.

It was a painting of his brother. His face was shouting a warrior cry, and over his head he held a wooden club, ready to bring it down. It was the exact image that Bird had just seen down on the street before they had agreed to play Catch a Rat.

“I’ve gotta show Ike,” he muttered, but when he turned to leave, the door was closed.

If you’d like to find out more about the importance of paintings in Virgil, check out the first installment HERE.

The Man Who Gets Things Done

Papa Smurph from Flickr via Wylio
© 2009 JoJo Johnson, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

The old man stopped in front of Don, but he didn’t face him. He just stood there for a moment, staring straight ahead down Genna Street. When he finally spoke, anyone passing by would have thought he was speaking to the air and that Don was only an innocent bystander.

“They tell me there’s a man on this street who can get things done,” the old man said in a hoarse whisper.

Don chewed on his mustache and itched the point of his chin bone beneath his long, wiry beard. If Don could have done anything different, he would have chosen a house in Virgil that had a front porch. That was pretty much all he would have changed. He liked sitting outside, watching the traffic go by, checking out the girls. He never said anything to them, nothing like that, but he watched them closely as they passed, and they felt it, his gaze, louder than a lewd shout. Women in the area even started avoiding Genna Street. They didn’t know his name. They didn’t know one single, solitary thing about him. They just didn’t like how it felt to walk past that fifty-year-old man with the beard, always bending the brim of his low-lying ball cap and chewing on the sparse hairs of his mustache.

There was plenty Don didn’t mind about his place in Virgil. He didn’t mind the cats, even though they made the breezeway between his house and the next one smell like a litter box. He didn’t mind the honeycomb maze of alleys behind his house. Don didn’t even mind listening to Sheryl and Slim screaming at each other in the apartment above his, something he could hear with digital clarity when he was out front. Slim was the local pot dealer, and Sheryl was known to do a thing or two to make an extra buck. He didn’t mind hearing them shout. Sometimes it made him feel powerful, like he knew something about them that could be used at a later date. In Virgil you never knew what you needed or when you might need it.

But it was the lack of a porch that got him, because that meant if he wanted to sit outside he had to take out his blue lawn chair and sit it on the sidewalk, in the heat of the day, or the snow, or the rain. He didn’t like the weather, and he didn’t like how close everyone came to him when they walked by on the narrow sidewalk.

Don acted like he didn’t hear the old man, so the man cleared his throat and spoke again.

“That’s what they tell me,” the old man said when he didn’t get a response, still looking straight ahead. A few cars went by in the late morning heat, but the street was pretty quiet. It was going to be a hot day.

“People say a lot of things about this city,” Don muttered. His teeth were yellow with large gaps in between them. “I’d only believe about half of what I hear.”

The old man nodded and shuffled his cane as if he was going to walk on. But he didn’t.

“So which half are you?” the old man asked. “The half I should believe in or the half that’s make believe?”

“Depends,” Don said, leaning back in his blue chair.

“On what?”

“Depends on who you’ve been listening to,” Don said, but there was an edge to his voice now, and the phrase somehow turned into a question, as in, Who have you been listening to?

The old man turned and looked at Don for the first time.

“I’m looking for a man named Saul,” the old man said. “You know him?”

Don sighed, then reached up and put his hand over his mouth as if he was thinking real hard. He scratched his beard and he stared across the street to where the huge willow tree grew up out of the sidewalk. It was the only tree left on the block. He liked that tree. It reminded him of himself.

Don looked up at the old man.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Manny,” he said quietly, looking around. “Manny Maude.”

Don sighed, then, as if a switch had been flipped, and he gave Manny a large smile. A rush of nicotine-stained teeth appeared when his lips peeled back. He pulled a pack of Marlboro’s from his pocket, shook it, and slipped a cigarette out. He held it between his lips while rustling a small book of matches from the same pocket. The match popped to life, then sizzled, finally flamed, and he held it against the tip of the cigarette, taking a deep draw.

“Well, here’s the thing,” he said in the tight-lipped manner of someone speaking and smoking. Then he exhaled, and the smoke was a mirage, a cloud, an image inside a dream. There were epic tales in there, and the long lives of kings and the short lives of heroes. The city of Virgil was in there, for a moment, heavy and dark, but then the wind blew it away, and there was nothing but two men in a quiet street, and the heat that gathered, and the willow tree saying “Shhh” in the breeze.

Don started again.

“The thing is, yes, I’m Saul,” Don said, and Manny wasn’t surprised, although he was rather taken aback by the clammy feel of the man’s skin and how the clouds seemed to gather when they shook hands.

This story is part of a series of stories that have to do with the city of Virgil. If you’d like to know a little bit more about what’s going on, you can start with the first installment, titled “Shhh”. Check it out HERE.