Richard Dansky

It doesn’t stop.

Contrary to popular belief, fond hope, and fairy tale, the world does not in fact stop whenever you reach a major milestone in your life and/or writing. No matter how momentous the occasion, no matter how important it is to you, it is not an ending. There is no happily ever after, the credits do not roll, and most importantly, you are not excused from continuing on. 

Which ain’t a bad thing, nosirreebob. But it’s not what we’re necessarily led to expect by the romantic myth of the writer.

Case in point: Me. This month, I had the unmitigated pleasure of seeing my first original novel, Firefly Rain, hit the shelves. Physically, it’s a gorgeous book, one that I was more than happy to pogo around my office showing off because it looked so damn cool. In the company of my lovely wife, I did all the things you’d expect a giddy new author to do – throw a party, wander from bookstore to bookstore doing surreptitious faceouts, holding copies of the book prominently and loudly proclaiming “Gosh, what an amazing book!”*. You get the idea.

And when we’d had a day or two of fun doing that, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof, I went right back to trying to administer the coup de grace to the next project I was working on, one that took me slightly over two years from inception to draft completion. Why had it taken so long? Lots of reasons, really. Part of it was the difficulty of the material and my closeness to it. Part of it was the demands of the day job, which did in fact conspire to chew up many of my evenings and weekends with carnivorous deadlines and abrupt travel catastrophes. Much of it was a series of fits and false starts as I tried to find the right voice and the right tone.

But a little bit of it was shaking the feeling – completely unfounded – that until I got “closure” on the first book, I wouldn’t be ready to write the next one. This is a dangerous and fallacious thought to carry around in your noggin for many reasons, not the least of which is that writing is not a serial process. It’s parallel. The time between when you finish a book and when it hits the shelf can extensive, so if you wait until one comes out to finish (or, God help you, start) on the next one, you’re just vastly increasing the time that will elapse between your books.

Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math. I finished the first draft of Firefly Rain back when John Kerry still had a lead in the polls. A polished draft was done by April of 2005. If, at that point, I had been able to compartmentalize and say “That one’s done, on to the next”, and if the next one had taken exactly as long as it did in real life, it still would have been done last spring. Instead, I finally wrapped it up this week, meaning that close to a year’s worth of time has been spent, more than a year’s worth of momentum has been frittered away.

Or, to put it another way, I’m already a year behind on the next one.

Fortunately, I’ve learned. The next next one, such as it is, is already in progress. I finished the manuscript Monday, went to bed early on Tuesday, and started in on the next round Wednesday.

Is the manuscript perfect and polished and done? No. At this point, it’s chainsaw sculpture – the shape is there, but there’s plenty of work to be done with sandpaper and polish. But I’m not waiting, not waiting for the folks who are looking it over get back to me, not waiting until I’ve made it perfect and sparkly with the literary equivalent of a cherry on top before digging in on the next generation of projects. Instead, I’m compartmentalizing, and I’m moving forward on the next project (and laying the groundwork for the one after that) while this one gets tended to, and then when it’s ready for me to go back in with the dremel instead of the chainsaw, I’ll do that instead.

Because, after all, it never stops, and now I know it.

 

 

 

 

 

*Not as such. Honest.

There’s a moment before the curtain goes up, when the conductor holds the baton like a headsman’s axe and the heat of the lights melts you like wax. It’s the moment when you’re convinced you’ve forgotten all of the words, you don’t remember any of the notes, your Shakespeare has fled and left behind Bugs Bunny, and you’re absolutely certain your fly is unzipped. No amount of reassurance, of practice, of checking to make sure you are in fact appropriately zipped will reassure you. The terror of anticipation – and the dead certainty that the curtain will in fact go up while you’re in mid-zipper verification procedure – is all.

The moment of waiting for your book to come out is something like that.

I should be inured to this. After all, I’ve had four novels published. I’ve had over a hundred roleplaying game supplements hit the shelves. I’ve had video games I’ve worked on cause international incidents. I’ve had projects I eagerly anticipated seeing in stores or in my hands. I’ve had projects where I didn’t realize they’d been released until friends mentioned they’d been playing them for a month. I’ve bought one project I worked on in a back-street market in Shanghai, two weeks before its street date, for twenty-five yuan. Oddly enough, it came with a full manual – written in Chinese.

This one’s different, though.

On January 8^th – roughly two weeks from when I sit down to write this – Firefly Rain will hit the shelves. It is the lead title for Wizards of the Coast’s new imprint, a gorgeous-looking hardcover. Friends who’ve read it have liked it; reviewers who’ve reviewed it thus far (knock on wood) have said nice things about it, the whole thing is out of my hands anyway.

And yet, the nerves, they’re there and set all a-jangle.

Firefly Rain is my first original novel. I’ve published four others, all of which were media tie-ins, but this is the first one that is all mine. All the video games I’ve worked on have been part of a large and intensely collaborative team effort; all of the RPGs I’ve developed and designed and scribbled for have been someone else’s IP. There’s good and there’s bad in that. Good, in that there already was an audience for things I’ve worked on, good in the strength of those collaborations. But it also left a little nagging feeling after each wandered out into the marketplace. None of them were exactly, entirely mine. Any failure I could share the blame, any success was allocated and shared as well. If they did well, it was because of the property or the graphics or the physics engine. If they didn’t, in my darkest hours I could bitch about the too-short schedules or a million other things, which coincidentally let me reassure myself that it was not, in fact, my fault.

Which, I suppose, is another way of saying that if folks don’t like this one, it’s all on me. If it’s not good, then it’s me that’s not good, or at least my writing. And since writing is what I do, and what I want to do, well, then, that way lieth all sorts of emo-kid shoe-gazing behavior. Of course, if folks do like it – and did I mention that it was a BookSense pick for January? – then I get to bask in all that, all by myself, too. I get to confirm for myself that, yeah, something I did was pretty good.

But I’m a depressed writer-type. I generally don’t anticipate basking. It doesn’t go with the image, or with the wardrobe.

Two weeks. Two weeks left to fret.

Originally, it was a 3000 word short story, 2500 words of setup and then a quick, jagged payoff. I wrote it, and thought about it, and realized that most of what was interesting about the setup was unsaid. So, it seemed logical that if the most important stuff was unsaid, I’d better get busy saying it.

When I looked up, the manuscript was at 20K words, and I was doomed.

There was an outline at one point, which the various characters looked at, laughed at, and ran tauntingly away from about 55K words in. There were false starts, and whole sections chopped out or erased, and all of the other vagaries of the writing process that seem so momentous to the person wading through them, and so utterly standard to everyone else.

But it’s done. It’s almost here. And I sat down to read it again the other night, just to get a sense of what I was unleashing on the unsuspecting reading public, to see if it stood up now that I wasn’t neck-deep in it 24/7 and dreaming dreams of glowing fireflies soundtracked by the Drive-By Truckers.

I won’t tell you what I thought of it, reading it instead of writing it. That, hopefully, is for you to discover on your own, and frankly, anything I say at this point is liable to be a little suspect anyway.

I will say, however, that no matter what happens with it, I find I’m satisfied. It’s the best book I could have written, the best way I could have told that story. And while it’s not the story of my life or my relationship with my parents or anything else, it’s my story, and I’m pleased and proud to have written it, pleased and proud that the fine folks at Professional Media Services and Wizards of the Coast thought enough of it to help me share it with the world.

Look around at my fellow Storytellers and you see some impressive resumes. They’ve written award-winning novels. They’ve written international bestsellers. They’ve gone to see the elephant of publishing in all its many terrible and alluring guises, and kept coming back for more. I’ve seen little bits of it, from odd angles. This is the first time I’ve been asked to face it head-on, eyes wide open.

I think I’m ready.

Two weeks.

I know all the words. I can handle the notes. The zipper, I’m not worried about.

I’m ready.

Tonight, I am Frankenstein.

Not the monster, the doctor, Victor or Frederick depending on your context and your tolerance for that sort of thing. I am bolting together slabs of prose from different drafts, different versions, different takes on a novel. I am ripping great hunks of unnecessary verbiage out and consigning them to the offal heap or the cut file, whichever is nearer. I am creating a monster, so that when all the pieces are there, all the parts assembled, I can see what’s missing and give it the jolt that will in turn give it life.

The book, that’s the creature. Go James Whale or Mel Brooks or wherever you want with it, but this is not a golem, formed from seamless and smooth clay. It’s not a homunculus, generated spontaneously from the ingredients of midnight and nightmare. It’s a monster, a thing of shreds and patches that will, with luck, live.

I could take the metaphor further, of course. I could talk about what the book might be missing, whether it’s got no heart or no guts or whatever. I could discuss sneaking down to the literary graveyard and pillaging bits and pieces of other stories and other novel projects, cutting down the hanged man of a 50,000 word chunk of vampire novel and seeing if I could use any of the bits. But that would be silly, and overwrought, and frankly a little disgusting.

This is my third attempt at tackling this particular book, or more accurately the fourth. The first time it was fluff, a boogedy-boogedy monsterfest without enough monster, written with the underlying fear that since it was about video games, it would get me fired. So I wrote it soft and missed the point, and I understood that even as I was writing it. The best ghost stories, I find, involve the setting as character, and I’d lost that. It was just backdrop, the equivalent of an establishing shot at the beginning of a television episode, and it had lost its intrinsic importance to the real heart of what was going on.

The second time, it was jokey, a too-conscious attempt to distance it from its predecessor and to adopt the semantically null “edge” that people seem to think video games have, or have to have. The protagonist was, to be blunt, a jackass, and not someone either I nor the reader would have cared to spend time with.

The third time…let’s not even talk about that. There was a hotel room involved, and Canadian beer, and it was stillborn twelve thousand words in. Radical reconstructive surgery saved most of those, but they’re unrecognizable now, living under another name in another chapter. 

So now it’s take number four, and I’m ripping bleeding hunks out of the other three, performing surgery on the words to get them right and to make the seams invisible, and then seeing if it all hangs together.

I think it does now. I think I’ve got the target bracketed and have found the range. If nothing else, the speed of my work has picked up, usually a good sign. The distractions that tell me by their very existence that I’m barking up the wrong tree are less alluring. More, simply said, is getting done.

This may, of course, be another false alarm, another failed experiment to toss off the battlements or lock in the dungeon. But it feels different. It feels good. It feels like I’m getting there, at too-long last. As one slab of prose after another drops into place, it does so with the clang of finality, with the sense that it’s landing in the right place.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a plane to catch and a game to work on.

And most importantly, a book to write.

Finally.

Because autumn stories don’t necessarily have to be about Halloween.

Enjoy the season…

***

For The Autumn Queen, Where She Rests Among The Fallen

To Tommy, it was a leaf.

Oh, it was a beautiful leaf, to be certain, five-tined, like a maple, and blood-red at the edges with lines like yellow and orange flames in the center. And when he saw it on the sidewalk on his way home from school, resting among the dead and withered brown husks, he knew he had to take it home. He’d press it in wax paper, he thought. He’d preserve it.

He’d save it.

Behind him, the dead dry leaves rattled and rustled and made sounds like bony hands shaking a pair of dice as they skittered across the sidewalk. There was no breeze to move them, not on that sunny fall day, but that was not Tommy’s concern, not when in his hands he held the most beautiful leaf in the world.

Tommy, you must understand, was six at the time. What he knew of magic was what all six year olds know, if they are allowed to. He knew that there was magic in the world, though he couldn’t tell you where it was. He knew that strange and wonderful and special things could happen, and that Dracula and Bigfoot went out for cheeseburgers together when the moon was right, and that there really were dragons off the edge of the map and monsters under the bed.

What he did not know, what he could not know, was that in his hand he held the Autumn Queen, born best beloved every spring and adored through the dying time in the fall, most royal and exalted of the leaf-spirits whose existence is a secret even to six year old boys who know something about the way the world really works.

And so even as he hurried home, the better to preserve his find before any of her glory faded, word spread from leaf to leaf and branch to branch, limb to limb and tree to tree. Winds picked up leaves in ranks and blew them down the street after one small boy. Thousands upon thousands of leaves let go their last, painful grip on the branches that had given them life, and let themselves be carried away after the kidnapper, the defiler, the one who even now held the Autumn Queen between two fat and indelicate fingers.

He reached home ahead of the swirling winds, slamming the door behind him the face of a cloud of pursuers. They slammed themselves against the door and walls of his house, dashing themselves against it again and again until they battered themselves to pieces, and a thin smoke born of their passing filled the air. And even as one fell, another arrived on the breeze, or skittered along the sidewalk when it thought no one was looking, or dropped out of the clear blue sky to continue the assault.

Tommy, for his part, did not notice this, or if he did he ignored it, for he had better things to do. There was a leaf to preserve, after all, Fall’s finest colors to save so that they might be cherished all through the winter. Carefully he made his preparations, studious and careful in the way of small boys intent on a task that they know in their bones to be the most important thing in the world.

At least, it’s the most important thing in the world, until another thing comes along, such as your mother telling you to play outside. It was, she told him, a beautiful day, and he ought not to be inside.

“Just a minute,” he told her. “I just have one more thing to take care of.”

#

They found Tommy in the back yard, his mouth stuffed impossibly full of leaves and his face blue. On his hands and arms and round little-boy face were a thousand tiny cuts, the sort that might have been paper cuts, or scrapes from falling down on too-rough concrete, or a thousand other things, but weren’t. His mother cried and his father stood stoically while the ambulance took him away, at least until the nice policeman suggested that they go inside and get out of the wind that was whipping the unraked leaves in their backyard every which way. And so they went inside, and poured out their grief, and told the policeman what they knew, which, in the grand scheme of things, was nothing at all.

Outside, the leaves still beat at the windows and at the doors, at the walls and at the roof, for while they had achieved vengeance, that was all that they had done, and it was not enough.

And inside, the Autumn Queen sobbed unheard where she lay, alone and imprisoned, in the silence and desolation between pages 234 and 235.

Last time out, I discussed the ins and outs of taking criticism and doing something with it besides letting it amp your blood pressure to the point where blood jets out of your eyes. It only seems fair and sensible, then, to flip the conversation over this month and talk about critiquing, and ways to do (or not to do) so as to avoid giving the critique victim a grand mal seizure at the sight of the first comment in the margins.

Agreeing to look over someone’s stuff is not something that should be taken lightly. After all, if someone is handing their admittedly unfinished prose off to you in hopes of earnest commentary, they’re opening themselves up for a ruthless, microscopic examination of something that is almost certainly unready for prime time. They are counting on you to be fair but honest, and to give it your best effort. After all, a half-assed assessment isn’t going to help them improve, and may actually be damaging. An offhand, “Oh, it’s fine,” when a story actually has a plot hole big enough for Godzilla to stomp through without brushing the sides is enough to actively damage someone’s writing. Yes, they should be able to spot that sort of issue for themselves, but hey, we all miss the obvious on occasion; that’s why we ask other people to look at it.

All of which means that if you’re going to do it, you should do it right. And by right, I mean that you should provide feedback that is useful, helpful, and designed to make the subject matter better. That doesn’t mean that you should just blow kisses and wave pom-poms, but rather that you should remember that the purpose of the critique is not to benefit the critiquer, or their ego. It’s to help the writer, and more importantly, the writing.

In my admittedly jaundiced opinion, the most important thing in providing feedback is to remember who is actually writing the story. By that, I don’t mean the narrator. I mean the author. One of the most aggravating mistakes a “friendly” reader can make is to confuse what the story needs with what they would have done with the story instead. Their comments become a rewrite, simultaneously managing to irritate what Shakespeare might have called the native and true challenger while missing the point of the damn thing entirely.

In other words, if I send a story to someone to look over, I don’t want to know what they would have done with it instead. If I did, I would have sent an email saying “Here’s an idea, and I’d love to see what you can do with it” instead. (Mind you, the appropriate response to an email like that is generally “Thhhbbbtt”; nobody will tell you this, but the ideas are the easy part. It’s the writing that’s hard.) No, I want to know what I did wrong, and what my reader thinks I can do to fix it.

So, the key is to remember that it’s the author’s story, not yours, and that any feedback you give should be couched in those terms. “Were you trying to say X here?” goes over a lot better than a deleted phrase and a replacement in the margins; “I’m not sure about this guy’s motivation for beating someone to death with a grotesquely large rutabaga – could you clarify it for me?” does a lot more good than “No way, man – he should totally use the sweet potato instead.” It’s not what you would do if you were writing it, it’s about what the writer could do to make it better, and questions are better for helping someone find their own path than demands or overwrites. That’s not to say that you can’t suggest alternatives, but doing so respectfully, and with the assumption that the choices the writer made to this point were in fact made for a reason, makes them a lot easier to swallow.

Tying directly into that is another point that may be equally important: It’s about the writing, not about the writer. Feedback should not be a direct assault on the writer’s self-worth, talent, or ancestry. Even if you hate the piece, odds are that the person who wrote it is a reasonably worthwhile human being and not deserving of vituperation over something their verbs did when they weren’t looking. Any sentence of feedback that starts with the word “You” should be carefully scrutinized for lurking ad hominems, for the simple reason that if you attack the author, they’re not going to be in the mood to read anything you said about their writing. That, of course, means that you’ve wasted your time as well as theirs, and nobody wants that.

Besides, it’s just not nice.

What is nice, however, is occasionally taking the time to point out good stuff. Hopefully it’s in there, and if it is, it should get called out. There are good reasons to applaud an especially deft bit of characterization, nice turn of phrase, or clever plot twist beyond the urge to be neighborly. For one thing, it helps the author get through what would otherwise be an unending slog of negatives – fix this, change that, what the hell were you doing over there? – by providing encouragement and support. It’s useful technically, too – point out what they did right, and you’re providing examples so they can do more of it.

I might add that calling out the good stuff helps the critiquer as well. If you’re just pointing out the bad stuff, it can become white noise. Boring. Frustrating, even, which can lead to cranky or bad or worst of all, inaccurate commenting. Allowing yourself to look for the positive is worthwhile, if for no other reason than to provide a way to keep you on your twinkly editorial toes.

From there, it’s just a short jump to what should be common sense, but so often isn’t: Don’t be a jackass. Reading over someone’s stuff is not a contest. You don’t win if you provide the most cutting bon mot, the sharpest critique, or the nastiest putdown. There’s no group of judges sitting there in a box, holding up numbered cards as they go through each reader’s responses and awarding degree of difficulty points for the best Dorothy Parker impersonation. The competition is not with any other readers, and the competition is not with the author. That’s because there is no competition.

In theory, at least, everyone is working towards the same goal – making the piece better. Nobody is looking to see how clever the editorial remarks are, nor will they ever be. Turning a request for feedback into a power game demeans everyone involved, and doesn’t help the writing. Instead, it makes you look like a jerk and irritates the guy on the receiving end. He wasn’t asking for a psych profile when he asked you to look over his 3000 word short story, and getting a nasty one isn’t going to help his disposition.

And before you ask, no, I’m not saying that feedback can’t or shouldn’t be forceful when it’s appropriate. At times, it needs to be. There’s some stuff that’s just plain old bad writing, and if you’re wimpy about pointing that out, then you’re not doing anybody any favors. That doesn’t mean you should use the editorial firehouse when it’s not called for, not needed, and not helpful.

Last, at least for the purposes of this essay, is knowing when to stop. Not everything needs to be nitpicked in the minutest of details. Not every instance of a repeated error needs to be called out. Marking it once and moving on serves everyone better – the editor who doesn’t have to say the same thing over and over and get burned out, and the writer who doesn’t have to read it and feel persecuted, nay, hounded as a result. At a certain point, enough has been said and anything else is ju
st piling on or padding the comment stats. That’s when it’s time to let it go, send it back, and hope that what’s been said makes a little sense.

And once the critique is done, it’s done. Kaput. Finis. Over. It’s moved on, and following up, beyond a polite “I hope that was helpful” starts crowding the border of counterproductive. The writer needs time to digest, to see if what’s been said is appropriate or useful or warranted. If they then ask for follow-up or clarification, great. That’s an open invitation to contribute more. But otherwise, you’ve done all that you need do, and there’s probably no need or call to do any more. What has been asked for, has been given, and in the immortal words of Stan Lee, ‘nuff said.

In the end, there are no hard and fast rules for providing feedback; just suggestions, guidelines, and the fruits of hard-won experience. Every rule has its exceptions, and there are folks out there for whom any given technique might be utterly useless. Regardless of the specifics, though, anyone who looks at another’s work owes something to them: an honest and respectful effort, and a genuine wish to help them make that piece of writing better.

But when it comes to the rutabagas, they’re on their own.

Let’s talk about the bad news.

And by bad news, I mean getting a negative response to something you’ve written. It may be a bad review. It may be a reader slagging the book on Amazon.com or on a message board. It may be a critique from a professional peer or agent or member of your writing group that leaves your manuscript bloodier than Caesar at the end of act IV. In the end, it’s someone responding to your writing with less than love and lollipops, and that can be hard to deal with. After all, by writing you’re exposing yourself. You’re putting part of yourself out there where you can’t defend and explain every little nuance, and inevitably someone’s not going to like it. And if they don’t like it, then they don’t like that part of you that’s out there, and, well, we can all see where that line of thinking goes.

Except, of course, that it is at least one part hogwash. Any writer who is actually going to write (as opposed to being one of those chowderheads who simply likes calling themselves a writer without bothering with the actual, you know, writing part of the equation) is going to have to be able to deal with negative feedback. If you can’t, then you’re simply not going to last as a writer. If you can’t take and use criticism, then either you won’t improve or you’ll be destroyed by it. Either way, you’re not doing yourself, your writing or your readers any good.

This is both more and less obvious than it sounds. On one hand, dealing with negative feedback is more than just being able to go on once someone says they don’t like your writing. It’s examining what they actually said and why they said it, and sifting through it with the intention of extracting useful tidbits that you can apply to the next iteration, taking it as information and not as a comment on your worth as a human being. Data is useful, an ad hominem is not, and being able to view even the most savage critique as the former is a vital survival technique in the bloodthirsty world of manuscript notes and online forums.

On the other hand, it seems only sensible, intellectually speaking, to be able to take a less-than-breathily-erotic commentary on your work and move on without having an aneurysm or swearing a thousand-year feud on the commenter in question. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, there are a lot of people who tend to lose their distanced savoir faire about other people staying cool with negative reviews as soon as its their own literary ox that gets the shish kebab treatment. The same reviewer who’s being incisive on your buddy’s book is suddenly a mouth-breathing, subliterate Reptoid when he points out what he thinks is lacking in yours. A fellow member of your critique group is just jealous because you didn’t give his manuscript a tongue bath at last week’s session, and is getting back by vindictively trashing your perfect prose. That writing professor whom last week you idolized is out to get you this week, and with a vengeance. You get the idea, or at least I hope you do. If you’re sitting there with your hair on fire, shouting “I’m not like that!”, then maybe you need to take a break before reading the rest of this.

There are, in my experience, a few standard responses to the negative. The first is simply to brazen it out and ignore whatever the feedback might say. This is the “What the @#$@## do they know?” response, and it usually comes with a lengthy vilification of the individual offering the less-than-positive response, their skills, talent, ancestry, and willingness to be caught on videotape nude with any number of nontraditional species of livestock. Then they keep on keeping on, doing the same things that got them the critique in the first place and improving only slowly, if at all.

The second is the complete inverse. Any negative feedback stops this individual in their tracks, momentarily and perhaps forever. Maybe the imperfect feedback – and make no mistake, sometimes anything less than “It’s brilliant. Don’t change a word” gets read as negative – is the excuse that individual has been looking for to lay down the burden of writing. Sometimes they’re so insecure in what they’re doing, or so gobsmacked by the idea that someone wouldn’t utterly love every letter they committed to paper that their entire creative process comes to a screeching halt. Maybe they just don’t know what to do with it. In the end, it doesn’t matter. They stop writing, for a while or forever.

Reaction number three is the one I was prone to, at least in my younger years. It can be summed up as “Oh yeah, I’ll show you,” and generally results in a massive frenzy of writing directed entirely at proving the critiquer in question wrong, wrong, wrong. The writer will do pretty much everything but the commenter’s suggestions in an attempt to improve their writing. Sometimes this works; sometimes it produces a lot of wasted time and effort, and sometimes it just sort of sends you spiraling off into the outer darkness. While someone doing an “Oh, yeah?” isn’t reflecting the idea of critical feedback, they’re rejecting the specific feedback they’ve gotten out of hand. It’s a good thing that they’re willing to accept the notion of valuable critique, at least as a theoretical construct, but the living-breathing example in front of them gets rejected out of hand because, well, it was put down in front of them.

Ultimately, I think best response, and the place that you have to get to is to judge feedback as feedback, not as counters on an absolute scale of “He loves my writing/He loves my writing not”. Each one needs to be judged based on where it’s coming from, what it’s trying to say, and if it affords something useful for making the writing better. If it’s critique of a project in progress, you don’t automatically have to kow-tow to every suggestion every reader you have makes. You just have to weigh them dispassionately on their own merits, and with an eye as to whether following them up will make the project better. Maybe they won’t, but the idea they spark in you will, Maybe they will in fact do the trick. Or maybe they won’t help you get where you think the book needs to go, but you can at least appreciate the effort and thought that went into them. It’s entirely possible that the thought and effort might add up to zero, and you’re right in ultimately dismissing them – I’m reminded of one gent who complained in an Amazon review that it was confusing to read book 2 of my fantasy trilogy if you didn’t bother to read book 1 – but there’s also the possibility that there’s something in there that you can put to good use, now or down the road.

As you might have guessed, that’s t
he position I’ve come around to. At this point in my career, I love pointed feedback, because getting it early means I’m less likely to get it late. Reader response on a manuscript or story that can be summed up as “I liked it” may provide a minute of egoboo, but it doesn’t help me improve the story. It doesn’t help point out that one moment where a character’s motivation gets shaky, or the plot hole that I’ve subconsciously been tap dancing around for the last six drafts. I’m a big boy now, and I can take harsh language in the interest of getting other eyes on stuff that I know too well. That doesn’t mean that I want to deal with pointless ranting, or rudeness, or anything of that ilk, but mainly because that doesn’t make the writing better.

So my advice is to learn to love the bad news, or at least, to live with it. You never know. It might grow on you.

Lyon.

Autumn

Night.

This is the city of ancient sorceries and Blackwood’s “Ancient Sorceries”, of churches on hills and walls of fire-blackened stone houses huddled in close alongside them. It’s the city of grand avenues and cobblestones, of streetcorner vin chaud in the winter and constant rain in the spring, of a hundred tiny bouchons tucked into even tinier streets where the galumphing American tourists dare not go lest they accidentally eat something strange.

It’s where I was that evening. A brief rain had washed everything clean, made the cobblestones shiny and black. Work in Lyon was tiring, was frustrating, was long and wearying and singularly unproductive on this occasion, and I had it in me to walk. I’d walked to my hotel from the office, of course, a jaunt of a mile or so through new neighborhoods and past signs advertising the great chefs of Lyon; up and over the Pont de Guillotine and into the massive stone architecture of the old city. They’d set up the guillotine there when the Revolution came to power. One man died on it, or so I’d been told, the one who’d brought it to town. Still, the memory lingers.

As I first set foot upon the bridge, a man coming the other way saw me and stopped. Stared as if in recognition. I’d never seen him before, this man wearing a black suit and a brightly colored cloth around his head. I nodded, I didn’t slow down, I kept walking.

And he hissed. Leaned forward, head down like a snake, and he hissed. Three times, his head turning impossibly to follow me. I hurried on as he shouted something after me, something I did not wish to understand.

I hurried on, past the great plaza of Bellecour and to my hotel, as much to get away from the memory of the hiss as to drop off my sadly overstuffed backpack. Evening had fallen by the time I came out again, the streets filling with tourists and revelers and the lost and the curious. I lost myself in the throng, the way I do when I travel. See where the crowd goes, see which streets call my name, see which hills want for climbing – when I can choose my route with confidence and calm, then I know I’ve been someplace too long.

That night, it was up one street, down another. Zig-zag, back and forth. I walked a sawtooth edge, admiring architecture and ignoring restaurants. Thoughts of work popped up, and I squashed them quick as I could. It wasn’t their place, it wasn’t their time.

And suddenly, on a white stone wall ahead of me, a sign.

A stencil, really. On the façade of one of the lovely ancient structures that lined the street I shambled down, there was a black shape. I looked closer, and it resolved itself – a headless skeleton, formally dressed, bearing a cane.

Baron Samedi, perhaps, or someone like unto him.

He didn’t wink, not that I expected him to – him being headless, to say nothing of his being made of spraypaint. Hesitantly, I reached out and touched the figure. It was dry, and cool to the touch. The surrounding stone was warm; the black paint not.

A mystery.

I nodded my head to pay my respects to the Baron – no hat to tip, not that night – and wander off. I saw a thing I did not expect, tasted something odd and magical, and that was what the night needed. All around me, the others walked past. Not one noticed the black shape against white stone. We shared a secret, the Baron and I.

Eventually, I walked off and left the image behind me. There were other places to explore, after all. Other things to see.

A hundred feet on, there was another stencil. This one was on a pillar at the side of a massive wooden door, daring passers-by to see it. One did, one stopped dead in the middle of the street. That would be me. To everyone else, it was just graffiti, if it was anything at all.

I looked around. Up ahead, near the corner – yes, it was another one. And beyond that? I’d just have to see, wouldn’t I?

So I chased the Baron. I found him on the sides of steps, on white walls made in the days of kings whose names I’d long forgotten, on the doorposts of ancient houses and upon their gates. They were never close together, and never did the path split, the line diverge.

I was being led.

In books, in movies, we know what happens at times like this. We holler at the hapless protagonist, soon to be the hapless victim. It’s only a painting, we say. Walk away! Turn around! Don’t be stupid!

But we say that from the comfort of our wingbacks, our stadium-seated movie theaters, our cars and our coffeeshops. Put us in front of the mystery, let it whisper in our ears so that no one else can hear, and suddenly it seems reasonable to follow. Logical.

Appropriate.

So it was with me, so it was with my mystery. Where the images led, I would follow. Where they went, I would go.

That night, they led me to the river and along it to the Pont Napoleon. “Across?” I asked. Ahead of me, I saw a figure stenciled onto the ancient stone of the railing.

Across.

They were closer now, more densely packed. I thought of the Smoot markings on the bridge over the Charles in Cambridge, and dismissed the comparison as inappropriate. Science there, magic here, and never the twain shall meet. Ancient sorceries, or something very much like them.

And in the middle of the bridge, they stop. Two figures together, right up at the edge of the railing. They are barely a finger’s width apart. They are together. Someone has drawn faces for them in black indelible marker, round and hideous and misshapen. One looked angry, one looked sad.

I stood there, paralyzed, convinced somehow that the spray paint and ink was going to gather itself up and fling itself – themselves – into the water below. A tourist boat, all striped awnings and bright lights, cruises on below and I realized I’d been holding my breath. I let it out, slowly, the sound hidden by the drinking and shouting and engines from the ship below.

Drawings. They were, of course, just drawings. I’d had my taste of mystery and would treasure it, would wrap it up and guard it so that I could take it out when needed. So that I’d have a well of mystery and wonder and helpless fascination to reach into when something I was writing called for it.

Maybe it was all the hissing man’s doing. I could take that speculation, too, the fear that it inspired and the wonder at the cause, and save them away as needed. I could wrap up the skepticism – Lord knew there’d be a need for that – and the fear, and the moments when I’d told myself aloud that I was just being silly. There would be a place for all of them. All the wonder and mystery of the night, all the strangeness and magic, would live on. It would be inspiration, imagination, memory – a story, or perhaps more. Bits and pieces of that night would inform so much, or at least I’d hoped they would. Otherwise, they’d come home to roost in my nightmares.

I finished crossing the river, suddenly glad that the trail had ended. I’d find someplace to eat, someplace with bright lights and lots of people and despairing waiters who liked tourist dollars but not the tourists
who came with them, and that would be enough. Dinner, and then home, and to bed.

After all, I had seen enough for one night.

I never saw the hissing man again. And in the morning, all the skeletons were gone.

So.

Confession time.

I…am not a “real writer”.

Oh, sure, I’ve written. I’ve published literary criticism, book reviews, RPGs, video games, humor, and six months’ worth of columns in a Korean-language video game magazine. I’ve done short fiction, tie-in novels, and a chapter in a book on game writing that was enough to get me branded an enemy of Art by one blogger who took particular exception to the pragmatic approach I was espousing.

But until now, I had never been through The Process. Yes, the magical, mystical, shrouded-in-layers-of-haze-like-the-Eleusinian-Rites- as-recast-by-the-writers-of-Dr.-Strange process of publishing a novel, at least from the author’s side. Yes, there were those four tie-ins, but a subtle program of researching The Process (Sample approach: “Hey, Jim, what’s it like publishing a novel, huh?”) gave me the rough outlines, nay, the parameters. Mystic terms like “ARC” and “galley” – which, contrary to my belief, is not where they chain writers who miss deadlines to oars and make them row book publicists around the Tyrrhenian – slowly became part of my vocabulary, and I learned enough to at least pretend to know what I was talking about.

But until now, I had never, in the words of Eric Idle, you know, done it.

As of this point, however, I have. With my first original novel, Firefly Rain, coming out in January, I have begun to experience all of the steps it takes to turn a Word file into a novel. And let me tell you, I had no idea what I was in for. It has been educational, interesting, and at times, terrifying. Above all, however, it has been a process, a ritual of completion that marks the transformation of an idea into an honest-to-God book.

And now, thanks to my editor at Wizards of the Coast Discoveries, the talented and infinitely patient Susan Morris, I’m going to take you with me through one of those ritual steps – just one – in this case, the reading of the galley proofs. Think of it as a public service, so that you, too, gentle reader, can know what you might someday be in for – or can laugh at what you’ve already been through.

And so, without further ado, the Blogging of the Galleys, as it was, or is, or might have been:

***

6:30 PM – The doorbell rings. Roughly eight and a half seconds pass between the last sound dying away and my sweeping the door open, and in that time the UPS deliveryperson has dropped a package on my doorstep, pelted down the walk, and driven as far as Charlotte. In other words, they are nowhere to be seen. On the step, a large box. Correction – as I pick it up, it’s a large and heavy box. Ominous thumping sounds come from inside as its weight shifts.

6:38 – The box is finally inside. The shipping label tells me it’s from Susan, so I ask my wife to get me a knife from the kitchen so I can open it. She responds that she’s not letting me have a knife when I’m doing anything involving my writing. Score one for the wife.

6:45 – A pile of paper the approximate size and shape of a Quonset hut slides out of the box and onto the air hockey table. Yes, we have an air hockey table. No, I don’t think it’s stable enough to support the weight of the proofs for long. I scoop them up and hurry upstairs to my office.

6:47 – Stop at top of stairs. Catch breath. Remember to note this for posterity, realize that posterity is going to think I’m a goober, keep going.

6:48 – Realize I forgot to strike the stuff about the stairs from the record. Say a mental “screw it” and throw the pile down on my desk. The desk makes a noise like a lovesick moose in protest. I very rapidly clear four months’ worth of bills, two empty Jones Soda cans, and a pile of Stan Ridgway CDs off the remainder of the desktop to make room and reduce the load.

7:04 – Melinda pokes her head into my office and asks what my plans are for the evening. She sees me instead poking at the proofs with a stick, making sure they are not going to attack me even if provoked. “You are very silly,” she says, shuts the door, and goes back downstairs, where she and our summer houseguest, her nephew, can engage in some heated bonding over the “Face-Melters” level of Guitar Hero II.

7:05 – I stare at the galleys. Right. Going to get started any second now. Going to go through this sucker line by line and nail it.

7:10 – Still staring.

7:15 – Still staring. I think it’s staring back. Cripes, it didn’t seem that long when I wrote it.

7:30 – I’ve won two games of Freecell, lost six, and downloaded a significant portion of the Drive-By Truckers’ back catalog on iTunes, on the premise that it’s good music to get me in the mood of the novel. The Freecell games, I have no excuse for.

7:45 – Page one. It’s a good start.

7:50 – I’m through the prologue and the first chapter, which had taken the brunt of a lot of the rewrites and debate. It reads well. I mark one sentence for a change and move on.

7:56 – First embarrassing spelling mistake of the evening! I howl my anguish at the uncaring stars, then write it down and move on.

7:57 – Second embarrassing mistake of the evening.

7:58 – Third embarrassing spelling mistake. I resolve not to mention spelling mistakes in the blog any more.

8:06 – Up to chapter four. Downstairs, they’re doing co-op on Rush’s “YYZ”. I turn up the Truckers.

8:14 – We reach the landmark “first howlingly bad Bible error” of the night. It’s actually just a juxtaposition of two names, no doubt caused by doing revisions far too late at night in a Montreal hotel room, but even so, letting this one get through would be Bad, with a capital “Suck”. Gingerly, I note it.

8:17 – No bolt of lightning has struck me down. I continue editing.

8:21 – It’s quiet downstairs. Too quiet. Why are they not distracting me, damnit?

8:35 – Through chapter six. As a reward, I take myself downstairs to get a can of soda, then lurch back up to my cave like a morlock on a booty call lest the dreaded Guitar Hero riffage tempt me to abandon my labors.

8:47 – I knock over the can of soda. A rivulet of bubbling brown fluid lurches toward the “unread” pile. I swipe it away, and build a temporary retaining wall out of old Spanish-language promotional bookmarks for Vampire: The Dark Ages. They’re laminated, they can take it.

8:56 – Crisis averted, desk dried, soda removed to a safe distance.

9:03 – I get back to that ‘proofing’ stuff I’m supposed to be doing. Chapter seven, and I find myself reading, as opposed to casting a gimlet eye on my still-inchoate prose. On one hand, that’s a good thing. I mean, if I can get caught up in it after spending more months than I want to think about living in the novel’s headspace, that tells me that it’s a pretty good story. On the other hand, it’s not helping me do what I have to do. I backtrack fifteen pages and go over them again.

9:16 – A hundred pages in and no sex scene yet? Who wrote this thing?

9:23 – The hero drinks a beer. He does that a lot, I’ve noticed. I clamp down firmly on the urge to go downstairs and emulate him, on the grounds that it probably won’t help my proofreading much, if at all. Also, I’ve got better beer in my fridge than the character’s got in his, and I don’t want him getting jealous.

9:40 – Melinda, the aforementioned and incredibly patient wife, sticks her head in my office. “Are you done yet?” My answer sounds like a sasquatch with his paw in a blender. She shuts the door again.

9:57 – Page 150. So far, so good, but I’m suffering grad school flashbacks. The last time I read something this closely, I was living in Boston, forty pounds lighter, and still inclined to do amateur theater.

9:59 – Amateur theater flashbacks. They will pass, they will pass.

10:04 – Hey! There’s acrobats in the book. Big ones. I didn’t write in any acrobats! Where did the acrobats come from?

10:08 – Suddenly realize that somehow writing assignments from one of Melinda’s writing classes have gotten mixed in with the manuscript. For ten minutes, I have been assiduously providing notes on someone’s senior thesis. The scary part is that the paper isn’t even the same size. Clearly, the focus can be relaxed a little bit. Just a smidge.

10:10 – Notes file is officially clean of any comments about acrobats.

10:14 – Get idea for short story idea about acrobats. Start writing it down.

10:16 – Fling pencil across room, accidentally terrifying one of the cats. No notes about other stories allowed until I’m done with this one, damnit.

10:24 – Six other story ideas have made themselves known in the last eight minutes. Bastards!

10:30 – Page 200. Either I’m picking up speed, the novel’s getting better, or I accidentally grabbed that beer after all.

10:36 – Find some new typos. Me and my big mouth. Err, blog. Err, blouth. Whatever.

10:42 – I check the clock. Nearly three hours in. My neck and back feel like Lionel Hampton’s been using them for practice. My sympathy for authors of Jordanesque fantasy dagwoods goes up several notches.

11:04 – Melinda again. “Are you done yet?” “Grrr.” “Are you coming to bed?” “Grrrrr.” “Do you want me to help?” “Grrr…oh God, yes, yes, a thousand times yes! I mean, err, Grrr!”

11:22 – Past the 275 page mark and picking up steam. I think my characters want to get rid of me. They’re afraid of more edits.

11:34 – 300! Woohoo! This part of the novel will now defend Thermopylae against the Persian hordes!

11:37 – Read last comment. Sigh. Go downstairs for more caffeine. Inhale it. Get more. Carry it back upstairs. Place it carefully away from remaining 75 or so pages.

11:39 – Inhale additional caffeine. Wonder where helping verbs and articles have gone in my blogging.

11:44 – So far, I have come across spelling mistakes, a mislabeled character, one embarrassing factual error, one situation that, if left unchecked, would pit the content of my novel against the laws of physics, and evidence of a marked disdain on the author’s part for consistency in italicization. Which is to say, so far, so good. I have a brief urge to look at the draft of the manuscript I submitted, just for the sake of comparison, then ruthlessly squish the notion. I’m fairly certain that if I try it, I’ll be turned into a pillar of salt. Even if I’m not, I’m already engaged in spending the evening hunting for my own mistakes. I’m reasonably certain I don’t want to find the countless hordes that were there in the earlier, pre-editing, Neanderthal phase of composition.

11: 48 – Getting there. Time to knuckle down. Also time to correct my sudden, intense semicolon addiction.

11:52 – I stash some of the semicolons for later. I can quit using them any time I want, you know. I just like complex syntax.

11:59 – Page 350. It’s the height of the action. Things are exploding, explanations are being explained, dogs and cats are living together [editor’s note – Not really. The cats are reserved for the short fiction.] I find myself feeling a little twinge that it’s going to be over soon. This, I think, is also a good sign.

12:14 – Last chapter, excuse the prologue. One more typo, one more doubled space between words. Things are winding down, and so am I.

12:27 – Melinda again. She knocks, then asks how it’s going. “Done,” I say,” looking at the list of edits onscreen. I save the file and reverently tuck the pile into the corner of the desk. She looks at me, looks at the proto-book, looks at the serried ranks of empty Coke Zero cans lined up on my desk. “You’re going to do it again tomorrow, right?” I nod. “Right.”

There was almost no essay today. (Stop with the cheering, you lot. You get another thirty days without me now.)

That’s because tomorrow, the calendar starts getting interesting. Come one o’clock, my wife is putting me on a plane for a two week stint at one of our sister studios, there to work with various and sundry fine folks on a project that looks to be challenging and enjoyable. (No, I can’t tell you which one. I mean, I could I’d have to shoot all of you, and I just don’t have that many bullets. Besides, my trigger finger would get tired.)

Friday, she takes off for her summer writing wanderjahr. First it’s two weeks in Prague for a session on magical realism, then six more in Seattle for Clarion West. Do the math and you come up with roughly nine weeks apart, though rumor has it that Clarion West does allow supervised visits from spouses and legal representation. Today would seem to be a day for making big puppy dog eyes at my wife, uttering endearments, and generally acting like I’m not going to see her for a good long while. Instead, I’m sitting in front of the computer, typing out this.

Why?

I have friends who tell me that it’s about time I put the fiction writing on the back burner and really concentrated on the game design work, because I’ve been giving the writing too much play for the last couple of years. I have friends who tell me that I need to make sure that I clear more of my time for my writing, and that work has devoured too much of my writing time with late-night dialogue fixes over the years. And I have friends who think I should be focusing on writing about game writing, and really carving out a niche in a field where I’m, if perhaps not a leading expert – I’ll leave that for others to decide – then at least in possession of what Moe Green would no doubt refer to as my bones.

So where does the time go? Who gets the hours of fingers to keyboard? Or, to open the question wider, when do the fingers hit the keyboard at all? Was the hour I spent today lugging mulch out to the garden in preparation for a multiple week absence a betrayal of my writing time? How about taking twenty minutes to run over and do a friend a favor, returning a lost cell phone?

There’s only so many minutes. Who – or what – gets them, and in what order, is the real conundrum of trying to write while maintaining any other existence or existences. The writing books and magazines and websites (even this one) are full of the stern admonitions about how much you should be writing and when you should be writing and when you should be writing about writing and, well, you get the idea. But generalization is impossible. Circumstances change, rise up, and mutate. The muse is demanding and so is the deadline, but so is the rest of your life. A balance has to be struck, if you want to continue writing, if you want to continue being a writer. But what that balance is, and whom you strike the bargain with, is entirely a function of each individual’s circumstances, will, and desire.

For my part, I haven’t found my balance yet. I’m not sure I ever will, though I’m always going to keep trying. I certainly don’t feel like I’m not a real writer because there are occasional days that other things take precedence and I haven’t chained myself to the chair for a requisite number of hours. There’s a whole other essay in that, something I like to call “geek macho”, but that’s for another time. Right now, the balance is shifting, and no doubt it will shift again tomorrow, and the day after that. The trick is to keep it from sliding too far in one direction or another. Tricky, yes, but worthwhile…if I can pull it off.

And if I ever do, you’ll be the first to know.

Thomas Boswell famously titled one book of essays on baseball Why Time Begins On Opening Day. There are plenty of reasons for the baseball fan, casual or fanatic, to agree with him. After all, baseball is the writers’ game. Look at the bookshelves. From Moneyball to Feeding the Monster to The Echoing Green, the books give witness in ever-increasing numbers that writers love baseball. From bookish Bill James to elegant Bernard Malamud, from the precise George Will to the masterful, late David Halberstam, all were called to write about the game, and so many others with them.

Of course, the game offers much to those who’d take up the pen in its honor. Maybe that’s the reason writers are drawn to it. The season is 162 games, long enough for plots to unwind themselves at their own pace without hurry, with enough time for reverse and counter and a last, mad, desperate dash to the climax. Say “1978” in Boston and you’ll hear all about it.

Or maybe it’s because there are always stories in there, as many stories as you’d want to dig for. The aging veteran seeking one last shot at glory, the out-of-nowhere rookie who shines against all expectation, the part-time player who seizes the spotlight, the wily pitcher whose stuff has deserted him but whose guile enables him to befuddle those younger and stronger than himself – are these not the characters of epic? Of tragedy? Ask Roy Hobbs or Donnie Moore; they certainly thought so.

But I think Boswell’s wrong.

Writing is like baseball because for every superstar there are a hundred guys in the minors, doing whatever it takes to hang on because no matter what, they’re still playing baseball. They’re still doing what they love. They’re still chasing the dream, and they will keep chasing it as long as they can. Sound like any writers you know?

There are reasons writers love baseball, above and beyond that elegiac pace that suddenly goes accelerando when you least expect it. Basketball fails to surprise, the gap between the best and the worst too large. Too many of its heroics are wasted in hopeless situations and pre-ordained playoff series. It’s a game of superstars, and everyone else is forgotten.

Football’s season is too short, as are the careers of too many of its heroes. Their faces hidden, their bodies armored, on the field they become military units, manifestations of the coach’s plan. Individual achievements emerge only in the context of Super Bowls won, otherwise they fade into insignificance.

Doubt me? Then tell me off the top of your head what the career record for touchdowns scored is, or receiving yards in a season, or career sacks.

But everyone knows what 755 means, and we could see Hank Aaron’s face as he jogged around the bases after going deep into the left-field bullpen for homer #715.

Writing is like baseball because it’s a case of individual prowess projected on a team stage. It’s batter versus pitcher, fielder versus ball, writer versus manuscript, a series of single moments that play out into a coherent, compelling narrative.

Find the themes. They’re there, waiting. Consider the Yankees, arrogant and rich and powerful, locked in eternal fratricidal combat with Boston. The Red Sox, forever beset by tragedy and lost opportunity, until delivered by miracles and a bloody sock. The Cubs, lovable losers basking in the sun at Wrigley while the beer vendors shout “Old Style!” and the fans watch from rooftops across the street. The Dodgers, gone from beloved Bums to the laid-back kings of La-La Land. These are the tropes, the stories that have been built up over a century, the archetypes that are so easy to play with. Pick up the threads; it’s almost too easy. After all, other hands have been weaving them for years.

Then again, maybe it’s just that there’s so much there. Every game has its heroes and villains, its underdogs and its goats. Each team gets the same fair shot – 27 outs whether you want ‘em all or not, 9 innings, 9 men on the field – to do with as they will, a multitude of encounters matched in duality. If the hero is the crippled pinch-hitter who has one good swing in him and goes deep in the bottom of the ninth, he’s matched the goat, the guy who gave up the bomb. It’s serious stuff. So sayeth Kirk Gibson and Joe Carter, so sayeth Mitch Williams and Dennis Eckersley.

Or it could be because baseball makes everyone a storyteller, because the score never tells you what happened.

Never.

Writing is like baseball because they’re both about the precision of inches applied over vast differences. Willie Mays made The Catch 450 feet from home plate. An inch of difference one way and that ball is popped up, an inch of difference the other and it’s gone. Instead, it’s poetry. Change one word and see what happens. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

Time doesn’t begin on opening day. It ends there, and on every day the rest of the season. Every game is somebody’s first, someone’s magical moment, someone’s legend born and retold. Their story, for them to tell and retell for the rest of their lives.

For me, it was September 26, 1980. It was a night game, Phillies-Expos, both teams fighting for the N.L. East pennant. Our seats were borrowed field boxes, right at the end of the Phillies’ dugout on the first base side. Nine years old and the proud possessor of almost a complete set of 1978 Topps cards, I’d brought some cut-down 5”x 8” index cards with me for autograph hunting. During the game my father passed them to the security guard stationed at our end of the dugout. “Can you get someone to sign them?” he asked. The guard nodded and disappeared for a minute. A few seconds, or minutes, or pitches by Montreal’s David Palmer later, he returned, a card in his hand. There were five names on it:

• Catcher Bob Boone, who later set the record for most games played at the position.
• Shortstop Larry Bowa, a slick-fielding All-star and future manager with a fiery temper. He was my favorite Phillie, as much for his diminutive stature as anything else. Years later, he’d manage my beloved Phillies into the ground, but that would be later. In 1980, he was the little guy who caught everything.
• Outfielder Bake McBride, a former Cardinal with a ferocious ‘fro. 1980 was his last hurrah. After the season, he’d never play regularly again, but that night, he was magical.
• Ramon Aviles, a backup infielder. Good field, no hit, and in 1980 he’d hit the only 2 home runs of his career. I was a fan; I can still lay hands on a half-dozen copies of his 1981 card at a moment’s notice.
• First baseman Pete Rose. Liar, gambler, tax cheat, fraud, drug addict, American Ixion in the making. All that was in the future; in 1980 he was a first baseman with a high on-base percentage and no power, the Phillies’ first dive into that newfangled free agency thing. The other story had not yet been written.

None of the autographs were personalized, except that by the mere fact of their existence, they all were. They were mine, made for me in the heat of battle and given to me from the mysterious depths of the dugout. Bowa’s signature was cramped and tight, Rose’s fat and loopy with a “P” than ran all the way out to the “R” of his last name. McBride’s signature was smooth and flowing, the downstrokes going way, way down below the letter line. Boone’s looked distracted, the letters written one over the other. Aviles? His “R” went down and his “A” went out, and every other letter went every which way. I stared at it, heart thumping, fascinated.

If a foul ball had come our way, I would have been doomed, as I refused to let them out of my hands all night.

I still have that card. It’s on my desk now. And when lumbering left fielder Greg “Bull” Luzinski saved the game with a running, stumbling catch by the left field foul like, it seared itself into my memory. When Bake McBride, the same Bake McBride who’d signed that piece of cardboard for me, hit a home run to break a 1-1 tie in the ninth and win the game, I was plunged into pandemonium.

Shake’n’Bake, the scoreboard said. 27 years later, and I still remember the scoreboard, remember the ball disappearing over the outfield wall, the ballpark erupting into chaos.

Pure magic.

And the next day, I couldn’t wait to tell all of my friends all about it.

 

Writing is like baseball because both go better with a beer. Or maybe that’s just me.

Just as I still have that card, I still tell the story of that game. Maybe my memory of that night is faulty, maybe I’ve jumbled details and filled in gaps and built a myth out of the first game out of yet another three-game series that honestly didn’t decide all that much.

Except that in my story, it does. It’s a story I learned that night and that I’ve been telling ever since. That’s what keeps me going back to the ballpark, the search for another story like that one. I’ve gotten close a few times – a game-winning grand slam by a long-forgotten catcher named Bo Diaz, a Keystone Kops triple play in Kansas City as the Tampa Bay Devil Rays ran amuck on the bases, a start for a one-armed pitcher named Jim Abbott at Fenway Park against the dreaded Roger Clemens, a My-God-Did-You-See-That? Play from Durham Bulls wonderphenom B.J. Upton throwing out a runner from his backside. There have been other moments – heckling a player only to discover his girlfriend was sitting right in front of me (she agreed with me, for whatever it was worth), agreeing to look at an old autographed baseball as a favor and discovering that the autographs turned out to have names like Aaron and Spahn and Mathews, sneaking into my father’s bedroom closet to oh-so-carefully take down his old Brooklyn Dodgers yearbooks and read once again about Campy and Shotgun Shuba and all the rest.

Moments. Stories told and retold, and me always looking for more.

Did that game make me a storyteller? Probably not, but it did demand that its story be told. And so does every game, because every game has a story, or two, or as many as there are players and moments in it. The score says nothing, the agate type of the box score is merely a plot outline. But the game itself, and every other one played, is a story waiting to be composed and relayed, made up and told.

That’s the real link between writing and baseball, I think. All the rest helps, but all the rest is details. It’s a game of stories, and it calls to the storytellers in us. Not all of us, perhaps, and not every time, but enough of us, and more often than not.

So maybe time does begin on opening day, and end there, and everything else in between. That’s my story, and I’m sticking it to it. And the story? It’s sticking to me.