Jeffrey Ricker's Blog, page 16

There’s always something you can do

I’ll be honest. I had a little freakout this week.

[image error]I don’t even know if anyone but me noticed it, since so much of my life happens within the confines of my skull. (For this fact, the test of the world should probably be happy.) Suffice it to say, on my lunch hour when I usually write, I spent too much time reading too much of the news, figured societal collapse was inevitable within the next six months, so what the hell was the point in anything anyway, especially stories?

You can imagine this is not a great mindset to encourage writing.

Luckily I didn’t have a meltdown in the middle of work, but this low-grade anxiety dogged me the rest of the afternoon until I got home and confided my worries to my long-suffering partner. (It’s incredibly comforting, I must say, to walk in the door and just lean your forehead against someone else for a moment. In life, as in yoga, supports help.) I said screw it to my resolution not to drink during the week to help with my fitness kick, poured a cocktail and sat down in front of my laptop.

I kind of knew the writing still wasn’t going to come, so after sending emails to my elected officials (something that I could at least do that made me feel like I was accomplishing something), I looked at my calendar for upcoming deadlines and sent out two stories. Then I filled my calendar with upcoming deadlines for other magazines, contests, and fellowships and residencies.

When I teach writing classes, students ask fairly regularly about where to submit, how to promote your work, and the like. I tell them those things are important but I also try to point out that the first order of business is the writing itself. You can’t submit or promote what hasn’t been finished, after all. And the time you spend promoting your work, while important, is time spent not writing. So budget wisely.

That being said, people can’t read what they don’t know about. So yes, you do have to send things out. (And when they get rejected, you have to send them out again. And again.) You have to talk about your work. You have to let people know that it exists. But, you don’t have to do it all the time—nor should you, I’d say. You can also talk about what inspires you, and you can especially talk about the work of other writers whom you admire or look up to or just plain enjoy. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram or [ugh] Goodreads then you may have seen me wax rhapsodic about the latest Adam Silvera book, History is All You Left Me (so good), or talk about how much I love Tayari Jones or how ’Nathan Burgoine is great at lifting up other writers.

You can’t talk about yourself and your own work all the time. On the one hand, it gets boring. On the other hand, it makes you look self-centered. On the other other hand (you mean you don’t have three hands?), it will make people want to tune you out.

That’s not entirely the point here, of course. My point, and I do have one, is that when you’re finding it impossible to focus on making headway on whatever you’re writing, for whatever reason, that’s when you can work on the dozens of other things that go with the care and feeding of your writing, even if it’s just organizing your files. You never know what you’re going to find in a stack of old drafts, maybe something that will help you see your way forward in whatever you’re working on.

If nothing, it’s better than freaking out.

On coffee, captains, and characters

I’m planning to teach a workshop this summer at the community college on creating characters, so that’s had me thinking: What makes our favorite characters our favorite characters? It’s never quite the same thing every time, is it?

If you follow me on any social media, it’ll be no surprise to you that I am a big fan of Captain Kathryn Janeway.

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Total badass coffee achiever

For those not in the know, she’s the commanding officer of the U.S.S. Voyager on the TV series Star Trek: Voyager, which ran from the late ‘90s to 2001. If you follow along on Instagram, or Twitter, or (ugh) Facebook, you’ll notice I post a lot of gifs featuring her fairly regularly. (There’s a reason I tag them #DailyJaneway, after all.)

No, she’s not a literary character (unless you count the Star Trek novels in which her character appears, and I do recommend Jeri Taylor’s Mosaic when it comes to that), but what makes her so compelling? Yes, Kate Mulgrew, the actress who portrays her, is a big reason I love her character so much, but beyond that, what is it about her? Is it some combination of background and character traits? Is it her love for coffee? (OK, that might play into it.) Is it that she’s from the Midwest and I’ve spent most of my life there, against my better judgment? Is it that she’s a scientist at heart? Maybe it’s that she stands up to anyone, no matter how big a bully they are. She’ll do anything for her crew, and she’ll tread along a narrow, confusing path between expediency and principle in order to get them home. She’s flawed and imperfect and completely determined.

She’s not black and white. She’s fabulously complicated.

She has a problem, she needs a solution, and the space between those two points is huge and full of conflicts. She’s not as noble as Jean-Luc Picard, not as tragic as Ben Sisko, and not as cavalier as Jim Kirk. (We won’t talk about Archer. Sorry.) She’s not always likable, but I’d say she’s the most relatable person to sit in the captain’s chair in any version of Star Trek.

For me, at least. And that’s why I keep coming back to her. And why I keep thinking about the things that make her a great character to me, so that I can tap that kind of complication when I’m working on my own characters, even a gay high school teenager who’s the son of an Amazon.

(See? Even when I start off talking about Star Trek, it all comes back to the writing.)

You are not cereal

Originally, this was the week I was planning to write about one of my favorite fictional heroes, Captain Kathryn Janeway, and try to explain why I find her so compelling. (For those who don’t know, she was a starship captain played by Kate Mulgrew in the science fiction series Star Trek: Voyager, and if you didn’t know this already, all seven seasons are available on Netflix.)

And I will still write about that (because Janeway=awesome), but next week. Because this past week, thanks to my friend ’Nathan, I came across this post on the website of a literary agency about a topic that’s somewhat close to my heart… well, if I’m honest, it’s probably closer to my spleen than anywhere else, because as I’ve discussed before, I have a love/hate relationship with social media. (I teach a class in social media for writers, and no, the irony of that is not lost on me.)

But, dialogue is always a goal of mine with writing, and I mean dialogue with the reader, not dialogue between the characters (although that’s a component of my writing, obviously). Social media is probably the best way for a midlist writer (or lower, like myself) to put a message in a bottle and send it across the sea to people who may open it and say yes, I get that.

So anyway, I read that post and my first thought was, “Well, what a load of codswallop.” Because codswallop is a word that doesn’t get brought out and used nearly often enough anymore, don’t you think? (Sadly, I wasn’t able to find an etymology for the word, but it makes a colorful alternative to nonsense, and it also makes me think of fish, which makes me think of chips, and now I’m hungry and clearly getting off track.)

Anyway, where was I? Right. One of the most important things I tell my students when it comes to social media, I think, is just be yourself. (Unless you can be Wonder Woman. Always be Wonder Woman.) People want to read your books and stories, yes, but when they come to places like Twitter or (ugh) Facebook, they want to read about you, about your work, and get to know you a little better. If you’re just a nonstop marketing mechanism and all you do is try to sell sell sell, people are not going to care.

So yeah when I read that article, I thought, what a load of codswallop.

(OK, if you must know, I also thought “what a bunch of f@&$ing bulls@$t,” because I learned my penchant for colorful metaphor from my dad and my dad is a U.S. Marine, and so I’ve always had a hereditary link to the profane.)

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courtesy of freestocks.org, unsplash

But anyway, the idea that writers should keep themselves and their opinions out of what they’re saying online is such a bunch of twaddle, I don’t even know where to begin.

Maybe I’ll begin and end where I always do, at that queer junction I inhabit. To be honest, I consider my continued existence and happiness as a gay person in love with another man to be inherently political. I haven’t shed blood for my sexual orientation (yet), but I’ve been threatened, intimidated, and punched for it. These are things that I don’t set aside when I sit down and write. Totally the reverse. I call those things up, along with a bunch of other stuff about me, about my past, and about all the random and particular things I’ve learned along the way. I put that on the page, and I also put that on Twitter and Instagram and (ugh) Facebook.

But. (Come on, you knew there was a but coming, could you see my “but” face?) Yes, there’s obviously a risk with telling people what you think. Or telling people that you’ve had a bad day. Or mentioning that you got three rejections in the space of one day and that makes you want to have a drink. Or that you think a particular elected official is a witless dilettante who hasn’t the first clue what he or she is doing. Because people might not think the same things that you do, and they might get downright angry about it and unfollow you and not buy your books.

Are you really going to lose sleep over that?

Besides, I’d be hypocritical if I said I haven’t done the same thing, too. There are writers who I find highly objectionable because of their personal views, and I won’t buy their books. There are also editors and agents whose comments on social media have made me… reluctant to pitch to them. From what I can tell, none of them are exactly hurting from my exclusion. By the same token, my selection of books to read is not exactly shrinking by their omission.

There are lots of books and lots of readers out there. The trick is connecting with the ones who will get your work and will get you. It takes time, and consistency, and it takes being yourself enough that people recognize the you in your writing.

And it’s easier to be yourself than it is to try and be someone else.

Personally, I’m happy to see that someone like author Matt Bell is posting about running a marathon, author Rebecca Chance’s cats are sleeping in the Jacuzzi tub again and leaving muddy paw prints everywhere, and Jennifer Weiner is live-tweeting The Bachelor (I’m not going to watch it myself, but I could see myself live-tweeting the season finale of Supergirl). Or Chuck Wendig is being… well, Chuck Wendig.

Just be yourself, and be as genuine as you feel you can be. But for heaven’s sake, don’t obsess about your “brand.” You’re not a box of cereal.

You can’t be everywhere all the time

I didn’t want this to be one of those “so I left Facebook, look at how above it all I am” post. So I asked myself: “Self,” I asked, “what does ditching a social media profile have to do with anything?”

It goes back to grad school.

Back in 2014, when I was getting my MFA in creative writing, I had a novel to write. This was my graduate thesis, and it was a dark speculative fiction piece about climate change, crumbling civilization, and the possibility of a new life on another planet, but mostly it was about family. It’s funny how, in the intervening years, what I wrote as basically science fiction looks scarily close to becoming fact (except for the whole other planet bit), but that’s the thing about fiction, right? Sometimes you tell a vision of the future and it comes true.

Anyway, I’m still revising it, but at the time, when it consisted of nothing more than a few pages scratched in a notebook, a proposal for a scholarship (which I didn’t get, but that’s okay), and a reading list I’d submitted to my (awesome) advisor, I had a long way to go. (Also, any time you can compile a graduate thesis reading list and it includes things like The Road by Cormac McCarthy, you’ve got a fun, but grim, project on your hands.)

Anyway—have you noticed how often I start sentences and paragraphs with “anyway”? This is a verbal tic that I’m conscious of in my writing and that I work on revising out of it but, apparently, not right now. Anyway… (See what I did there?)

ANYWAY. I had a deadline and a lot of writing to do in a short period of time—to the point where my advisor was suggesting that combining all my short stories into a collection could be a good alternative if I couldn’t pull this novel out of my hat in time—and I was all about eliminating distractions.

That’s where Facebook comes in. Or rather, that’s where Facebook went out. I deleted my Facebook account—not just deactivated it, but went the full-on nuclear option and made it gone, gone for good. To be fair, at the time I didn’t understand the distinction between deactivating and deleting a profile. I just merged my profile and my writer page and left it at that. (Did you know I have a writer page? Doesn’t really matter; most of the traffic points people to this little website or my newsletter, and you’re already here, so there’s that.) If I’d just deactivated that profile, maybe I would have turned it back on afterwards.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda. Or something like that.

Fast-forward a couple years and the thesis was finished (I think we were both surprised I got it done that fast, my advisor and I), I was no longer in Vancouver, which is my favourite (adding the extra “u” out of nostalgia) city in North America, and I no longer saw on a daily basis all of the friends I’d made there. I missed it. I missed them. So I created a new Facebook profile.

You can see where this is going, right?

I’ve been in a distraction spiral ever since.

One of the many things I do in my ongoing quest to make a living (which automatically makes me think of the Sade song “When Am I Going to Make a Living?” and that’s not a bad thing…)

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OMG, style for DAYS, she has….

Where was I? Oh, right. Distraction spiral. One of the many things I do to cobble together a living as a writer is teaching, and one of the classes I teach at the local community college is a one-day weekend workshop called Social Media for Writers. And yes, I recognize the irony in that. But I enjoy teaching that topic, and one of the things I touch on in that class is that you can set up an account on every different platform there is, but you can’t keep a fully fledged presence on all of them at the same time. Or rather, you can, but all of that takes time away from the actual business of writing. And it may be worse to have a lackluster presence on a particular platform than it is to have no presence there at all.

(There’s also the concerning issue with how Facebook plays fast and loose with access to users’ personal information, which is why I also erased every post, photo, and detail before I deleted my account; whether that amounts to any use is questionable, but it was satisfying. It was also eye-opening to see how pointless most of my interactions there were.)

You can only be so many places. You can only divide your attention so many times before it’s impossible to focus on any one thing for any appreciable amount of time. Where do you want to spend your most finite resource, time? Me, I like spending it here, writing things to the folks who read this blog, or writing stories and books that I hope people want to read.

I have two novels to finish revising this year: the as-yet-unnamed sequel to The Unwanted, and that aforementioned grad school novel. I also have a third one I’d like to get started on, and I’m mulling over an idea to make use of my back catalog of stories. With all of that on my plate, I know I’ll need to do as much as I can to keep myself on target.

Sunday Shorts – “Shepherd” Q&A with Jeffrey Ricker

Hey, my friend ’Nathan asked me a few questions about “Shepherd,” the story of mine that appeared in Foglifter magazine. He also said some darn nice things, but he’s a nice guy. He’s also a fantastic writer, so go read this and then check out his latest novel, Triad Blood.

'Nathan Burgoine

Foglifter Magazine

I need to offer a public mea culpa with today’s Sunday Shorts. I had intended to have this ready for release to coincide with the month of release of the magazine, Foglifter, in which the story appeared, which was—cough—last November. Then I managed to have a spectacular ice fall (among other things) and everything sort of stuttered to a stop for a bit.

But! One of the great things about great shot ficition like Ricker’s “Shepherd”? It’ll wait for you.

You should haven’t wait for Jeffrey Ricker, though, and for that I apologize.

Foglifter is a queer journal and press, but more than that. We want powerful writing, intersectional writing, that queers our perspectives; writing that explores the sometimes abject, sometimes shameful, but always honest and revelatory experience; writing that calls into question the things we believe to be true, the things we believe to be known…

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Goal for 2017: Actively seek out rejection. (Yes, really.)

Happy New Year!

That’s less of a declaration and more an expression of hope, as in “wow, I hope 2017 will be happy.” Because 2016 was a bit of a Dumpster fire, wasn’t it? Between a horrific election cycle and the way the year killed off so many actors, musicians, and artists, by Dec. 31 I was ready to stay up until midnight just to watch 2016 die.

Now that it’s over, though, I’m trying to look ahead and decide what I want to accomplish this year. I don’t really believe in New Year’s resolutions; they never seem to carry through the whole of the year, anyway. We make too much of a big deal about them, I think, and create unrealistic expectations (I’m going to get into the Best. Shape. Ever! I’m going to write a novel! I’m going to run a marathon!) and then the second week of January rolls around and we’re slouched in front of the TV on a Netflix binge with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s (those are single-serving containers, right?) and wondering where our motivation went.

That said, yes, you can set a goal for yourself at any time of the year, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set a goal at the beginning of the year. Basically, don’t stress about it, right?

Anyway, to figure out my goal for 2017, I just have to look back to the last day of 2016: On Dec. 31, I submitted a short story for an anthology. On Jan. 2, I received the rejection notice.

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Image by Judith E. Bell/Flickr

You know what? I’m actually pleased with this. One, it means I finished that story. Dec. 31 was the submissions cutoff, and I was almost certain I wouldn’t make it. But I did. So, achievement met there. That it got killed two days later is less-than-optimal, but maybe the story was less than optimal. Or maybe the reviewers were hungover from too much champagne. Or maybe they already had a story very similar to it. Or maybe they don’t like their science fiction a little bit gay.

But whatever. None of that is in my control—except for the possibility that the story was less than optimal, in which case this is an opportunity to revise. My point, and I do have one, is that my submission might have been rejected, but if I hadn’t submitted, I would have had no chance of acceptance, either.

Control what you can. For me, I can control how often (and where) I submit. So that’s what I’m planning to do. I’ve already got my eye on a submission deadline of January 31, and I’ve filled my calendar with reminders of when some magazines’ submission windows reopen. (Hopefully, I’ll have something to throw in their windows at that time.) If you’re a writer and your work leans toward speculative fiction or queer fiction, my friend ’Nathan is very good at posting calls for submission that he’s aware of. He does that every Wednesday; here’s what he posted this past week. (He also mentions his novel that’s coming out later this year; he’s a darn good writer, so that’s worth checking out if you like dark urban fantasy.)

Wish me luck.

A momentary pause

Sometimes it’s good to take a break, especially if you have some deadlines (self-imposed or otherwise) that are personally important for you to meet. In other words, I have a manuscript to finish revising and I want to get that done by end of year. (I also have a basement I desperately want to clean out, but that’s beside the point for this site.) So I’ll be taking a break from posting here through the end of the year. Have a great November and December, and when I come back in January, hopefully I’ll have good news.

Why write right now?

Wow, what a week.

I normally try not to get political when I write these newsletters (although it could be argued that, as a writer of fiction primarily with a queer bent, my work is inherently political). I like to have a focus, and that’s usually on the things I write, the things I teach about writing, how to help other people write, and why I write.

And then this week happened, and well, you know. Now I’m trying to figure out where writing fits into a landscape that looks like it could very easily collapse.

A lot of people might be surprised to hear that I consider myself an optimist. (Hey, stop laughing. No, really. I said stop.) I think that’s surprising mainly because I’m also pretty curmudgeonly. A curmudgeonly optimist? Is that a thing?

In any case, that sense of optimism has been sorely tested already over the past year. I think the last week pretty much shattered it. Which is not to say that I’m surprised at how the election turned out. Never underestimate the ability of a group of paranoid, prejudiced people to make poor choices.

So now I’ve started asking myself, in a climate like this, what’s the point of writing stories?

photo by Aaron Burden

Beyond just the fact that writing is in my nature, I write stories to entertain and also to figure things out for myself about the world, and I share them because I hope they’ll resonate with other people. And that maybe they’ll be worth reading tomorrow.

So what’s a good story for tomorrow, or the day after that?

The other day, I tried to actively engage with someone on the other side of that political divide through social media. To try to speak to her in a way that might make her acknowledge the people on this side of the divide as human beings. I’ll admit, I’m not trying to empathize with her. I have no empathy for paranoia and racism. But if I could maybe make her realize that those she labels as Other have more in common with her than she realizes, and that her actions, even on something as innocuous as social media, have consequences…

Did it work? I don’t know. I doubt it. We were able to have a civil conversation, and I think maybe that threw her off a bit; but in the end, when she said to me “we’re on the same side,” I had to point out that no, we’re not. She voted for someone who’s antithetical to my way of existence. I don’t buy into a lot of her preconceptions about American exceptionalism and patriotism, and I certainly don’t buy into their ideas of racism and misogyny. It was an uncomfortable discussion, and frankly exhausting. And I worry that, in trying to reach out in that way, they might think I’m legitimizing their paranoia and their racism.

So yeah, what’s the point? Frankly, I would rather spend my time trying to help my friends who are truly at risk in this hostile environment than trying to find understanding with those who are merely uncomfortable about the changing complexion of our country. That makes me think of the adage about wrestling with a pig.

In any case, as a writer I’m trying to figure out what the role of my work is in a climate like this and whether it’s worth continuing. I’m also trying to negotiate the likelihood that my health coverage will evaporate next year and that the atmosphere is going to become a lot more hostile to people like me, but that’s another thing.

Actually, no. It’s the same thing. If this is the climate in which I have to tell stories, what will those stories be? Is it time to tell a different kind of story?

In the end, it seems, I can always find someone who has a better answer to these questions than I can seem to come up with. Toni Morrison said, “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I guess it’s time to get to work.

Wow, you made it all the way to the bottom. I’m hoping that means you got something out of this. If you know someone who might also find it interesting and fun, not stupid or boring, please pass it along. And if something struck a chord with you, good or bad, email me. I actually love email. Thanks!

What’s it worth?

These days, I admit to feeling more than a little guilty if I’m not spending every spare minute I have working on my book. Which is not to say that I do spend every spare minute working on it, just that whenever I do something other than write (which is often), I feel as if I’m somehow betraying something. That I’m not really a writer. That I don’t want it badly enough. That the idea isn’t compelling enough to try to get out on paper.

But then I look at what I’m working on, and it looks like this:

There’s the version that lives on the computer, and the sections of it that I print out twenty pages or so at a time. I cross out large chunks of it and write in between the lines what I think belongs there instead. When I run out of space, I write on the back of the sheet (unless I’ve printed it double sided) or move over to my notebook, where I make a note of what page of the manuscript I was on before I made the switch. Once I get through a twenty-page chunk of manuscript, I start typing it all up again and move on to the next section.

In the meantime, the edits to those twenty pages exist in a sort of limbo where they’re not saved and backed up anywhere except on paper. Whenever I leave the house with them in my bag, I think, if I got mugged, would I ask for the notebook? Probably. If the office were on fire or there were an active shooter, would I grab the bag with the pages before running out? Likely. There was a guy in the news recently because he ran back into a burning home to rescue his computer, which had the only copy of his novel on it. No cloud storage, no backup disc; is he crazy? I thought at the time. Now I’ve got these twenty pages at any one time that I would risk going back for.

So maybe I do want it bad enough.

Wow, you made it all the way to the bottom. I’m hoping that means you got something out of this. If you know someone who might also find it interesting and fun, not stupid or boring, please pass it along. And if something struck a chord with you, good or bad, email me. I actually love email. Thanks!

An excerpt from my story “Shepherd”

You may recall that recently (I think it was August? Wow, where has the time gone? I know, I know, it doesn’t really go anywhere, it’s us who travel through it in a linear fashion, but wow do I seem to be traveling through it quickly lately).

Wait, what was I saying? Right. I mentioned recently that I have a story coming out in the second issue of Foglifter magazine. Well, guess what? The issue’s out!

Pretty, isn’t it? In addition to me, it includes stories by some other writers I know, including Ed Moreno and Celeste Chan, who are both lovely people I met during the Lambda Emerging Writers Retreat in 2014. My copy is on its way, and I can’t wait to read what everyone else has written. (Have I also mentioned Jewelle Gomez is in this issue too? OMG.)

You can buy a copy from their website, which of course I encourage. In the meantime, though, you may also recall I promised an excerpt from the story once the issue was out. Let it never be said I don’t keep my promises.

Shepherd

Joe and Ed never did figure out where the dog came from. Their summer house, nestled in rustling knee-high grass and surrounded by black locust trees, had no immediate neighbors, and the only road was their long and winding gravel driveway.

“Summer house” made it sound grander than it was. It was a cabin that happened to have indoor plumbing and unreliable electricity. They kept a kerosene lantern just in case. There was no air conditioning, but it was still cooler than it was in the city, and the sea breeze made up for the primitive charm. Joe liked to leave the windows open so he could listen to the ocean’s ever-present background hum, somewhere out of sight.

Joe leaned over the kitchen sink, hands bracing against the porcelain edge slippery with soap, and peered out the window. “Ed, come look at this dog,” he called. This was the first time.

The fawn and black dog waded through the grass as if swimming through water, nose held just above the surface. He came from the direction of the woods, not the road, and paused at the white picket fence surrounding the property. After a moment, he nudged the gate with his snout and came into the yard.

As Ed took up a spot to his left, Joe felt a chill rush over him, though the breeze coming through the window as the sun set was only mildly cool.

“Where do you think he came from?” Ed asked.

Joe wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “I didn’t see him come up by the road.”

Ed leaned against the sink, the freckles showing on his arms as the sleeves of his t-shirt rode up a little. He always freckled in the summer. “Pretty, isn’t he?”

As Joe reached for the doorknob, Ed came up behind him and covered Joe’s hand with his. “Let me go first.”

For a moment, Joe let Ed’s hand remain there, enjoying the warm feeling that spread through his chest at the contact; then, as if remembering to be irritated, he withdrew his hand. “It’s just a dog,” he said.

“You never know.”

Joe didn’t wait, though, and followed Ed out the door and down the step. The dog stopped in the grass maybe twenty yards from the cabin and stood regarding them, its jaw slightly agape, as if smiling hesitantly.

“Here, boy.” Ed sat on the bottom step and leaned forward, hand outstretched toward the shepherd. Joe leaned against the doorframe and, arms crossed, watched as the dog edged closer until, eventually, he pressed his wet nose into Ed’s palm. Ed smiled and ran his hand through the thick fur at the dog’s neck.

“Doesn’t look like a stray.” Ed frowned. “No collar, though.”

“Think someone dumped him?”

“Maybe.” Ed’s jaw worked with some unspoken irritation. “Not right just abandoning a dog like this.”

The shepherd circled around, presenting his flank to Ed while facing Joe, who leaned down to let him sniff his hand, which was red and irritated from washing the dishes. He stroked the dog’s ears for a moment before hugging his arms to himself again. The golden, slanting light of sunset made the lawn look on fire, but Joe was starting to feel chilly. It was late July, and it should have been warm, even hot. But it wasn’t.

Ed yawned. The long commute into work had to be wearing on him, but he insisted it was fine, and besides, he loved coming home every night to the peace and quiet of the shore, which was good for Joe.

In August, though, their lease would be up and they’d have no choice but to close up and head back to their apartment in the city for the fall.

The dog turned away from them at the same time Joe heard the whistle of a bird, a frantic, three-note song that repeated. The dog took a step away from them, which seemed to spur something in Ed.

“Hey, buddy. Here, buddy,” he called. The dog turned, but then the bird sang again. It was a whippoorwill. Joe read once that those birds could hear the sound of a soul departing the earth, and since then, their song had left him cold.

To read the rest, go pick up a copy. Or, if you ask me really nicely the next time I see you, maybe I’ll read it to you….

(Hey, you made it all the way to the bottom of this post. That’s awesome. If you liked it, I have an e-mail newsletter. You should totally sign up for it. I might surprise you with stuff you don’t get to see here, or anywhere else, for that matter.)