Bryon Quertermous's Blog, page 2

Free Short Story!

Happy New Year! One of the goals I made for myself this year was nurture my newsletter better and grow the audience so I’m not as beholden to the grip of social media. I really like having control over my content so I can up and move it without too much hassle when one platform or another goes extinct. I’m lucky that this newsletter has never been a moneymaking operation for me, so I can move around as much as I want and bring my email list with me.

All that to say, as a thank you to the folks who read this newsletter I wanted to started sending along some of the short stories I’ve published over the last few years. I think they’re some of the best work I’ve written and they’ve been hidden away in anthologies.

First up is one of my absolute favorites. It was published in 2021 in the Mystery Writers of America anthology When a Stranger Comes to Town and is based on an actual conversation I had with a guy in the hot tub at my gym.

It’s called “Howard’s Heart” and you can access it here. If you haven’t subscribed to my newsletter yet, click here and the password will be sent in the welcome message.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Finishing the Hat

This isn’t going to be a long note, I just wanted to share some final words of encouragement to end the year with good momentum. I’m not at all a proponent of hustle culture, but I’ve seen how ending a day, or week, or month, or year strong helps keep the momentum going on long projects, and sometimes that involves us pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones.

After waffling on whether I should push myself or take it easy and try for a steady pace with a longer timeframe to finish the book I’m working on, I decided to push and finish the book by the end of the year. I was on a roll for a few days and then messed it up by trying to edit too much as I go along. Right now it looks like I need to do about 3k words a day to finish by the end of the year, which isn’t out of the question.

Since people always ask when I show these word count graphics, that screenshot is from Scrivener which I HIGHLY recommend even with it’s weird learning curve.

That final word count has a buffer built in that will let me cut 15% of what I write and still have a manuscript close my goal word count. I’m still just traumatized by almost a decade spent writing vomit drafts that were so unusable I’d have to start from scratch every time, especially the second half which I where I have the most trouble. I feel better about the structure of this one though, more than I have any of the others, because I wrote up a four page synopsis before I started writing. I’ve also been reading Matt Bell’s great book Refuse to be Done so I know I have a guide for the next steps after finishing this draft. It’s a great safety net to work with.

So I just need to keep my eyes on the goal, trust my process, and trust I’m better at this than I was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and 20 years ago.

Comedy Tonight

The last two months have been rough. At first I thought I had taken on too much and was melting down because of it, but it turns out that toward the middle of September my medicine stopped working. I gained almost all of the weight back I lost, I was having trouble sleeping, I was moodier and more agitated than I’d been in over a year. And to add insult to injury, the medicine had started to make me nauseated again all day. So I was in bad shape.

I’m working with my doctor to switch meds to something that will work better, but because he’s switching me to a stimulant, I have to meet him in person instead of through tele-health like we’ve been doing, and his soonest appointment was more than two weeks out. But through all of this, I’ve managed to get some things done. I finished a nice edit of the first 1/3 or so of the novel I’ve been working on and came up with a plan to finish the book by the end of the year.

I took the remaining word count I wanted to hit and added 15% to it because that’s roughly what I cut in edits then set the project timer in Scrivener to tell me how many words I need to write each day to hit my goal. Right now it’s around 1800. Very doable if I plan properly (and get my meds right). With the extra word count built in, I can type like crazy without fear of cutting too much and having a book that’s too short.

I’m quite excited to get to work. But the other big thing I accomplished was starting to do stand up comedy like I’ve wanted to do for ages. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a stand up. My very religious family and very religious school I attended didn’t have any sense of humor. My exposure to the comedy greats was through the sitcom boom of the late 80s and early 90s. I watched them all – great ones, crap ones, and all of the mediocre ones that came on between the great ones. If it was 30 minutes long with a laugh track I watched it.

I wrote them as well. I wrote spec scripts for Friends and Frasier that I think still hold up pretty well considering how young and naive I was when I wrote them. I even toyed with the idea of moving to LA to pursue a TV writing career. But I chickened out and stayed at home.

My first real exposure to stand up comedy came when I was high school and I would stay up late after my parents went to bed. I watched the late night monologues from Jay Leno and David Letterman, but my biggest inspiration was watching ComicView on BET. I watched Cedric the Entertainer, DC Curry, Sinbad, Sheryl Underwood, and my personal favorite DL Hughley.

From then on I started watching any standup special I could find. And I started going to comedy clubs more often. My wife and I went to comedy clubs quite a bit when we were dating, and since the kids have been older and we can go out later more often, we’ve been seeing them more regularly again. And every time, she would tell me I should do it and that she thought I’d be great at it.

I never really thought pursuing it though because I had no idea how to even go about it. And I thought I was too old to start. Then I got a job working in Royal Oak for a bit and drove by Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle every day. This place is legendary for giving Tim Allen his start and for being where Bob Saget and Dave Coullier met. I looked up their website to see who was going to be visiting and saw they offered comedy classes. Again, my wife encouraged me to take them, but I put it off because I had too much else to do.

Well I finally did it and loved it. The class ended with a showcase performance that I’m really proud of. Performing was great, but what I really liked was writing and perfecting the jokes. It also brought a new excitement to my fiction writing as well. I’ll be taking the advanced class in January and I’ve already lined up a couple of performing slots over the holidays.

Much like I did with my writing career where I started acting like a professional LONG before I had any business doing so, I’ve already created a stand up comedy specific section on my website to make it easy for folks who want to hire me to do so. The site also has a link to the video of my performance if you want to check it out. Hopefully by the end of next year I’ll have a finished new novel, a finished college degree, and a burgeoning stand up comedy career. What kind of ambitious hobbies are you looking to pursue in the near future?

It’s a Simple Little System

After revamping this newsletter to focus on joy and happiness and magic then updating regularly for five months, I disappeared. While this is absolutely a stock move from the ADHD playbook, it had less to do with the immediate effects of my disease and more to do with needing more space and time to process the previous 40 years or so of my life pre-diagnosis and medication. There’s an adage in Alcoholics Anonymous to avoid making any big life decision for a year after you first become sober because it takes at least that long to properly come to terms with who you were and what you did under the influence of the disease. Well, it’s been almost exactly a year from when I was diagnosed and started the healing process and that seems about right.

Aside from addressing the trauma issues and fallout from everything with my therapist, the main thing we’ve been working on is building consistency and balance into my life. This has not been easy for me. Even on medication, I noticed I was still prone to procrastination and still more comfortable working in obsessive streaks followed by chunks of laziness and depression. That’s no way to live a life, so I’ve had to work on breaking those large tasks into smaller tasks and finding consistency in even the smallest aspects of my life. I tend to appreciate patterns and routines in my life, but that hasn’t helped all that much.

A big part of working through this for me has been looking at the big picture of life rather than the immediate moment. Take household projects for example. Before, I would hope for lottery windfalls or major career windfalls to provide a big chunk of money that I could use to take care of all of the projects around the house as once. But now I realize I can pick one project, do it myself, and even if it takes me all summer to do one project, by next summer I’ll be able to move on to the next project and so on. Even if it takes a decade to do it all, it’s better to look back ten years from now at all I did instead of being ten years older and wondering why I never had the opportunity to do everything around the house I wanted.

The same with writing novels. I would get frustrated at the slow timeline of writing a novel, then editing a novel, then selling a novel, then publishing a novel. I got so down about it all and freaked out that I was never going to have enough time to do it, but here I am almost ten years since finishing my last solo novel and even with the glacial pace of publishing, I could have had a couple more novels out at least if I’d focused less on the enormity of the problem and more on the day-to-day aspects of getting it done. Despite having a family, a day job, and other responsibilities on top of trying to build a writing career, there are plenty of hours in the day to do everything I need to do plus everything I want to do if I plan it properly.

Planning.

My kryptonite both personally and creatively. I’ve always prided myself on my spontaneity and my ability to adapt on the fly, but always living on the edge and never knowing what’s going to happen next is no way to make the most of my limited time on this earth. I started planning my life and my creative work grudgingly at first, but over time, I saw that not only was I more successful and more productive, my stress level went way down.

I wish this letter was full of emotionally-charged inspiration for you or life-changing insights to drive your own creativity, but sometimes we need the banality of common sense reenforced for us when we get too far inside our own heads or lives or processes. Boredom is a trait lost to this generation and I think it’s time to bring back respect for boredom and for the basics. Everything doesn’t have to be revolutionary or disruptive.

What I’m Reading: I just finished two great books, Play the Fool by Lina Chern and The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz, and I’m currently reading Everyone in my Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson and loving it.

What I’m Watching: I was one of the many people sucked into Suits on Netflix this summer and I’m shocked I never watched it when it originally aired. But it was just what I needed during some difficult moments this summer. I’ve also been watching the Martha’s Vineyard mystery movies on the Hallmark Channel. These are a bit less airy and frilly as some of the other Hallmark Mystery Movies and I’ve enjoyed them. In the theater I saw A Haunting in Venice and The Royal Hotel and enjoyed both of them in very different ways. I’ll likely be taking my girls to see the Taylor Swift movie this weekend. I’ve started buying more media in physical format lately because it seems more and more of the things I want to watch aren’t available for streaming.

What I’m Writing: I’m almost halfway through a book I started about a year ago that was originally intended to be a straight up category cozy, but has morphed into something more akin to an Agatha Christie novel. Still funny and light, but with a bit more depth. And still very much me. I read an article recently that talked about a burgeoning trend toward cosy (not cozy) mysteries and I couldn’t be happier if it’s true. We’re living in dark times and sometimes books need to be an escape not something that adds more darkness to the world. I took some time off from generating new words to go back and rework the first 30k or so of the book to make it more in line with the new direction. My hope is still to have a good draft done by the end of the year.

People (Who Need People)

“People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” – Jule Styne and Bob Merrill

Since it’s February and we’re thinking about love, I wanted to tackle one of the most enduring toxic literary tropes, especially for men – the lonely tortured artist grappling with the pettiness of life and the weight of his great talent. We’ve all been fed hundreds of examples, real and fictional, of men like Hemingway and Philip Roth and other mostly white men who were absolute assholes in their marriages and their lives and struggled with the reality of their art.

The lesson we’re supposed to take away from all of this is that the art coming from these men is so important and so vital to the world that they can’t also be expected to deal with mere humans in their lives who will never understand the heavy mantel they’ve been cursed with.

Which, of course, is complete bullshit.

I’ve always viewed this trope with skepticism, but didn’t realize until recently I was living that trope. As I’ve been reckoning with my life and behavior pre-ADHD diagnosis, the people I love have been letting me know how much I hurt them and how cold and mean I could be, especially when it came to dealing with my work.

I am incredibly lucky to have an amazing support network around me who have loved me unconditionally and made accomplishing as much as I have even under my fried brain possible, yet common wisdom and societal norms would indicate I needed to work harder to drive these people away from me. I’ve talked with Becky a lot about this, and I think one of the reasons I was able to get this far into my life without anyone pulling me aside and diagnosing me with ADHD is because according to traditional views of masculinity I wasn’t doing anything wrong. My wife was to blame for exploring her own career and interests instead of devoting herself exclusively to supporting me and my art. My kids were to blame for daring to live their lives as children in their own house instead of walking on eggshells around me to make it easier for me to get my work done. My friends were to blame for not understanding just how important my work and my presence in the literary scene. Etc.

This is something I’m going to be unpacking for a long time , and part of that is using any platform I do have to spread the word and make sure no one else has to suffer the way I have and the way my friends and family have because of this. Becky and I have been watching a lot of roller coaster documentaries on YouTube lately and one thing that always comes up is how important the structure around the roller coaster is to maximizing its performance. When one element of the structure starts to crack, the whole coaster is in danger, including riders and bystanders. I’m lucky I was able to find out how distressed my structure was before there was a fatal accident and while I can still repair it.

Even if you’re a neurotypical person, or someone who considers themselves a regular person instead of an artist, it’s important to find other people to love and let other people love you. One thing that’s become even more obvious than ever in our world is that we are in desperate need of love and kindness for those around us.

Everybody’s Gotta Be Somewhere

Happy New Year! I know it’s weird to still say that more than halfway through the month, but because of vacation and illness I got a late start to the new year. Then we had a holiday yesterday so today really feels like the first official day of this year to me. Which is great, because I’m excited about this year and ready for it to start.

Even with a delay though, the year is already off to a good start. I spent the first week of the new year with my family in Florida reading by the pool and having breakfast on the patio every morning, which was a great way to prep for an exciting year. I also signed a contract for a new short story that will be published in March and I got a potentially exciting email that I hope to be able to share more about soon.

I’m not just waiting around for good news though. I have an ambitious agenda for this year professionally and that’s where the topic of this newsletter comes in. I’ve always been the sort who knows the value of planning and organization in theory but has trouble executing it in reality. This likely had a lot to do with my undiagnosed, though heavily suspected, ADHD. Now that I’ve found the right meds for that, I’m finding my head is clear enough to start adopting the processes I need to make sure I get everything done I need to in a timely manner.

The most obvious of these is using a planner and the calendar and reminders app on my phone. I’ve always used the calendar on my phone to keep track of where I need to be and when using notifications to keep my on track. This has made a huge difference and being able to combine it with Siri voice controls has been a godsend to my brain. But I also find that once a week copying down my reminders and appointments into a paper planner calms me and really imprints the appointments on my brain. I started using a Passion Planner last year and really enjoyed it. I hope to make full use of it this year. It has a lot of goal tracking and reflections features that I find very helpful. I’m even using stickers in my planner!

For the actual writing work that I need to do, I am finally ready to admit that I’m an outliner from here on out. I’ve resisted it for years, thinking that doing any kind of advance work would ruin my creativity or put me in a box or whatever. That turns out to be nonsense (for me at least) and after wasting almost a decade on a book that went nowhere, I’m finding the more advance work I do on a project the more creative I become because I’m not always worrying in the back of my mind whether or not this project will fall apart in the middle or at the end like all of my other have. I’m also journaling more and moving it completely digital.

I’m using Day One to keep a daily fact journal that’s just a bullet list of the main points of my day. Where I went, what I did, what I read or watched. That sort of stuff. I’m also keeping a more traditional journal every few days with longer and deeper entries that help me work through personal issues and professional issues as well as letting me work out story and structural problems in my writing. I used to keep these by hand, by handwriting has started to take a toll on my wrists and I find the digital journal is easier to read months later and is less stress on my wrists.

I hope the new year finds you as excited about your life and your work as I am, and I hope you find your own way to organize your thoughts and your life to make the most of both.

Something Just Broke

I’m not very big on regret, but I’ve been thinking a LOT lately about wasted opportunities. There was a recent opportunity I had that I really thought was going to change the trajectory of my career, and it did sort of. But after one book I was let go and found myself back to square one again. I found out that opportunity ended up being even better than I could have imagined and I think about why I wasn’t able to do what I needed to do to make it work.

Ever since college, my life and career have been defined almost entirely by opportunities I’ve wasted. I was in college for almost a decade across four colleges and still never ended up earning a degree. This really hurt me early in my day job career life by severely limiting my job options. Eventually I made it work for me and I’m doing great now, but I do think about what could have happened if I did it the way I was supposed to.

Then we have my writing career. I finished my first novel when I was 25, but I didn’t have a novel published until 14 years later. And instead of making the most of that opportunity, I dicked around and missed a bunch of deadlines on my second book, pissing off almost everyone who worked with me on it. And then I took three more years to finish the third book on my contract, which my publisher didn’t even like and canceled my contract. Then in 2020 I had the previously mentioned great opportunity come my way and same story. Every time.

I used to feel bad about this because I thought it was because I was lazy or unmotivated, or just untalented. I briefly worked with a doctor to try anti-depressants, which wasn’t the thing. It wasn’t until recently when we’ve been working with doctors for Spenser and Natalie on ADHD issues that it finally clicked for me. The problem isn’t any of the stupid protestant work ethic issues our society drills into our heads, my brain is just broken.

Once I finally realized this I was relieved that maybe there was a way forward to start making the most of whatever opportunities may be left for me, but I was also pissed that it took almost half of my life being over before I had this option. The mental health system in this country is just abysmal, but so is our societal attitudes around mental illness. Even as much as visibility has grown over recent years, there’s still this underlying belief that if you just work hard and eat right and just work through it that you can fix anything.

Well fuck that.

Now I’m on the fun rollercoaster of figuring out what medicine and dose will work for me. After an annoying bit of business trying to find a therapist in the first place that would work with my insurance, I found one who seems to be great. He started me on a non-stimulant medicine that seemed to start working right away, but has nearly debilitating nausea as a side effect. I think I’m about ready to tap out on that one. Hopefully we can find something else that works and doesn’t make me feel hung over all the time.

The issue for me now though, is to make sure I don’t get so caught up in thinking about these wasted opportunities that I don’t continue seeking out new opportunities or believing that I still have a chance to succeed. I hate the corny idea that these wasted opportunities were gifts I should be thankful for, because they’re not. I can say without a doubt that I would be in a very different, more successful place in my life right now had I made the most of the opportunities offered to me.

BUT, I like my life the way it is right now, so I don’t regret what’s happened because it’s all part of what got me to where I am now. What I want to do is keep myself in the game and keep my name out there so people know I’m someone to be trusted with opportunities. At the end of the day, I’m a professional writer and I want to be viewed that way by the community and my peers.

Part of that is also figuring out what works for me as a writer. That’s why I’m leaning into writing funnier, more traditional mysteries instead of trying to write hardboiled social novels. Who knows where all of this will ultimately end up, but I still feel optimistic about this industry and my future in it. My goals and dreams change as the industry and market evolve, but the core goals of being read widely and making good money from my work remain.

Magic to Do

In my last post I mentioned coming back from Bouchercon and being excited to write again, but even though that was sort of true, I still couldn’t get any traction on any of the book projects I tried to work on. So I took a break to work on a short story I’ve been noodling for a while that I think will be perfect for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, one of my bucket list publications. That story is a very traditional mystery story with clues, and poison, and even a closed setting in a theater. Very cozy. And when I was done with it, I found something had snapped with me and I had no interest in darker stuff.

I started watching comfort TV shows like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote and subscribed to the Hallmark Movie Channel so I could watch all of their mystery movies on demand. It was then I realized why I couldn’t make any progress on my book and why I’d been so miserable writing for almost five years. I was trying to be a writer I’m not. I wanted to be a serious, tough, dark, writer wrestling with the social issues of the day, but that’s not me. And it’s especially not me now. I happened to be chatting with another writer friend who mentioned the cozy mystery he’d written and everything clicked into place for me.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had this kind of paralyzing identity crisis. Back in 2008, I was torn between working on this serious hardboiled PI novel or a zany pulp fever novel I really wanted to write. I got so far up inside my head with that conflict that I stopped writing completely for a few years. Finally, I gave up the serious novel and went all in on the novel that became Murder Boy. Which I sold shortly after I finished it. You’d think I would have learned my lesson from that. You would be wrong.

After writing three zany crime novels, I convinced myself my next book had to be big and serious and tough and then I proceeded to be miserable for five years with it. Until I wrote that short story. I’d attempted a couple of cozy novels before, but always stopped myself because 1) I didn’t trust my plotting skills and 2) I was afraid of being looked down on by my writing peers for writing fluff.

Well after writing that short story I knew I’d upped my plotting game significantly and went out and outlined an entirely new book from beginning to end in four days. And it’s the coolest, twistiest, most solid plot I’ve ever constructed. And it’s ME. The book only I could write. But when I sat down to start writing the book, I let the doubt creep back in and wondered what people would think of me for writing this stuff.

Luckily my friends on social media are smarter than me and convinced me I was being a moron. Once I gave myself permission to start writing, I felt so much joy and freedom. I even started thinking about making my next project the romantic comedy novel I’ve always wanted to write.

Coping with Sanity was my old blog title and was part of my old self who wanted to struggle with brilliance and all of that nonsense. The new me is fun and sparkly and glittery and what better title than one from Pippin, one of my favorite musicals. Writing should be magical to write and magical to read. And I’d gotten away from that. So I hope you’ll join me here on my path toward joy in writing. It should be fun.

What I’m reading: I had the delight to finally meet Mia P Manansala in person at the Midwest Mystery Conference last weekend and get a signed copy of her first book, Arsenic and Adobo, and it’s an absolute delight. I also have a digital subscription to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine that I’ve been working my way through.

What I’m watching: I mentioned Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, but the Hallmark movies I’ve specifically been enjoying are the Crossword Mysteries, the Aurora Teagarden Mysteries, and Mystery 101. I also HIGHLY recommend the new Selena Gomez documentary My Mind and Me.

What I’m listening to: Like the rest of the world, I adore the new Taylor Swift album Midnights and I can’t wait to get my hands on a vinyl copy to listen to. I’ve also cracked the seal on the Christmas music though the bulk of my listening lately has been showtunes.

Being Alive

Last month I was able to get back to Bouchercon for the first time in three years and it was just what my soul and creativity needed. I’d been working on the same novel for more than four years before finally abandoning it right before the conference.

Talking to folks and sitting in on panels and generally being in the stew of creativity was just what I needed to recalibrate my ideas and goals for that book and start a new draft. I’m writing the version of this book I always wanted to but never felt confident enough to. It’s the least commercial version of my least commercial novel idea, but for the first time in a long time, I’m happy writing. I’m ambitiously hoping to have a draft done by the end of the year

Bouchercon brought a couple of cool announcements as well. First, I have a short story published in the Bouchercon anthology, which is very cool. It came out of a terrifying situation where I hit a deer with my van. Everything is copy as Queen Nora Ephron liked to say.

Second, I’m the consulting US editor for Angry Robot’s brand new crime fiction imprint Datura Books that was launched at the con. You may remember almost a decade ago that I ran a crime fiction imprint from AR called Exhibit A. This time I’m happy to be one of many folks involved in making the imprint work and I can’t wait for you all to see what kind of cool stuff we’ll be doing.

Another thing feeding my renewed creativity was a visit to New York City a couple weekends ago. That city always fuels my creativity and it had been too long since I’d been there. While I was there I had a chance to see the Pulitzer and Tony Award winning musical A STRANGE LOOP and was absolutely wrecked by it. I recommend anyone who can go see this show.

After the show, I went to the bar above Sardi’s and had a drink, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. It was full of theater people and the petty gossip about the shows was just what I needed.

And speaking of theater…I’m a big fan of creative people having hobbies and working in other art forms to keep their work fresh, so for the first time more than 20 years, I’ll be on stage in a musical. The theater company that Natalie and Holly have been doing shows with also does some all ages shows through the year.

This time they’re doing Shrek: The Musical and I’ll be appearing as Lord Farquaad’s father as well as the jerk knight who throws all of the fairy tale creatures into the swamp. I really wanted to be Donkey and actually got a callback for the role, but I think I was a bit too old for that role in this show.

I hope you’re all being creatively nourished and finding ways to stay alive as we head toward the season of eternal darkness.

Say Hello to Mr Leo

Sooooo, uh, we drove to the middle of Amish Ohio this morning and brought back a new friend. Say hello to Mr Leo.