In our backyard, the day of the solar eclipse...
2018 dawned cold in Georgia. But it's warm in the house, or so says Penny, our outdoor cat who came in last night and won't leave, even with the ginger cat Fred's outrage at this barefoot hillbilly who eats food off the floor. Hissing and spitting aside, it's a relatively quiet first-of-the-year morning in the Davidson/O'Leary-Davidson household. Time appropriate, I guess, with coffee, to think back on a year that's been anything but quiet.
I started keeping a journal, back in August, when I realized I would forget more than I would remember about my first year as a published writer. Here's a snippet from my very first entry, 8.15:
It's an easy thing to dream. It's harder to be awake and working. The best thing about writing, maybe, is that the two enterprises seamlessly become one. Going back to the day job after a summer of dreaming seems like trading the finest, most productive sleep for a fretful night without rest or comfort. I sit here thinking of the hills of Colorado, how far they seemed from ticking clocks and the worries of the week. I think of Sam Shepard's letters to Johnny Dark, how he longed for the smell of horses, the act of being near them. Sam's dead now, left us this month.
The hills of Colorado, taken from the driver's seat - July
Since April, when the ARCs of In the Valley of the Sun first came in the mail, Crystal and I have travelled over 10,000 miles (roughly 8,000 were by car) in service of promoting the novel. We've crossed and re-crossed, passed through, or touched upon a corner of every state in the southeast and southwest, not to mention a few other regions that encompass California, Colorado -- even Kansas (brrr, Kansas). We've stood upon the shores of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. We've watched marmots scavenge on the tundra in the Rocky Mountains. We've spent nights in famous hotels haunted by the likes of Jack Torrance, seen the scaffolding that should have hanged Tom Chaney, and had our rental car washed in Walter White's front business.
Crystal in the Rockies
In Tennessee, in August, I gave a signed copy of In the Valley of the Sun to Max Allan Collins, who wrote Road to Perdition. My journal entry from 8.26 notes:
What a strange thing, to give my book to a man who wrote many of the movie tie-in novels I read as a boy. A man I never even contemplated meeting, let along engaging at a professional level. He signed my Dick Tracy novelization. I was thrilled.
The previous month, in Denver, I signed a few books alongside Stephen Graham Jones and saw my novel shelved within reaching distance of Stephen King's The Gunslinger.
At Tattered Cover in Denver - July
"Jones is very tall," I wrote in my journal. "A woman asked him to fetch a magazine from a shelf, as if he were a store employee. He graciously did so."
Then, about the reading itself:
It all feels very strange, sometimes, the workaday realization of a thing you've held in your heart and mind since you were able to tell a story -- even the simplest one. There is no manual. No rule book. No handy guide.
Indeed, each reading I gave this year was different, each signing a lesson in how to act and interact and be the writer your book says you are (the best sales and receptions were, by far, at colleges). One venue forgot to order books to sell at the event. Another forgot I was even coming. But it all worked out, as we say, and what a trip it's been. Publishing a horror novel in 2017 has been the gift that keeps on giving -- so many kind words, so many new books to read in 2018 by writers I met in 2017, so many new friends (and hey, for a guy pushing forty, one new friend a year would be a treasure; in 2017, I made so many I've lost count).
At E. Shavers in Savannah, with my new friend Eliot the Cat - October
When I think back on the last six months, how seismically my life shifted, I can't help feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude -- not only for the new but also for the old. For every one thing that's changed, ten things have stayed the same. Crystal and I go to work, we feed the cats, we scoop litter boxes, we get the brakes fixed on the car. We buy Star Wars toys like the marks we are. We have fun visiting thrift stores and rescuing the odd, forgotten item.
Crystal finds a treasure at a Goodwill in South Carolina...
2018 will mark our tenth year together, still very much "nerds in love" (which remains, for my money, the most accurate description of two newlyweds ever soaped onto a car outside a church; thanks for that, Peter Gareis).
But what about everyone else? The rest of the world? Of 2017, in one of my earliest journal entries, I wrote:
The world's a strange, often uncomfortable place for nuance in 2017. Everybody's angry. Everybody's writing poems and essays and tweets about it all. Op-eds and rants and some genuinely good journalism decried as "fake." I hurt to see America hoodwinked by a sociopath. Hell of a year to publish your first novel.... It has been a year for rare things.
Among those rare things, in September, Hurricane Irma swept through Georgia and took out power for about three days (to say nothing of the devastation it wrought elsewhere). Crystal and I put food in ice chests, lived out of those, took cold showers, and played Scrabble in the dark. On one of those days, Merricat (one of our outdoor kitties) went walking across the backyard with a furry baby squirrel in her mouth. We made her drop it, saw it was alive, and -- because Bob Ross remains a personal hero of mine -- took it in and kept it in a Converse shoebox overnight. It was in shock. By the morning, it was feisty and ready to be released. We let it go into a tree, and we haven't seen it since. There are a lot of ways I've imagined that squirrel's fate ending in dire circumstances, most of them having sharp claws and eagle eyes. But what I choose to believe is the story in which its mother comes for it in the low branch where we left it, that she takes it back up into the nest it fell from. It's a story I tell myself, one among many, to help soften the blows of 2017.
And this, maybe, is the ultimate value of stories, as Tim O'Brien is famous for saying: they save us. Not from the truth, but because they are truth. They show us our place in everything, remind us how to be, correct us when we fail. They lend structure and meaning to the chaos of our lives. To the random chance of it all.
The next morning...
Or this story, from September 23, an odd moment of grace in a day we set out to see Flannery O'Connor's Georgia home and were bound for disappointment:
En route to Milledgeville today, on Highway 18, between Jeffersonville and Gordon, mile markers 10 and 11, a horse came wandering up the center of the highway, hot and frothing. No person in sight. Hills and curves and fast-moving traffic. We turned around, got ahead of him. Called to him, but he walked oblivious down the middle of the road, as if he had some destination in mind. We called 911, reported it, and managed to edge the horse with our truck into a field, whereupon the homeowners came out and said they knew the horse's owners, would call them. We drove on to Milledgeville. Andalusia was closed. The horse had a beautiful tail.
And so, a year for rare things.
Even though the world around us seems to have truly lost its sanity at times, I'm feeling optimistic about the future. The pendulum swings back, always. We've seen the first hints of America attempting some correction in the recent elections in Alabama and Virginia. For Crystal and me, 2018 promises more great things book-wise, writing-wise, nerd-wise. I'm sure it won't be without its troubles. I could have written so much more about those; we all have them. We all fight against the darkness. But that's the key: we fight. We don't give up.
Here's a bit to end on, I think, from 11.15:
I fumbled through a metaphor at dinner about life being like a river -- not my best moment. But the metaphor has a certain accuracy. Maybe it's not so much about some divine plan in a folder in some cabinet in the sky, but more a kind of natural current we're all pulled along by, influenced by eddies and rocks and streams that branch. We're all swept into a branch, from time to time. Eventually, we rejoin the river.
Here's to hoping, friends. Happy New Year.
