April 20, 2016

Wedding in a Week and a Book Baby

On Sunday, April 10, I turned to Tony halfway through our hippie church service and whispered, "hey, wanna get married here next week?" He sure did. And why not? He's about to start a new job, we're selling two houses and buying a third, and I'm prepping for a TEDx Talk plus have my book baby out on submission, and so why the hell not UPROOT EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE?

A week later, on Sunday, April 17, we swapped vows in front of 70 of our closest friends and family (and yes, that is some legally- and religiously- sanctioned ass-grabbery you're seeing below; squeeze it like you own it, amirite?). Our getting hitched went off without a hitch. Almost all our important people made it, and the weather was gorgeous. Our scrappy and brilliantly-talented photographer friend Cindy offered to take photos. Christine shared stories and a poem that had the entire church in laughter then in tears. Kellie sang <i>At Last</i> so powerfully, so personally, that Tony and I held each other and cried. Tony's sisters read the Apache Wedding Blessing and personalized it with a perfectly-delivered <i>The Princess Bride</i> reference, my mom worked her kitchen magic on a mountain of tender, perfectly-seasoned pulled pork and a dozen different desserts, and everyone brought sides and flowers and wine even though we said no gifts.

Voila! A wedding in a week.

Afterward, Tony suggested I write a book so others can plan their own weddings on the cheap (money- and time-wise). I said it'd be more like a pamphlet, but you know what? It's a sentence: Find the person who makes you feel safe, adored, and loved, the person who doubles down when the going gets tough, makes you laugh, and is committed to a lifetime of evolution, add amazing family and friends, get lucky on the weather, and celebrate the good like your life depends on it.

Hmm. I might have stumbled onto the recipe for LIFE.

Which is funny because you know what? A big hairy part of me was sure I'd never get married again, even as I said yes to Tony's proposal last December. I'd experienced a dramatic shitstorm the only other time I'd tried it, and the thought of inviting that depth of pain into my life, my kids' life, fired up my lizard brain. My lizard brain always brings the fear wrapped in a deceptively reasonable package, you know?

Here's the deal, though. Fear is an amazingly helpful emotion when our physical safety depends on it--when we are walking alone at night, or when we're choosing whether or not to wear a seatbelt or to eat pufferfish. But outside of protecting our bodies, fear is USELESS. Worse than useless. It's a joy-thief. When not needed for physical survival, fear is a parasitic emotional squatter that looks like the child snatcher from <i>Chitty Chitty Bang Bang</i> (warning: link NSFW). Fear might be the loudest and the strongest of emotions, but since when has that been a good criteria of who you want to spend the night with?

Laying all that out spurred me to develop a new rule: if it's not about protecting my body, I'm not going to listen to fear. You know how I know this is one of the life lessons I'm supposed to learn? Because the second I adopted that rule, Life gave me all sorts of opportunities to practice. Take my Book Baby, the first nonfiction book I've written, which is currently out on submission. It's the book that explains how I took the facts of my life--the shame-filled, the fearful, the funny--and turned them into fiction, transforming myself in the process. My personal experience is woven with neat and sweet instructions for anyone else who would like to reprocess their pains and pleasures and "you'll never believe what happened to me"s into compelling fiction.

I'm proud of that book, really proud. So why am I listening to the fear that is whispering (and it's the hot, meat-scented whisper of that guy you never should have gone on a date with because now he's talking through the whole movie) that this book won't find a publisher? Why am I accepting, even in my head, that conservatively-wrapped fear gift known as back-up planning (if/when the book doesn't find a publisher, I can always self-publish, and...)? Why am I hedging my hopes and my bets and generally living small, and calling it common sense?

Dangit, NO.

I am tuning out fear, even if I need to tune it out again 30 seconds later. OK, 10 seconds. But practice makes perfect, right? It's time to clear room for joy in my heart and abundance in my brain. They're the ones I want to spend the day with. I'm done borrowing trouble. (But I'll take cake if you have some.)

Big love to you.

p.s. I know it's only been three days, but marrying Tony is one of the best decisions I've ever made. Typing that makes my eyes get all hot, which is the equivalent of full-on happy sobbing for all you non-Midwestern-of-German-descent people out there. The marriage hasn't changed our relationship in any perceptible way, but it has filled in all these cracks that I hadn't known were there. I now have this amazing, solid foundation which makes everything else seem possible.

Cheers to silencing fear.

Turns out there's lots of good stuff out here beyond the cave.

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April 6, 2016

Making (Book) Sausage

Yesterday, I presented to 60 booksellers the story of how I became a writer. It was the first time I'd shared in public the truth of how I came to write fiction, and where my story ideas (mostly) come from. Doing so shot me pretty far out of my comfort zone. Jupiter-far. Historically, when asked the inspiration for my first published novel, <i>May Day</i>, I tell a version of the truth, usually slanting toward funny:

• I lived in the country and had poor TV reception and decided to write to entertain myself. (true/not true)
• Janet Evanovich wasn't writing fast enough, so I wrote my own funny mystery. (true/not true)
• I'd tried writing a literary novel, and it turned out stinky, so I turned to mystery. (true/not true)
• My kitty brain likes swatting at puzzles, and mystery writing provides that outlet like nothing else. (true/not true)

But not yesterday. Yesterday I told the truth, with only a thin microphone stand to hide behind. I'd been writing about it for a while, but that's a different animal; I can write about anything. But to say it out loud, into a microphone, in front of a breakfast crowd of strangers? Oof.

Coincidentally also yesterday, my friend and kick-ass writer Lori Rader-Day posted a link to this article penned by Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, where he writes:

Artists frequently hide the steps that lead to their masterpieces. They want their work and their career to be shrouded in the mystery that it all came out at once. It’s called hiding the brushstrokes, and those who do it are doing a disservice to people who admire their work and seek to emulate them. If you don’t get to see the notes, the rewrites, and the steps, it’s easy to look at a finished product and be under the illusion that it just came pouring out of someone’s head like that. People who are young, or still struggling, can get easily discouraged, because they can’t do it like they thought it was done. An artwork is a finished product, and it should be, but I always swore to myself that I would not hide my brushstrokes.

I like that. I like the idea of not hiding our brushstrokes in life. Back in the 90s, I worked at an import store on the West Bank of Minneapolis. My coworker, Aeon, put it like this, "When I was a kid and would trip in front of people, I'd get so embarrassed, like I'd been a four-legged creature putting on airs and had just gotten found out for the fraud I was. Now when I fall down, I laugh and get back up. Life's more fun that way."

Those words have stuck with me for 20 years.

So, yesterday, I stood in front of 60 booksellers, my voice shaking, and told them how my husband's 9/11 suicide is what truly made me a novelist. His unexpected death left ripped-up memories, a churning brain, terror, questions, shame, and more questions, and they didn't all fit into my head and so I poured them into a book. A mystery, specifically, which is to say a book centered around a question that at the end gets answered. And it healed me, or came close to it. I haven't stopped writing since.

All 60 booksellers grew super quiet when I shared my raw truth. Some heads started nodding. A lot of eyes connected with mine, some of them so full of love that I teared up a little myself, some curious, others--clearly and beautifully--wondering what stories of their own it would be okay to tell. Yesterday's talk was one more step on a path that leads to my June TEDx Talk, and (I hope) continues outward and upward after that. Because I really do believe that when we show our brushstrokes, when we laugh and get back up no matter how dramatically we've just fallen, life gets easier.

For everyone.

Everyone.

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Jessica (Jess) Lourey is best known for her critically-acclaimed Murder-by-Month mysteries, which have earned multiple starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist, the latter calling her writing "a splendid mix of humor and suspense." She is a tenured professor of creative writing and sociology, a recipient of The Loft's 2014 Excellence in Teaching fellowship, and leads interactive writing workshops all over the world. <i>Salem’s Cipher</i>, the first in her thrilling Witch Hunt Series, hits stores September 2016 and her agent is currently shopping <i>Better than Gin: Rewrite Your Life</i>, a guide to recycling life experiences into compelling fiction.

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April 1, 2016

How to Write Funny, Part 2 (A Writing Whip-It)

Specific Is Funny

Hey you. Thanks for showing up! My last blog post promised that this next blog post would begin to share the tools of writing funny. That this would be the first of 8 tools, matter of fact. It is! Here's the first tool: be specific.

If it seems easy, it is. Specific is more funny than vague. Let me give you two examples.

This first is a past blog post from the consistently hilarious Bloggess:

You know how when you’re having a dream you sometimes get angry, or frustrated, or delighted or calm…but you almost never get utterly baffled.  A giant purple ostrich walks into your house, which you’ll later realize (upon waking) is not your house at all but is actually a bakery you peed at once, and instead of thinking, "When the fuck did I get an ostrich?" you think "I wonder if it wants me to scritch it on the head?"

You can argue whether or not the above is funny (it is to me), but there is no debate that it's funnier than merely writing, "dreams are so weird!" Let me give you another example of how specific is funny in writing, this one excerpted from Carl Hiaasen's <i>Bad Monkey</i>:

On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos.

“What’re you waiting for?” James Mayberry barked at the mate. “Get that thing off my line!”

The kid tugged and twisted, but the barb of the hook was embedded in bone. Finally the captain came down from the bridge and used bent-nose pliers to free the decomposing limb, which he placed on shaved ice in a deck box…

Louise Mayberry's gaze was fixed on the limb. "What could have happened?" she asked.

"Tiger shark," her husband said matter-of-factly.

"Is that a wedding band on his hand? This is so sad."

"Fish on!" the mate called. "Who's up?"

James Mayberry steered his bride to the fighting chair and the mate fitted the rod into the gimbal. Although she was petite, Louisa Mayberry owned a strong upper body due to rigorous Bikram yoga classes that she took on Tuesday nights. Refusing assistance, she pumped in an eleven-pound blackfin tuna and whooped triumphantly as it flopped on the deck. Her husband had never seen her so excited.

Hiaasen is the master of this type of specificity--"breakfast burritos," "bent-nose pliers," "shaved ice in a deck box," Tuesday night Bikram yoga classes that account for Ms. Mayberry's strength and possibly her vapidity. Hiaasen sprinkles these laser-focused gems throughout his writing, not too many so they load it down but enough that you should pay attention. Here's the thing: consciously using specific language is a good writing habit in general, but it's food, water, and air when it comes writing funny.

I'll prove it with an exercise. Pull out the last potentially funny (or actually funny) paragraph you wrote. Scour it for vague words. Replace them with one or two specific details. Hiaasen could have written, "Regular exercise gave Louisa Mayberry unusual strength." He instead wrote, "...Louisa Mayberry owned a strong upper body due to rigorous Bikram yoga classes that she took on Tuesday nights." Do the same find-and-replace in your paragraph, but go lightly--specific is like salt in that a little bit goes a long way, and if you oversalt, that's all anyone notices.

Hmm. That has me weirdly hungry for a hamburger. Specifically, a salty juicy burger dripping with melted cheddar, topped with butter-sauteed mushrooms, a diced jalapeno pepper, and raw onion. Yum! It's probably because I'm doing this ridiculous 5/2 fast with Terri Bischoff. Sigh. I'm off to drink water and crunch celery.

Happy writing.

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Jessica (Jess) Lourey is best known for her critically-acclaimed Murder-by-Month mysteries, which have earned multiple starred reviews from Library Journal and Booklist, the latter calling her writing "a splendid mix of humor and suspense." She is a tenured professor of creative writing and sociology, a recipient of The Loft's 2014 Excellence in Teaching fellowship, and leads interactive writing workshops (including "Writing Funny") all over the world. <i>Salem’s Cipher</i>, the first in her thrilling Witch Hunt Series, hits stores September 2016 and her agent is currently shopping <i>Better than Gin: Rewrite Your Life</i>, a guide to recycling life experiences into compelling fiction.

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