by john | Mar 8, 2017 | #HoldOnToTheLight, Real Life, Writing
People sometimes ask me how I’m so productive, how I manage to turn out a novella every month, plus run a publishing company, and do a couple of podcasts each month, and attend an average of 1.5 conventions each month, and do all the other shit I do.
The answer is – productivity through mental illness.
No joke, no bullshit, I am mentally ill and that is how I get so much shit done.
When I am able to do anything at all.
I self-diagnosed myself with depression when I was a teenager. I didn’t go see a doctor, or talk to a therapist, or do anything healthy to deal with it for almost thirty years. Last year, after dealing with depression for years, and after realizing that it wasn’t just depression, but I also had episodes of super-manic activity that were often equally damaging to my life, I self-diagnosed with Bipolar II disorder. This is not the bipolar that leads to throwing things in tantrums, or driving across multiple states wearing a diaper to murder the spouse of your astronaut lover. That’s Bipolar I.
This is the bipolar that vacillates more slowly, sometimes having month-long or multiple months-long episodes of depression, alternating with equally long episodes of mania. The depressive episodes are marked by hypersomnolence (sleeping all the time), lack of enjoyment in things you generally enjoy, lack of energy, and general malaise. The manic episodes are marked by lack of sleep, irritability, judgmental tendencies, waspishness, and hyperproductivity.
After a couple of meetings with a psychologist and some testing, my personal diagnosis was confirmed, and added to – ADHD along with Bipolar II. So I went on drugs. I take one pill every morning, and the idea is just to keep my shit regulated, to knock the tops off the highs and the bottoms off the lows. As I said to my GP, who is the one I talk to now about my meds, I’m not currently under psychiatric care (although given the fact that I don’t think I need it, I probably do), I just want to keep life on a range between a 3 and a 9, instead of a 1 to a 12.
The drugs I’m on haven’t done much to mitigate the current manic episode, I still don’t often sleep more than five hours each night, but I am less irritable, so that’s something. What the drugs have done is really helped with the depressive episodes. I had a pretty rough depressive episode in November, then another in January. December was okay, and February was pretty level. I was still able to work during November and January, and that’s probably mostly thanks to the drugs. In the past, when I had a depressive incident, I didn’t write at all, and that’s no good for someone with as many deadlines as I have, and someone who lives month-to-month from the fruits of their writing. A period last summer of no writing made for a couple of very tight months in the early fall.
About halfway through February, I felt the restlessness start to pick up, and I knew I was coming into a manic time. So I upped my daily word count, and I’m now writing as fast as I can to take advantage of the illness. That’s my current coping mechanism – when I’m feeling manic, I write as much as I can as fast as I can, that way I have stuff stored up for when I come down. It helps me stay productive, and keep getting paid, which the people that hold my mortgage appreciate. It’s just another part of living with a mental illness – learning the coping mechanisms.
I owe a lot to a couple of people in particular for their part in me getting help. Wil Wheaton released a video about his depression and anxiety that was really influential, and Jim C. Hines wrote a blog post about his fears of going on medication, which mirrored my own, and his positive experiences. Those two things really pushed me to get help, which lets me continue to bring people the stories that they hopefully love. So if you don’t feel right, find someone to talk to. If you can’t afford a doctor, try a clinic. If there isn’t a clinic around, ask around for a patient minister. If you don’t like church, call a hotline. Or phone a friend. There have been too many statistics. You don’t need to be one.
Words from Gail Z. Martin, founder of #HoldOnToTheLight –
#HoldOnToTheLight was inspired by #AKF #AlwaysKeepFighting, a campaign from the Supernatural TV show fandom (http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Always_Keep_Fighting)
#AlwaysKeepFighting #AKF showed the reach media stars have when they talk about issues, and I wondered what would happen if genre authors opened a similar conversation. I recruited my usual partners in crime—John Hartness, Misty Massey, Jaym Gates, Jean Marie Ward, Emily Leverett and my husband, Larry N. Martin—as the steering committee, and we started asking our colleagues and author friends to join us.
The result? More than 100 science fiction, fantasy, horror, paranormal romance and speculative fiction authors are part of #HoldOnToTheLight—and the outreach grows every day.
To find out more about #HoldOnToTheLight, find a list of participating authors and blog posts, or reach a media contact, go to http://www.HoldOnToTheLight.com and join us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/WeHoldOnToTheLight
by john | Nov 1, 2016 | Real Life, Writing
So once upon a time, there were blogs. And there were blog aggregators, and people read blogs, and blogs were super-active, and a thing, and some people wrote blogs about poker, and then they parlayed those blogs into jobs writing “news” articles about poker, and then they got fired from those jobs and turned to writing fiction (not that there hadn’t been some fiction in the other work).
Then there was Twitter, then Facebook, then Instagram, then Tumblr, then whatever, then whatchamacallit, then whodafuqknose…then most of that stopped being fun.
So there were still blogs. And some folks still owned blogs, no matter how infrequently they posted to them. And when Facebook and Twitter and all the other social media sites started throttling the amount of posts they displayed, it became a lot more effective to have a blog again.
At least I hope. I mean, I know I won’t be throttling this space down at all. In fact, I’m going to try very hard to do just the opposite. I’m going to try to be consistent with my posting here, and to post a lot of the crap I used to post on Facebook here instead.
So I think I’m back. We’ll see. I still have a fucking ton of books to write, but I think I can get some better mileage out of regular blog posts than I can out of just screeching into the void on FB.
Either way, Hi! Good to see you. Hope you’ll come back for a visit.
In the meantime, here’s my latest release – Heaven’s Door. It’s book 6 in the Quincy Harker series. I think it’s really damn good, and boy, you wanna talk about shit getting real? Shit gets real real up in here. So give it a look. It’s exclusive to Amazon, so if you need to read it on other platforms, print will be available in January, and all my releases are available to all my fans early using my Patreon.
by john | Aug 28, 2016 | Business of publishing, Real Life, Writing
As I’ve said before, this is advice for new writers. Writers with just one or two publication credits. If you’ve got a list of pub credits as long as my…arm, then this probably isn’t the reason your book got rejected. Go back to one of the earlier posts and see the stuff about bad timing, bad luck, or just not being a good fit for a publisher at that time. It’s more likely to be that. But if you’re just starting out, this is the #1 reason most books or short stories don’t get published.
You Don’t Know How to Write for Publication Yet.
This shit is hard, y’all. It takes years to learn how to write a novel or a really good short story. It takes even longer to learn how to do it again and again, day in and day out, either for a living or a supplemental income. You don’t just walk out of college with a freshly minted BA in English and sit down to write your first novel. Okay, you probably do, but it almost certainly sucks. And that’s okay. Your first book, story, blog post, article, poem, or whatever the fuck you want to write is supposed to suck. Just don’t think people are going to pay you for it. And don’t think that it’s worth charging money for it.
So how do you get good? How do you get ready to be published? Well, strap in kids, I’m going to give you the Secret to Becoming a Published Author and getting all the women, blow, and cash you can ever imagine.
Work really hard, study a lot of shit, read a fuckload, and put a metric shit-ton of words on the page.
Come on, there’s no fucking secret to it. I spent almost a decade writing a blog and working for poker websites before I wrote The Chosen. I had more than a million words written and about half a million of it published by someone other than my blog before I started writing fiction.
You want to get good? Write.
You have to write. You aren’t good if you’re getting a lot of rejections. That’s the main reason people get rejected. It’s not because they don’t like you. It’s not because they don’t like your politics. It’s not because they don’t like gay people, or straight people, or white people, or African-Americans. It might be because you’re an asshole, but you can probably hide that for the fifteen minutes someone spends with your query letter. It’s almost always because you aren’t ready yet. You don’t serve mashed potatoes that are cold in the middle, and you don’t get your book published until you know how to write, and how to be a writer.
So what do you do?
Write – and join a critique group. You can’t learn in a vacuum. I learned a ton writing my blog, because I had people reading my work every day, and they would call me on it if something sounded stupid. Then I worked for an editor, and they called me on it when I wrote shit. If you live in the boonies, join an online critique group. I know it’s hard to show your precious little manuscript to a room full of strangers, but suck it up, buttercup. It’s one of the best ways to improve. And no, nobody wants to steal your fucking idea. If you think that people go to critique groups to steal ideas, then just be a goddamn stamp collector, because there are already enough idiots in publishing and writing, we don’t need another one.
Read – it’s a fucking mortal insult when someone walks up to my table at a con and says “I have a fantasy novel I’m writing (have written),” then they follow that up with “I don’t really read, I just want to write.” Fuck. You. Read. Read in the genre. It’s fucking necessary. You need to know what the tropes are. You need to know what the crutches are. You need to know what’s selling, and what’s oversold. You need to know what’s been fucking done to death, and when an original idea is actually original.
Study – There are amazing books out there, many of them written by people who are doing exactly what you want to do – making a living off their words. Why would you not take the opportunity to learn from them? I really like On Writing by Stephen King and Goal, Motivation, and Conflict by Deb Dixon. Every writer in the world has their favorite. Ask someone.
Go to Conventions and Writers’ Conferences – Yes, they cost money. Some of them are expensive. Most of them are worth it. Where else can you sit in a hotel bar and talk with half a dozen publisher writers? Where else can you sit in a room and listen to six or more people tell you how to answer writing problems? I have several friends, manny of whom I’m now publishing with Falstaff, that I met when they were attending conventions and sitting in the audience taking a shitload of notes. They kept their mouths shut and their ears open, and they learned. And they got better, and now they’re building careers.
Write – Oh, did I say that one already? That’s because it’s the fucking key to it all. I don’t give a shit how many hours you work. I don’t give a shit how young your kids are and how much of a pain in the ass they are. I worked two jobs when I was starting out and still blogged every day building my voice. I drove from Charlotte to fucking Arkansas, spent three nights in a hotel to attend a con where I was nominated for an award that I didn’t win, sold two goddamn books, then drove two days home. I’ve been to cons where I slept three or four hours a night because I was networking in the bar (yeah, I know, but I was networking. Ask my friends how many times they’ve been in a bar with me until the wee hours. Then ask them how many times they’ve seen me actually intoxicated. Those numbers won’t match, and you can probably guess which number is surprisingly low.) then got up to make a 9AM panel.
I’ve been to cons with bronchitis when I was so fucked up on codeine-laced cough syrup I don’t remember the convention, and I was at Dragon Con doing panels and working the convention while I knew my mother was dying. I said my goodbyes on Thursday afternoon, told her I loved her for the last time, drove back to Charlotte, got in the car with two friends, and rode to Atlanta. I got the call Monday morning that she was gone, and we buried her two days later. So don’t tell me you’ve got shit to do that gets in the way of your writing career. I’m standing here shouting from the goddamn mountaintops that if there are things in your way that you don’t want it bad enough. Go read Sherrilyn Kenyon’s website where she writes about how she got her start and all the shit she went through. Then tell me your job is hard and you’re too tired.
If I sound hard, and mean, well too goddamn bad.
This isn’t my hobby. This isn’t what I do when I feel like it. This isn’t something I do when the muse strikes me. This is how I feed my family and keep a roof over our heads. And if you aren’t willing to work as hard as I do, then get out of my way. But if you want it, if you are willing to scratch and claw and work for years to get good enough just to get a personalized rejection letter, then let’s go. I will do anything I can for you. I will help promote your shit. I will perhaps even publish your shit. But if you’re in this because you think it’s an easy ride, go somewhere else. I ain’t got time for dabblers.
I just spent two days working a comic con with two friends. One of them is a doctor. He has literally saved lives, and watched people die in front of him. He has a job, an important job, and he’s good at it. We need him doing his day job. But because this is something he loves, he works all week then drives all across the Southeast doing conventions. He works all day and goes home to write. He’s got one novel out now, with two more coming in that series, and I’ve signed him to a three-book contract for another series. Now tell me you don’t have time to get some words on the page.
You want to know why your book got rejected? Because out there in the dark of night, at 11:35 on a Sunday night when I’m writing a blog to promote myself, promote my brand, and hopefully give a little back to aspiring writers, there’s somebody else who’s working on their craft. Somebody who wants it more than you do. Somebody who’s willing to work harder than you. Somebody who will invest the time and energy into developing their writing ability to something worthy of publishing.
Note that I never mentioned talent until just now. I’ve said this from my senior year of college when I first started directing plays. I don’t give a fuck about talent. Talent doesn’t mean shit. Give me a choice between an A-plus talent with a C-minus work ethic, and a C-minus talent with an A-plus work ethic, and I’ll take the work ethic every time. Fuck talent, get to work.
You like this shit? It’s moving come September. My blog will be more events and fun stories, and my writing advice will be for my Patreon patrons. Because I gotta make a living. My podcast will still be free, and my stuff on Magical Words will still be free, so there’s plenty of ways to get my advice for free. But these blog posts will be patron-only. But they will be available for everyone that pledges $1 or more, so it’s affordable. Go to Patreon to check it out.
by john | May 23, 2016 | Real Life
Dear Mr. Morgan,
I don’t know you. I don’t know your politics, your faith, or anything about you other than your position as president of the Charlotte Chamber, and that you seem to have a nice tan. And that you speak for the Charlotte Chamber in your recent letter to the Charlotte Observer. I don’t speak for anyone but me. My opinions are not those of a millionaire CEO, or even a six-figure-earning MBA VP in one of the downtown towers. I’m just a small businessman working out of his spare bedroom trying to make ends meet. As such, I’m probably not terribly important to you and the people you claim to represent.
But here’s what I am, Bob. I’m as staunch an ally to Charlotte LGBTQ community as I know how to be. And I vote, both in the booth and with my dollars. And apparently there are a lot of me around, because when the last City Council failed to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance in Charlotte, we voted in a Council that would. And they did.
And then your buddies in Raleigh, who you are showing more loyalty to than the people you are hired to promote in Charlotte, reached down and yanked away not only the blanket of protection that Charlotte put into place for LGBTQ citizens, but also stripped away rights from every municipality in our state, and from everyone who has ever held a job in North Carolina. And if our City Council “lit the match” by passing a non-discrimination ordinance, our state legislature “went nuclear” by not only removing protections for LGBTQ citizens, but also anyone else that is wrongfully terminated for a reason other than a very narrow set of reasons that follow almost identically the federal EEOC guidelines. And if HB2 was merely a reaction to Charlotte’s “overreach,” why does the majority of this bill address subjects that have nothing to do with Charlotte non-discrimination ordinance?
Charlotte’s ordinance had nothing to do with minimum wage, yet it’s part of HB2. Why is that?
Charlotte’s ordinance had nothing to do with bringing suit against an employer in state court, yet that ability is removed by HB2. Why is that?
If this was really about bathrooms and protecting the innocent women and children of our state, why does only one in three sections of HB2 – 33% of the law for the mathematically challenged – have anything to do with bathrooms?
This is not about bathrooms, Bob. It is about making sure that our people are protected, not just from discrimination in restrooms, but from wrongful termination, and from being paid unfairly for the work they put in.
And you want to compromise on these issues? You want to fly in the face of Bank of America, American Airlines, Wells Fargo, Red Hat, Time Warner Cable, PepsiCo, and Rob Reiner? Come on, Bob, even Archie Bunker’s son-in-law “Meathead” knows this law is wrong!
Negotiation on human rights gets us “separate but equal.” Negotiation on human rights get us “domestic partnerships.” Negotiation on human rights gets us right back to Jim Crow.
I am not calling for “inaction” by my City Council. I am calling for steadfast resistance. I am calling on Mayor Jennifer Roberts and Council Members John Autry, Patsy Kinsey, Julie Eiselt, and LaWana Mayfield to stand firm against these calls to “compromise,” which are really just Raleigh telling Charlotte’s leadership to toe the line they have drawn. I don’t want city leadership that will toe anyone else’s line. I want city leadership that will push that line of equality and progress forward.
And Bob, if you, as president of the Charlotte Chamber, aren’t interested in pushing that line forward, then you should resign. Yesterday would be a good time for that. Because if you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, and bowing to Raleigh’s demands and giving a victory to a gerrymandered and corrupted process is no solution.
Make no mistake, Bob, we are in a fight for the soul of our state. Not just about bathrooms, or LGBTQ equality, but about progress versus fear, about acceptance versus ignorance, and about honest concern for the well being of your fellow man versus manipulative, fear-based politics that exist only to line the pockets of the few at the expense of the many.
So pick a side, or stand aside. But there must be no compromise, and history is watching.
by john | Nov 8, 2015 | Appearances, Business of publishing, Real Life
I’ve had a few people ask me how my Patreon campaign is working out for me, and my response is always pretty much the same. “It’s great. It brings in a little extra money each month, it lets me have more direct contact with some of my biggest fans, and it funds some of my convention travel. I can’t ask for much more than that.”
And that’s the deal. That’s the broad brushstrokes, thousand-foot view description of it. This post is about the details, because some folks have asked. BEWARE – there’s a lot of information here about how the sausage gets made as far as the life of a struggling midlist writer. If you just want to read cool books and don’t want much behind the scenes crap about finances and all that other stuff, click on one of the buttons at the top of the page, buy one of my books, and enjoy!
Still here? That probably means you’re either a real fan of mine and are counting on me to say something hilarious (probably unintentionally) or you’re a writer and are interested in the business side of things. So here we go, down the rabbit hole.
Patreon is a fundraising platform that allows creators (me) to connect with fans (you) to create ongoing funding streams for long-term projects like webcomics or podcasts, or series of other projects like music videos, or just support the creator with a monthly pledge to keep doing what you’re doing. Since I release new work almost monthly, I set my Patreon account to be a monthly funding source. This allows my fans and patrons to support me, and in exchange they get perks, kinda like Kickstarter rewards. My fans get early access to the stories, and they get the stories for free. So if you know you want to read everything I write, and you want to be the first one in your book club to read it, you can pledge to my Patreon and get it via email before anyone else.
So on the one hand, why would anyone pay for that from me? I don’t really know. I have a dozen or so patrons right now, some of them I know personally, some I’ve met once or twice, some I’ve never met. Could be they feel like they get more joy out of reading my work than the cost of the book. Could be they see me at conventions and really want me to continue to be able to travel and amuse them at cons, so they help fund that travel. Could be they just have more money than sense and want to support the arts in a more direct fashion than their local arts council allows them to do.
How much do I make? It varies as pledges get added and dropped, but it ranges from $75-100 each month. This year, that has so far totaled $947.44. Not an insignificant sum of money, but not rock star numbers, by any means. What does an extra thousand bucks a year mean to a midlist author?
For me, it means I go to Connooga and Con-Gregate. Straight up, those two conventions would not have made it onto my list in 2015 were it not for the extra money from Patreon. And I love both of those cons, and I sold like gangbusters and Con-Gregate this year. But they’re smaller shows, and I am guaranteed to lose money by attending those cons, almost no matter how well I sell. So without Patreon, those are two conventions in 2015 that would have been on the chopping block. For 2016, it would be Arisia and MystiCon, two shows I’m very excited about attending, but without Patreon money, wouldn’t be able to afford.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the convention circuit, just let it be known that I could be out of town every single weekend working a convention somewhere, and I am out of town about once a month doing a con. And I lose money on almost every single out of town convention I’ve ever done.
Want to take a second for that last sentence to sink in?
Want me to say it again?
I lose money on almost every single out of town convention I have ever done.
Wanna know what’s worse?
I’m better at selling books at conventions than 75% of authors out there. So most of the writers you see at conventions, unless they are listed as “Guest of Honor” or “Special Guest” are paying for the privilege of being there, knowing that it’s money we’ll never see back. So when people ask why I don’t run Facebook Ads, or do a lot of paid advertising, it’s because my marketing budget consists of convention attendance.
I’m a numbers guy, so here are some rough numbers –
Connooga – one of my worst cons of the year, sales-wise. I love the show, I love seeing all my friends, I love seeing my Tennessee fans, but I think after 2016 I’m taking a year off from the show because I’ve been there too many years in a row. The attendees have all my books, which means they aren’t buying anything at the show. If I give it a “breather year,” then the attendees have more time to be excited about seeing me again, and they’ll buy more stuff.
2015 Sales – 19 books totaling $230
Book Costs – $142
Net sales – $88
Hotel – $200
Gas – $60
Food/Booze – $150
Net for Convention – (-$322)
What could I have done to reduce costs? I split the room with my assistant and another friend. I don’t currently pay my assistant, so I should at worst cover his room. And my other friend picked up the tab for Congregate 2014 when I was out of work and really needed that help, so this was my payback to him. Going forward I could split the room, but after two people, three max, you see a point of diminishing returns on rest v. savings, so the most I would save there is $100. I could split the drive and gas costs, but food costs money, and I network over meals and in the bar, so those expenses aren’t going to budge much. I already travel with a cooler and sodas and Pop-Tarts for breakfast, so $150 for food and booze for three days is pretty damn good. Being super-frugal, I could reduce expenses on this show to where I’m only $200 in the hole, but that’s probably the best I can do.
And Connooga is just used here as an example of a small to mid-sized show that costs me gas, food, and a couple nights in a hotel room to do. You could change the year and substitute JordanCon, MystiCon or any of several other conventions into this slot. The point is, if I have to have a hotel, I have to either sell like a boss, or I lose about $200 just attending.
So let’s look at a con where I sold like a boss – Con-Gregate. I moved a ton of books at that show this year, a marked improvement over the (1) I sold in 2014. Here are the numbers –
2015 Sales – 37 books totaling $479.00
Book Costs – $287
Net Sales – $192
Hotel – $200
Gas – $30
Food/Booze – $150
Net for Convention – ($-188)
Same cost-saving measures here could have gotten me very close to breaking even. Or I could have sold more books, but most authors will tell you that selling close to $500 in a weekend is pretty damn good. In fact, Con-Gregate was my 4th-highest grossing show of the year! After a few years of doing this, the only way I can be in the black on a show at the end of the weekend is if I don’t have any hotel costs associated with the show. And even that doesn’t always cut it. By my reckoning, I lost $50 on MonsterCon this year, and I drove to and from Gaffney each day to do the show. I also spent more on food than I should have there, but there were extenuating circumstances. In other words, I wanted to.
Overall, I spent about $400 more than I made in 2015 on conventions, and that doesn’t include leftover stock, which I have tried very hard to keep to a minimum. So if I lose $500 every year (extrapolating and guesstimating moving forward), why do I keep going to conventions?
Well first, I love conventions. I love meeting fans, I love converting people to become fans, and I love meeting other writers and hanging out. I also really enjoy being on panels and pontificating about things I may not really know anything about.
Secondly, this is what I consider my marketing. I don’t do much direct email marketing right now, I don’t do much paid advertising, and I do limited swag, so this is where most of my marketing money goes.
And Patreon allows me to do it. If not for Patreon providing funding, I couldn’t have afforded to do the West Virginia Book Festival, which was a lot of fun, and my biggest sales show of the year.
So if you like seeing me at conventions, and want me to come to one in your area, hit me up. I’m always interested. Here’s the 2016 Schedule – Tentative. I haven’t gotten confirmations on guest status as all of these yet, so everything is always subject to change until I arrive.
January 14-18 – Arisia – Boston, MA
February 19-21 – Connooga – Chattanooga, TN
February 26-28 – MystiCon – Roanoke, VA
March 2-5 – SouthEastern Theatre Conference – Greensboro, NC (completely different life, but if you’re there, we can hang out!)
June 3-5 – ConCarolinas – Charlotte, NC
June 17-19 – HeroesCon – Charlotte, NC
July 15-17 – Con-Gregate – High Point, NC
September 1-September 5-DragonCon – Atlanta
October 27-30 – World Fantasy Con – Columbus, OH
November 18-20 – Big Fandom Greenville – Greenville, SC
That’s nine conventions, not counting one-day signings and appearances. And we’re not into 2016 yet! So thanks to everyone who has given to the Patreon, I would never be able to plan this much travel without you!
by john | Aug 27, 2015 | Real Life
One year ago today, at about this time in the afternoon, I was driving north on Highway 49 towards Sharon with the driver’s window down on my truck and Ray Wylie Hubbard blaring on my stereo, singing how we never cut cut loose of our rock n’ roll ways. Tears rolled down my cheeks, and it was hard to drive, but I grew up driving that road and as long as I could avoid the tractors I probably wouldn’t roll up on anything too quick for me to deal with it.
I had spent the day saying goodbye to my mother, talking with my sister, my father and my aunt about what was going to happen the next few days, and finally telling her that she could let go anytime, that she could go now. In that last moment we had together, she opened her eyes, and in a voice stronger than she’d had all day, she said “Let’s go. Where are we going?”
That was my mother’s mantra for many years – “Let’s go.” If there was a defining characteristic of my mother for most of my life, it was motion. She hated to sit still, and it didn’t matter the destination, she was ready to go. And wherever she decided to go, she went. And whatever she decided to do, she did.
Sometimes people ask me how I’ve managed to do the things I’ve done in my life. I’ve worn a lot of hats – million-dollar salesman, manager, award-winning designer, theatre owner, stage director, actor, poet, spoken word performer, blogger, poker journalist, novelist, short story writer, husband. Sometimes folks ask me how I manage to fit that into 42 years, and I usually tell them that “I’m too stupid to fail.”
That’s a lie.
I accomplish things because I watched my mother accomplish things she wasn’t supposed to accomplish. I succeed because I have no concept of failure, because I grew up watching an extraordinary woman decide on something, and do it. I never heard her ask if anybody thought she could do it. I sure as hell never heard her ask anyone’s permission. I just watched her, time and time again, decide that something needed to be done, or that she wanted to do something, and then watched her bend the universe to her will until it happened.
I was in second grade the first time I saw my mother do what she wasn’t supposed to do. My elementary school was short on substitute teachers, and with her youngest child (me) out of the house, Mama decided that she would be a sub. One problem – to be a substitute teacher in Sharon, SC in 1980 required either a high school diploma or a GED, neither of which my mother had. She had dropped out of high school in tenth grade to help raise her 11 younger siblings in a household with an alcoholic father. So she didn’t have the paperwork required to babysit a bunch of rowdy eight or ten-year-olds, according to the rules.
So my mother went to night school at York Tech and got her GED. I think she was forty-eight when she got it. Then she went to the schoolhouse and signed up to be a substitute. I loved and hated when my mother worked at the school. I loved it because I didn’t have to ride the bus, but I hated it when she was my sub, because I couldn’t get away with shit, my mama was watching.
A few years later, she decided that smocking looked pretty and she wanted to try it. So she bought the pleating machine and learned to smock, then went around to craft shows selling handmade baby bones and dresses. A few months ago, one of my nieces found her baptism dress that Mama smocked for her, and her daughter wore it to be baptized. Mama would have approved. That’s a picture of my great-niece Emily in her mother’s baptism gown over to the left.
After I got done with elementary school, Mama decided she was done with substitute teaching and wanted to make extra money as a substitute mail carrier. Now that she had her GED, all she had to do was take the Civil Service Exam and pass it, and then she could work one or two days a week delivering mail.
She passed on her first try, and soon her red and white pickup was bouncing all around the roads of Western York County delivering mail.
Always involved in the church, she served multiple terms as a deacon, often at the same time that my father was serving as an elder of the church. She served at least two terms as Chair of the Board of Deacons, and spearheaded efforts for our church to acquire its first church van and to install a wheelchair lift to the sanctuary. She wasn’t alone in working on all these things, of course, but I don’t think I exaggerate much when I say they wouldn’t have happened nearly as quickly without her. Later in life, in her late sixties, the Deacons of the church asked her to come back and serve one last term. The church had a new pastor, and needed some institutional memory. She went back, and served one year as Chair before passing that torch on to a younger man, one I’d grown up with in church youth groups and Sunday school.
That last run on the Board of Deacons was the end of her service life, as the dementia started to take hold pretty severely not long after that. Eventually she couldn’t drive anymore, and her travels were over as well, as her own brain turned traitor and locked her alternately in confusion and the past. The last few years and after her passing we would find things wrapped up with little notes telling us what they are and where they came from. She knew what was coming as her mind betrayed her, she’d seen her own mother suffer from dementia and finally succumb.
But until that time when her body and mind turned on her, she was a remarkable woman. She helped raise eleven siblings, almost all of them at some point either living with my parents when things got too bad at home, or just working for my father in his peach shed or chicken farm. She raised four children, none of whom ended up in prison and all of whom lived to adulthood no matter how stupid we were (and a couple of us set that bar pretty high). She helped raise six grandchildren, none moreso than my youngest niece, who was her sidekick for years.
She was a pillar of the community, one of the women leading the fire department fundraisers whenever someone lost their house to fire, or got cancer, or just needed help. She was part of the grapevine, the Western York County Trinity of Miss Tot, Miss Faye and Miss Frances. If you wanted news to get out, you only had to call one of those three women and everyone who needed to hear it would know. She sold Tupperware, held toy parties, ran a booth at a flea market on weekends when I was at college, and taught me everything I know about sales and selling. She never met a stranger, and could sell ice cream to Eskimos. She was a square dancer, a rose gardener, a seamstress, ran a fabric store out of a converted peach packing shed, held out a helping hand to a local drunk and gave him work fixing up our roof and outbuilding when he needed it, and wasn’t afraid to be the first one on the scene at a fire or traffic accident.
She was raised in the Depression, and only ate her meat well done. She had a sharp tongue, and would peel the skin off your ass with a word if she needed to. She was a teetotaler, the child of an alcoholic, and judgmental as hell. She taught me at a young age not to say the “n” word, and to treat people right no matter what the color of their skin. She taught my sister how to make the world’s best fried chicken and rice and gravy, and taught my oldest niece how to make the world’s best banana pudding. And I will whip the ass of any man who challenges that fact.
She taught me that I could be anything I wanted to be, and I did.
A year ago this coming Monday, I was finishing my morning shower at Dragon Con, getting ready to hit the last day of the show. I didn’t have any panels, so I was just gonna take it easy, see a few friends and get on the road early. My roommates knew what was going on back home, and we’d been waiting all weekend for “the call.” As I dried my hair and turned off the water, I felt it. I felt something change, and I realized that somehow, she had known how important that weekend was to my career, and she’d held on for me. And I felt her go. I shed a few tears in the bathroom, then stepped out and started getting dressed. Before I even got my socks on, my phone rang.
She waited for me to finish what I needed to do, because that’s the life she had always led. Then she went home.
