​Last week, before the weather turned cold again, we went out as a family for walks in the evening. The temperature was in the sixties, the skies radiant blue. On a couple of evenings, we walked through abandoned farmland and around marshlands, and I was overcome by the sounds of spring peepers, birds, ducks, and other waterfowl. The sound was deafening. I’m serious. Pointing out a pair of mallards to Ellie, my daughter, I needed to raise my voice so she could hear me. The ground was soggy and it felt good to feel your feet sink a little bit into the mud as you stood, totally engulfed by the sound of wildlife. For a good fifteen or twenty minutes, until dusk impelled us to head back towards where we parked, we stood there, listening to the sounds.
 
If you haven’t heard spring peepers before, listen to this YouTube audio clip. Imagine the sound amplified, no joke, by a factor of a hundred. Imagine being in the middle of that sound, the sound swirling all  around you like chaos. Imagine that sound being compounded by song birds, duck calls, other frogs, the sound of ducks taking off from or splashing down into the surrounding waters.
 
I’ve heard the sounds before but, honestly, until this past week, hadn’t really listened to them.
 
Since I wrote my last blog post, another couple of my short stories were accepted for publication by various literary journals and magazines. Which makes five acceptances over the last three weeks. Plus a rewrite request from another magazine editor. I’ve never had a spate of luck like this before.
 
Art is long.
 
That’s how I feel about my short stories. Not that they’ll necessarily stand the test of time or that they’re works of profound genius. But long as in, they’ve been around with me a long time. In the case of the story that was selected as the winner of the Washington Square 2016 Fiction Award, I first started working on it in 2006. It was the second story I workshopped at Virginia Tech while pursuing my MFA. I sent it out for a while back then, and then for many years I didn’t bother sending it out anymore because ... because, well, it needed work. From time to time, I’d pluck it out of my hard drive, work on it for a bit, and then set it aside for many more months. In January, in the lull between working on a pair of novels, I worked on it for another couple of weeks. And then, finally, I sent it out.
 
Presto-bango, right?
 
Not.
 
Frankly, I can’t quite believe it’s been ten years since I started working on that story. What’s funny is, nearly every time I wrap up a first draft of a short story, I think to myself, WOW!!! This is awesome. And then, after the rejections pile up, I  realize, Um, maybe the story ain’t quite as awesome as I thought it was. Yet.
 
Actually, I like my revision process. I just wish I could speed up the end product a little bit.
 
But revising, especially over a period of years, is like a form of collaboration. You’re not the same person you were ten years ago. So it’s like collaborating with your past self. The “you” of today usually likes what your previous “you” wrote, but rarely do you adore it. Sometimes, man, you just want to scream at that old “you.” Because the person who wrote those original drafts no long exists, you’re better able, emotionally, to rip into those drafts, better able to see the faults, the clunky lines, the metaphors that just aren’t working.
 
And, honestly, with time, you’re better able to “hear” what’s actually going on inside the story. Sometimes, revising an old story draft, it’s like listening to the peepers and trying to pick out the individual sounds of the ducks. With time, you can do that. You can appreciate what’s struggling to emerge from the marshland of boggy prose. You know there’s a duck in there somewhere. 

Addendum: Admittedly, some of my revisions can be less than arduous. A couple of weeks ago, I looked afresh at one of my stories ("After the Riots") that I adored. It always puzzled me why,  in 4+ years of submitting it here and there, and revising it here and there, it had yet to find a home. When I looked at it this time, I realized the answer: the first line was an absolute clunker. Just horrible. So I deleted it, and then sent it out. Sure enough, that did the trick. It was accepted by Atticus Review a few days after I sent it out. 

On Saturday, as a bit of celebration, we went out for pizza and then came home and watched GO WEST, a Marx Brothers movie we hadn't seen before. We're big Marx Brothers fans in this household, and there's just something so delightfully subversive and zany that gets to us. Despite not being perhaps their greatest movie, GO WEST has some great moments of dialogue. 

Midway through the movie thought, Ellie threw up. I started feeling sick too. On Sunday, Stephen felt sick. My guess is that the celebratory pizzas did us in. So ixnay on future celebrations, right?

​So many good things have happened in the last 24 hours that I really ought to pause and write them down. So here goes:
 
Good Thing #1: My oldest son, Stephen, is a sophomore at Blacksburg High School. As many of you know, he’s on the autistic spectrum. He’s also intellectually disabled and has psychological/mental health concerns. Plus his ADHD makes it almost impossible for him to concentrate on anything.
 
My biggest, most paralyzing fear involves what will become of Stephen after he graduates high school. I worry for him. He’s not on track for an academic diploma, and he’s not (at this point anyway) mature, skilled, or focused enough to hold even the most mundane job. His career goal is to work in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant and yet, right now, he’d be a menace in any professional kitchen. Last week, in his high school culinary arts class, his ADHD was such that he couldn’t chop lettuce to the size needed for a recipe. I fear what’s going to become of him.
 
Yesterday though, we went to Stephen’s “Agency Day,” which the high school arranges for families of special needs kids whom they envision needing major life and career assistance after graduation. We met with representatives from about six different public and private social service organizations, and it was incredibly heartening to learn about the assistance that will be available for him. Part of the reason we moved to Blacksburg years ago is because we heard the local school district is really good for children with special needs. Listening to the presentations, I had tears in my eyes. Two years from now, after Stephen officially graduates from high school, he’ll be eligible for additional job training programs through the school district. After that, other organizations will also be able to offer him career training. The successful placement statistics for these organizations are really outstanding.
 
I asked how Stephen would likely fare in the real world, noting all my concerns about his intellectual disability, his ADHD, his delayed maturity. To my surprise, everyone in the room envisioned positive outcomes for him. They’ve seen children with similar (and worse) problems do well. Stephen’s got a good attitude. That’s going to help him.
 
Hearing all this, and for once actually envisioning realistic positive outcomes for him, was tremendously heartening. I felt as if a weight had been lifted off me. I felt as if I could breathe again. It’s good for parents to take pride in their children. Sometimes, when your child has special needs, and when your child’s medications are haywiring his ability to function in a calm, rational manner, a parent can lose sight of that child’s strengths. Stephen has many strengths. I’m so grateful for this Agency Day opportunity to be reminded of them.
 
Good Thing #2:  Last night, just before going to sleep, I learned that I’m the recipient of Washington Square’s 2016 Fiction Award. Published out of NYU, Washington Square is one of my favorite magazines. I’ve read it on and off for years. Marie-Helene Bertino (author of the wildly delightful 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS) selected my story (“Pacto del Olvido”) as the contest winner.
 
Good Thing #3: “Princeton Prison Experiment” (the story I mentioned last week) appears today in Entropy Magazine. Here's the link. Formatted like a Wikipedia entry about a prison experiment gone bad (think “Stanford Prison Experiment”). Hopefully, it's fun. Hopefully, it's thoughtful.
 
Good Thing #4: This Spring, one of my stories will be anthologized in THE MUSEUM OF ALL THINGS AWESOME THAT GO BOOM. The anthology’s publisher, Upper Rubber Boot Books, just launched one of the most creative websites I’ve ever seen to support the book’s launch. Check it out here!
 
Good Thing #5: That novel I started writing at the beginning of the month? I’m at about 15,000 words. Hard to believe, but I’m already maybe 1/5 finished!

I played Little Loop football as a kid, playing as a third grader against mostly fourth and fifth graders. My position was right guard, in the middle of the offensive line. Though small for my size, apparently I was tenacious. At the father-son dinner after the season, the coach asked that I jump up on a table. He wanted to show everyone how small I was—which was strange, because no kid really likes to think of himself as being small. The coach then went on to say how great I played, blocking kids who were taller, bigger, faster than me. For years thereafter, well into my high school years, my father would tell me how proud he was at that moment.
            The following year, for reasons that still puzzle me, the level of my play dropped off. I was bounced from the first string to the second string. This, despite how the coach had told me during pre-season he expected me to be the bedrock of his offensive line. I remember doing blocking drills with my father, who’d come home from work, grab a six pack, and take me outside to practice. During one of these drills, my father crumpled to the ground. I had blocked him, smacking into his shoulder. Withering in pain, he knew immediately something wasn’t right. We drove off to the emergency room, where we discovered I had separated his shoulder—which, to a fourth grader, sounded absolutely grisly. Likely, he just hadn’t set himself properly to absorb the impact of our drill. He bore no grudge against me, and I enjoyed, briefly, the ferocious neighborhood celebrity status that comes from being known as the kid who separated his father’s shoulder. But from then on, the ferocity I took with me onto football fields must have decreased, because I just wasn’t very good after that.
            I thought of this today upon learning that another youth football organization, Pop Warner Football, just settled a concussion-related lawsuit. Joseph Chernach played Pop Warner football from 1997-2000. His parents allege that, while playing Pop Warner football, Chernach suffered numerous concussions. He would have been about 12 years old when he stopped playing. Years lately, likely as a result of the numerous concussions he sustained, he developed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
            We’ve luckily, as a society, become much more aware of the long-term dangers and risks that come from brain injuries. Because of the nature of brain diseases and the troubles in diagnosis them, definitive diagnoses often don’t come until someone has died and medical experts can examine their brain tissue. And yet, with CTE, we’ve learned to recognize some of the symptoms: dizziness and disorientation that leads to memory loss, erratic behavior and social instability. As the irreversible disease progresses, the subjects’ speech becomes slurred. They experience tremors and vertigo. The dizziness some experience becomes so bad they have difficulty walking. They fall into depression, become reckless, are psychologically more apt to court risks, experience suicidal thoughts. In recent years, former NFL stars like Junior Seau and Dave Duerson committed suicide, unable to cope with the disease.
            Until recently, we thought one could only develop CTE after undergoing years upon years of repetitive concussions and brain trauma. That, sadly, does not appear to be the case.
 
            I know of a guy who played high school football in Southern California in the late seventies/early eighties. Compared to most of the people who played the sport, he was scrawny and downright under-sized, and yet he was tenacious as nails. He played linebacker and safety, defensive positions where his penchant to ram his body into receivers and running backs was an asset. He excelled at the high school level, playing in high-profile high school all star games in the Los Angeles area. At the time, there was serious thought of him playing college football. But, for a host of other reasons, that didn’t happen.
            Up until a few years ago, he was a successful businessman, a multi-millionaire who routinely appeared in the media to offer business and investment advice. Even then though, there were times when he seemed a bit, um, *off*. His hands would shake when he spoke as if he had, idk, Parkinson’s or something. His speech sounded off, too, as if he was always under the influence.  
            At his financial zenith, he might have been worth twenty five million dollars. Honest. Maybe even more.
            And then, things fell apart for him. His investments became reckless, his moods and behaviors more erratic. His wife divorced him. He started drinking heavily, probably also began abusing drugs. We watched from afar, aghast at what was happening. He’d send seriously deranged emails at 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning. He spiraled into bankruptcy. There were run-ins with the law, crazy-ass but possibly true allegations of him being abusive towards prostitutes. I’m not making this up. Some of the ugliness made local newspapers. One night, he sent me an email hitting me up for serious money. Needless to say, I don’t have serious money. Nor would I have been inclined to blindly loan or give serious money to a man that, back then, seemed intent on throwing his life away.
            At the time when all this was going down, we couldn't understand how his powers of logic and reason abandoned him, seemingly, all at once. His decision-making skills were totally hay-wired. We all thought his problems stemmed from willfully bad and outright stupid choices he was making. I mean, what do you do when someone continually does stupid things? One or two stupid things you might shrug off and say, “Dude, calm it down, okay?” But a whole slew of them, in nearly every facet of their life? None of us suspected there might be something more might be behind his problems. Each morning, I’d Google his name to see what trouble he’d gotten into overnight.
            Today, his life might be a little better. For one, he’s no longer in jail. And I think he might have kicked his substance abuse issues. But I worry about him— because of some of his physical symptoms, I seriously think he’s a CTE victim.
            This is what you might call a “reach out” moment.
            I’m worried he might not click the link to this blog post when I email it to him. I hope he seeks medical attention, but I’m also worried what medical experts might say. I’ve read a couple of articles recently about possible CTE sufferers (Jim McMahon and Bernie Kosar) who’ve been able to seek some level of relief for their symptoms through alternate medicines and therapies.
          Of course, I hope I’m dead wrong about all this. I hope my friend is perfectly healthy. I hope I’m going overboard. I hope he’s all right. But if he’s not, I hope he seeks help.
          
     I’m concerned for others who unknowingly are suffering from CTE. If you can get CTE after playing just a few years of football as an 11- or 12-year-old, it’s very likely that in the quiet corners of our nation, there are hundreds if not thousands men are suffering with no knowledge why their lives are spiraling out of control. I’m not a doctor, not a brain researcher, but I wonder if there are degrees of CTE, that even if one or two concussions don’t develop into full-blown CTE, maybe the long-term consequences might still be measurable through reckless behaviors and failed businesses.
         I’m wondering if some of the uglier aspects we’re seeing during this election cycle can be explained through the prism of CTE. Namely, the crazy reckless bullying junk Donald Trump says at almost every opportunity, and his supporters penchant to physically abuse protesters. Today, in North Carolina, Trump's goons are punching people in the face. Are we, as a nation, experiencing a CTE moment? How else are we to explain these ugly incidents?
*
UPDATE: Another of my short stories will soon appear in Entropy magazine. This one's called "Princeton Prison Experiment." As the title suggests, it's about a prison experiment (think Stanford Prison Experiment) that goes seriously awry. Embedded within the story are a few statements about the nature of violence in our society that I've been mulling over in my head for a long time. I'm curious to see what, if any, reaction this story might provoke.

Also, I'm about 11,000 words into the novel I started last week. In my previous novel-writing attempts, the 8,000-word mark always seemed like some magical threshold. Whenever I reached that word count, I've managed to carry the project to completion. But, man, I can't tell you how many times I've flamed out at about 7,500 or 7,800 words. So hopefully, if I can continue my present pace, I might have something resembling a finished draft in May. Won't that be grand?

Each night, Gillian deposited her eyes in a frosted blue glass jar, then blindly sprinkled water over them so they would remain moist. Winters were harsh on the eyes— the electric baseboard units that warmed her cabin made the air very dry.  She’d run a drugstore humidifier in the bedroom and wake each morning with particulate moisture dappling the floors and walls, all so her eyes would not dry out overnight. 

“Your eyes,” I asked.  “Why do you take them out?”

Gillian laughed.  “I guess the better question might be, ‘Why put them back in?’”
 

I’ve been working more on the novel I started last week. I’m now on the third chapter, about 7,500 words in total, and really like the progress.

Years ago, during one of his NPR book review segments, Alan Cheuse identified what he thought was the principle difference between novels and short stories. Short stories, Cheuse said, were all about images; novels, because of their longer page counts, were about the plots that propel the narrative. We can dicker. Most short stories rely, to varying degrees, on plot elements. Some of the very best images in American literature (I’m thinking, for example, of the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg that appear on a billboard in The Great Gatsby) are drawn from novels. And yet, one killer image in a ten-page short story might be enough to push that story to greatness.

Think of Ezra Pound’s two-line poem, “In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
 
Those two lines are the whole poem. Had they been stuck in the middle of an epic, slack-minded readers like myself would probably rush right past them, never giving them a second thought.
Having cut my literary teeth writing short stories, I’ve always paid an undue amount of attention in crafting my images. Whenever I’m lost, trying to figure out the direction the story will take, my artistic instincts direct me to craft an image of what the characters are seeing or touching. In some cases, I’d leap from image to image in lieu of crafting a narrative path. Which, to me, makes sense: once you “see” what a character sees (and how they see it), you get a sense of the character. As a writer, you draw the reader’s eye through the story, focusing on the things you feel are important.

Does this always work?

Not all the time.

The few lines that open this blog post—about Gillian and her eyes—have been with me for four or five years. I’m drawn to the opening image of the eyes in frosted glass jar, and the idea that someone might take out their eyes each night with the same ease and regularity as others take out their contact lenses. But, as much as I’ve picked at these lines over the years and tried to extend them into an actual story, my efforts continue to fail. In part, I think it’s because the main character (“Gillian”), having taken out her eyes, literally cannot see. Because she can’t see, as I writer I’ve boxed myself into a corner—I can’t portray what she “sees,” which is the principle means I often use to develop character.

In the past, when trying my hand at novels, I’ve continued to lean heavily on images and ideas at the expense of other fictive elements. It’s just how I’ve operated.

What’s neat though with the novel I started last week (see previous blog posts for a hint about this project), is that I’m not as beholden to images as I’ve been in the past. I’m excited by this, and eager to see where this takes me. The narrative is told through three first-person narrators and I’m much more concerned about voice and characterization than I’ve ever been before. Not coincidentally, so far my sentences are longer, richer, more detailed. And, because I’m trying to craft the novel as a domestic noir, I’m working harder to establish plot elements.

Addendum: Yesterday, at Entropy Magazine, a bunch of us (inc. myself) reminisced about our first loves. Please feel free to check out what we wrote.
 
PS: If anyone remembers the particular Alan Cheuse NPR review mentioned above, please contact me. I'd love to get a copy of that segment. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Many of my fellow progressives are attacking today's Mitt Romney speech as "dumb." But it wasn't. Nor was it addressed to us. Nor was he addressing Trump's supporters. His message was simple-- Trump is a disaster waiting to happen to this country-- and was directed at the 60% of the Republican party that distrusts Trump.

As Lincoln Michel noted elsewhere in a Facebook post, by strategically supporting Rubio, Cruz, and Kasich in particular states, he's trying to force a brokered convention. By not attacking core conservative principles, and only attacking the person of Donald Trump (and bringing up the probability of Trump losing in November to Hillary), he's inviting the conservative media (i.e., the outlets best positioned to reach Trump's supporters) to re-assess Trump with a much more critical eye.

Maybe it's too little, too late, and maybe it's the exact speech Jeb Bush and other GOP establishment types should have been giving for the last six months, but it's clearly kitchen sink time.  But, for now, this speech adds cover to all Republicans who wish to attack Trump. I wouldn't be surprised if Romney or Paul Ryan might enter a late primary contest or two if there's a chance they might legitamtely carry a state.

My favorite moments of the speech include the laughter that greeted Romney when he said, "Donald Trump says he's very very smart." Romney was also effective in pointing out that Trump is not the business genius everyone thinks he is.  And then there was that moment where Romney pointed to Trump's recklessness in backing ISIS (!) to overthrow Syria.  Plus, I loved how Romney inoculated himself against whatever vitriol Trump is sure to slur him with in the coming hours and days.

Novel update: The "domestic noir" novel I started the other day? Yesterday, I finished the first chapter. Almost 4,000 words in three days. Not bad work either.  So now it's on to the second chapter.  

Here in Virginia, it’s Primary Day. So, yes, I voted. And hopefully, after today, our house will be given a reprieve from the gazillion political robo-calls we’ve fielded over the past week.
 
Yesterday, Leap Day, brought a heap of good news. For one, REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters accepted a short story of mine (“Creams and Salves).” Five years ago, the journal published another one of my stories (“You Okay?”). As soon as I finished writing “Creams and Salves,” I knew REAL would be the perfect venue for it. Like “You Okay?”, “Creams and Salves” is a bit real-er and raw-er than most of my work. And yet, I sent it to REAL about 18 months ago and hadn't heard back until yesterday. A re-design and and editorial switch were responsible for the delay, but getting an approval like that out of the blue was a heartening surprise. Because I was so sure REAL was the right place for it, I rarely sent it out elsewhere for consideration. 
 
Yesterday afternoon, before I heard of its acceptance, I thought about “Creams and Salves” for the first time in ages. I’ve been reading domestic noirs lately. Paula Hawkins’s THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN. Mary Kubica’s THE GOOD GIRL. Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL. A.S.A. Harrison's THE SILENT WIFE. Yesterday, I started writing what I hope will be a good domestic noir of my own. The characters and situation are a bit unsavory, the protagonists’ marriage verging on desperately awry. I thought of “Creams and Salves” because it seemed like a precursor to the novel I was beginning to write. And then, wham, “Creams and Salves” was accepted later that night. Hopefully its success in finding a home is a good harbinger for the new novel which, for now, I’m calling THE MISTRESS’S BABY.
 
But other news: another journal wrote me about another one of my stories, requesting that I revise it. These requests-for-revision don’t come often, so I’ll press myself to make this one work. The journal itself is a fairly new arrival to the literary scene but it’s got a solid editorial staff, so I’ll be proud if this other story lands there.

And perhaps the biggest news: Sebastian’s indoor soccer team won their league tournament on Sunday!  Everyone on the team played well in the thrilling final match, which went down to PKs before Sebastian’s Roanoke Star SW team pulled it out!  Good job, boys!
 
 PS- I admit it: often, I scoff at the notion of "virtual communities," seeing them as something unreal or, perhaps, less-than-real. But yesterday, it was nice seeing how many of my Facebook friends "liked" the notice I posted about my short story acceptance. Sixty-five people have so far liked that note, perhaps a record for anything I've ever posted. And it made me feel somehow connected to a larger community, a group of people with similar passions and desires and dreams. That was nice. Thank you.