Now that Northward Dreams, at long last, is out in the world and available in hardcover and e-book (with the audiobook on the way!), I'm enjoying the payoff for all the lonely work of writing it and preparing it for delivery: the idea that there are people out there reading it. (Thank you!)

If you're one of those people, you didn't have to go far—the very first words—to encounter one of the book's devices, for lack of a better word. Spread out among the 32 numbered chapters of the book, which encompass four timelines (1952, 1972, 2002, 2012), are nine chapters that focus on individual characters who inhabit the book. These chapters—which I've heretofore been misnaming as intercalaries—exist outside the story's established timelines and illuminate aspects of the characters that inform the whole of the narrative. They're also written in second person, a choice I expanded on in this interview with Chérie Newman:

​I think I went with the second-person point of view initially just to talk to them: Here's what's happening to you, what you're feeling, why it has gone the way it has. Any notion I had about changing that up went away once I saw the effect. There's an immediacy to the POV. Those characters are illuminated in ways they couldn't have been even in close third person.

So that's why I did it, but this isn't really about that. (It's not expressly a craft talk.) Instead, I want to dig into who these characters are and why they spoke to me—and why they allowed me to speak to them—without giving away the essential plot, so to speak.

​(Before I get too far into that, about the errant use of intercalary: These chapters don't quite fit the accepted definition because they do involve main characters and are less about theme, I think, than they are about backstory. For a more traditional view of the intercalary, think of the turtle chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. I certainly do—I referenced it many years ago in a short story.)

Opal goes first because...she goes. She dies, right there on Page 13:

You kneel, the knees of your jeans in the mud, and you take the clipping shears from your apron pocket. You size up the job, and you pitch forward into the bush.

Two crows, languid on the telephone line above, bear witness. Across the way, the hammering goes on, beating out a rhythm, a simple song for the dead and gone.

Here's the thing about Opal, though: She is, in a significant way, the master key to the story, the connector of 1952 and 1972 and 2002, when she leaves us, and even 2012, when she's a full decade gone. Without Opal, the connections among Ronnie and Cherie and Nate and Electra—the four primary characters of those timelines—lack resonance. And without those four, Oscar and Anna and Charley and Brandon are four characters in search of a story. In subsequent installments of this series of posts, I'll introduce you to all of them. You'll just have to believe me that they all fit, eventually. Or read the book, please!

I'm going to tell this story only once, for posterity, perhaps, or maybe just because it's so bizarre that I'll want to have this record in a year or 10 years or 20, when I won't remember the fine details anymore.

Soon—very, very soon—my 10th novel will be out in the world, available in a variety of formats through just about any retailer that sells books. For the longest time—and that's part of the story, really, the loooong time—my assumption was that it would be called Dreaming Northward and would be released by the publisher behind my previous book, And It Will Be a Beautiful Life. We had a good relationship, this publisher and I, and I expected our association to go on and on, to the end of my career.

But it didn't go that way. On March 11, the day before Dreaming Northward was set for a fractured release, with the e-book going out first and the hardcover and audiobook supposedly to follow at some ill-defined point, I asked the publisher to cancel the book and immediately revert all rights to me. (That request was granted, for which I am grateful.)

I will not engage in a blow-by-blow description of all the ways I believe my trust and faith were compromised. And I have no desire to harm this publisher; indeed, despite it all, I have great affection for the guy running the operation and would even consider a return if certain factors that beleaguered this book were dealt with and overcome. Obviously, the publisher might not be interested in a reunion, given the events of the past week. I'm just being clear about where I am on this. I'm not mad. I'm not even hurt, not really. I'm just sad and disappointed over the outcome but also resolute that it had to happen.

Dreaming Northward is gone. Northward Dreams lives.

So why did I do it? It's not like publishing contracts are easy to get. It's not like I'm a well enough known quantity that I can act like a spoiled child and get away with it (or even foment the impression that I'm a spoiled child). It's not like I have this notion that independent publishing is a dream trip. I've taken it, and it's not. It's a slog. It's exhausting. It's an endeavor undertaken with the odds ever against you.

So first, let me say this: I'm a lot of things, but I'm not a spoiled child. Second, I've been around enough publishing blocks—self-publishing, small publishing, big publishing with powerhouse marketing and backed by big-time agencies, etc.—to know that almost everything is a crapshoot for almost everybody. In this case, the promises made to me about how my book would be positioned and the marketing muscle that would be put behind it were, in retrospect, dependent on a round of funding my publisher kept promising was imminent, month after month after month. After this book slid from its original publication date in June 2023 all the way to the doorstep of last fall, I asked for a Spring 2024 date, thinking that might provide the necessary buffer for the funding to come through and for the marketing pieces to be put in play. Many, many times, I was told the funding was just a signature or a courier away from being realized. Month after month, it didn't show up.

In late January, I asked if the March 12 release date was going to hold. Yes, I was told. But in the end, that cratered, too. The e-book was definitely going to come out, but the hardcover would have to be delayed. That was the eventual word. How long would the delay be? No one could say.

I wasn't comfortable, but I was willing to go along and have faith. We were so close.

Then came March 11 and word of another funding delay, and that ended my faith. I couldn't trust that the hardcover edition would ever come out. The more I considered it, the more I feared that the e-book would get launched, nothing else would come up behind, the whole thing would eventually crash, and I would have to pick up a barely breathing book and try to resuscitate it on the fly.

It was just a bizarre episode. Not two days before I asked for a reversion, I stood in front of 50 people at the Billings Public Library, talked about And It Will Be a Beautiful Life (the most recent selection for the One Book Billings community reading program), and premiered a video about Dreaming Northward. (The video has been edited in light of recent events and can be seen below.)

I had every expectation that my book release, flawed as it might have been, would be realized. Then Monday dawned, and with it came another funding delay and my publisher's declaration that he was leaving his post for a couple of weeks amid this latest setback. He said he had to shore up his affairs in light of the situation. That was the final blow to my trust.

​I asked for my book back. I made arrangements to publish it myself, through my own boutique house. In a frenzied 24-hour period, I conjured a new title, designed a new jacket, got hardcover files together and uploaded, got the e-book file to my designer, revamped this website, reworked marketing materials (such as Facebook headers and event posters), contacted booksellers and librarians who have already booked me, and, somewhere in there, bagged a few hours of sleep. Just last night, I approved the hardcover files with my printer/distributor and officially set a publication date: March 19, 2024. As I said on Facebook: I lost a week. I gained my whole book.

​It's not remotely what I anticipated or wanted. But it's my project now, and I'm determined to push it as far as it will go. I'll have to do some fundraising. I'll have to come up with some clever and creative marketing approaches. I'll have to look for people to say yes.

Bring it on.

So the e-book comes out first. What's the big deal?

Look, I love e-books. That's how thousands and thousands of readers have been exposed to my work.

​But my passion lies in supporting independent bookstores, and this was always going to be a bookstore book. There were grand plans—personal letters to booksellers from my publisher and me, flashy campaigns through Bookshop.org, maybe a tour. All dependent on funding, of course. And it wasn't so much that the e-book would go first that bothered me as the fact that I no longer believed the hardcover would appear at all, given the dead promises along the way. There was no way to be OK with that. My faith was expended.

​That doesn't mean I wish bad things for my old publisher now that my book is out of the mix there. On the contrary, I hope I'm extraordinarily wrong about my suspicion of how that situation will finally play out. I hope he calls me in a few months and says, "You should have waited, buddy boy," and sends me videos of his lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills. I'd be thrilled for him because he's a good man, and he was hands down the best editorial partner I've ever had. Publishing is hard work. It's even harder on a shoestring budget (as I well know and am about to experience again). I don't hold my publisher's inability to do right by this book against him. He was trying. Hard. But it wasn't happening, and in the face of that reality, my loyalty had to be to my work.

In short, even if my publisher's highest ambitions come to fruition, I made the right call, given the track record. At the moment I had to make a decision, I made what I consider to be the brave one. I chose my work. I chose my sense of integrity. "If it's not hell yes, it's no" is a great clarifier in matters of choice. Sticking to that rubric, even when the answers aren't easy and even when the wish is for a different outcome, can keep one from committing reservedly to something that requires one's whole heart. I was no longer at "hell yes." Therefore, it had to be "no."

Here's the dirty little secret of my life as a novelist: I'm terribly read, at least in the realm of fiction. When it comes to nonfiction, poetry, current events, studies about financial inclusion, etc., etc., things look better for me, but fiction is a weak spot in my repertoire.

The reason is both simple and counterintuitive: I write fiction. I'm too busy doing what I do to spend as much time as I'd like on what other people do.

This year, however, I've decided to dedicate a small part of each day—30 minutes, in the wee hours of the morning—to reading fiction. This means I move slowly. It also means I get to savor something—or live long with the bitter taste, depending on how I'm feeling about my selection. To focus my efforts, I've decided to read works that are generally regarded as classics. This, of course, still leaves a wide field from which to choose, and the criteria for curation are mine alone. My only rigid rule: If one month I read a work by a man, the next month I will read a work by a woman. And vice versa. I also intend to take in diverse work*, in as many forms of diversity as I can. Have a suggestion for me? Drop it here.

I have every expectation that this will be a humbling exercise. I'm going to read books I should have read a long time ago, and I'm going to be accountable to myself here, which means I'll be accountable to you. I fully expect to be greeted with incredulous declarations of "you haven't read that book, you philistine?", and I rather think my layman's approach to literature—I am not, by any stretch, an academic—will expose my shortcomings in assessing what I've read. On the other hand, I will receive these books as I imagine most of their readers, historically, have received them. And to this reception I will bring some amount of knowledge about the decisions a novelist makes as he/she/they do the work.

​Today, I start this journey with The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham. How I came to this one was a bit haphazard: I had gone to my local library to pick up To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, as my starter. No copy was available, so I perused the shelves, waiting to be inspired. I'd read Maugham's Of Human Bondage in high school and remembered liking it, although as god is my witness, I cannot recall why or even much about the book. Too many intervening years. So I plucked The Razor's Edge and started there, with the library loaner copy having a return date. I bought To the Lighthouse at This House of Books, so it's up next.

 By W. Somerset Maugham
Publisher: Vintage (2003 edition)
​Originally published: 1944
My review, in a nutshell: I couldn't wait for it to end

I should say this in the book's favor at the outset: I found much to admire early on, particularly Maugham's style and sentences, which I think are what I also enjoyed as a callow teenager when I tackled Of Human Bondage. But in the final analysis, I found the book to be maddening and dense, and in the last 30 pages or so, rather than savoring each tender morsel, I found myself hanging in there out of pure animus and a desire to conquer it.

Among the aspects I found irksome:

1. The decision to filter everything through a secondary or tertiary party—and to call that narrator "Mr. Maugham"—struck me as ineffective and bizarre. The central character—the one whose journey of self-discovery confounds the well-moneyed people who know him—is former military pilot Larry Darrell, and yet we don't experience his transformations through his eyes but rather through those who think they know him and, in small snippets, from Larry himself on those rare occasions when he drifts back into the social circles he knew as a younger man.

Until we do see it through his eyes but have given up. See Point No. 2.

2. The book makes a great fuss of Larry's inscrutability and unwillingness to share much of himself ... until he drones on for hours toward the end of the book, telling Maugham (the character, not the author, but who knows?) all in hopelessly long paragraphs that unfurl endlessly, no bit of arcana to obscure to leave out. To what end? We don't really know. Larry used to not talk of himself much at all, and at the end he cannot shut up. I didn't buy it.

3. This, no doubt, is the perspective of someone born late in the 20th century and thus not applicable to the audiences that received this book in 1944, so take it as you will: I had quite my fill of snobbish society early in the book, which made the rest of it a gutful as I slogged through the (many, many) remaining chapters. Elliott Templeton, the uncle of awful Isabel, who loves Larry but never has him, is charming enough and decent enough, but I'd had enough of him long before he exited the stage. Enough, too, of Mr. Maugham (the character, not the ... oh, hell, never mind), although I'll grant you that he was a bit more accepting of human frailty and thus was easier to take. It's nice when you can write yourself—or your avatar of the same name, anyway—to best advantage, I guess.

I found this to be a rare case of my vastly preferring the movie (for me, the 1984 version starring Bill Murray, although I have also seen the 1946 original starring Tyrone Power). The movies center on Larry as the main character on a baffling—to onlookers—search for meaning. The book, with Mr. Maugham (the character, not the ... well, you know) as the portal for all perspectives, mostly renders Darrell's experiences as nothing more than long soliloquies by the other characters. It's not nearly as effective. Those characters are glib and haughty and annoying, and they wear on the reader. This reader, anyway.

*—Now, about diversity ...

Years ago, a friend with whom I eventually lost contact, knowing I was interested in all things Hemingway, gave me a book titled With Hemingway. In that book, written by a young North Dakotan named Arnold Samuelson, Hemingway offered a list of the books one must read to be educated, by Papa's estimation. "Some may bore you, others might inspire you, and others are so beautifully written they'll make you feel it's hopeless for you to try to write."

Here's the list:

The Blue Hotel and The Open Boat, by Stephen Crane
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
The Red and the Black, by Stendhal
Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham
Anna Karenina and War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy
Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann
Hail and Farewell, by George Moore
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Oxford Book of English Verse
The Enormous Room, by E.E. Cummings
Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte
Far Away and Long Ago, by W.H. Hudson
The American, by Henry James

It's entirely possible I'll poach a title or two from Hemingway's list—I very nearly picked up Madame Bovary for my third selection before opting for a Bradbury book—but this roster is notable for several things that don't appeal to me, notably that only one woman, a Bronte, passed muster.

​I think I can do better than that. Gonna try, anyway.

Thank goodness for Facebook memories—I guess—as I otherwise would not have seen that I posted this picture and this comment on my timeline 11 years ago:

Eleven years seems like a long time ago, perhaps because it was a long time ago. And 11 years ago, I would have been loath to discuss the following topic, which I'm only too happy to discuss today:

I am not, for the purposes of self-identity or self-esteem, a bestselling author or an international bestseller or an author whose works have been widely translated or a two-time High Plains Book Award winner.

I am, for the purposes of advertising and marketing, all of those things.

The differences between am not and am are profound, and learning to understand and appreciate those differences took me a long time and no doubt occasionally made me fairly insufferable.

​​Live and learn.

I think I can tell you exactly how my first novel, in 2013, went straight up to No. 1, if I may borrow from Bad Company. Of course, I'm biased in the analysis, so I'll tell you that writing a good book had something to do with it. I'm a realist, too, so I'll also say it had far more to do with a rising tide of readers eager to acquire e-books, a publisher with unparalleled access to those readers, and a price that encouraged those e-reader-wielding book lovers to take a chance on my novel without an onerous investment.

Consequently, that book—and I—had a very, very good day (and week and month, and, really, a few good years). I'm nothing but grateful. And, sure, from a marketing perspective, I appreciate the bestseller label. It has had a far longer life than the actual bestselling ever did. We—the royal we of the publishing universe—hold fast to a bestseller status because we think it helps sell books. We festoon award stickers on hardcovers and paperbacks because we think it helps sell books. We seek out testimonials from other authors because we think it helps sell books. (And, on the flip side, we try to say yes to authors asking us to supply testimonials for their books because we really, really hope it helps sell books!)

​And at least to some extent, I'm certain all of that is helpful. But the degree of help is ephemeral and unmeasurable, and that's why the best an author can ultimately do is to (a) write the best book possible at the time of the undertaking and (b) work as hard as possible on its behalf once it has emerged into the world. Those are controllable factors. The rest...are not.

That's sobering, yeah? Still, sobriety is vastly preferable to drunkenness on one's own marketing materials. I had a blast that day 11 years ago, I sold hundreds and hundreds of books, I made a fair amount of money (all of it now gone), and I didn't have to do anything stupid in the bargain. I'll continue to use the bestseller label, even if the fuller context is "author of a handful of bestselling books and a larger handful that you probably haven't read, not that he's complaining."

Luckily, the limited room on a book cover rewards brevity in these matters.

I suppose this could be a Saturday Morning Craft Talk, except it's not Saturday morning* and it's not particularly crafty. So scratch that. No. No, it couldn't.

It does, however, speak to an aspect of the writing life, one that varies wildly from writer to writer, if my conversations with colleagues and contemporaries are any guide. What does one do with the ideas when they're not actively being worked on?

It's a good question, one with a slapdash answer for me. I'd love to be a capital-letter Artiste, with a leather-bound notebook that never leaves my side, with stacks of brimming journals, with a catalog of every thought I've ever had and a handwritten account of every beauty I've ever witnessed.

Alas.

​I'm just a guy with a brain, such as it is. My ideas—what I've thought of doing, what I'd like to do, what I'm considering, what I've started and not finished, etc.—are all in there, in some stage of marination. It's no doubt a terribly inefficient system, but I'm not complaining. I wrote my first novel in 2008, a breakthrough that came after years of wanting to and not really knowing how. Since then, I've not lacked ideas; indeed, I often describe my notions as being backed up like planes on the runway. But an archivist, I am not. Nor an inventory specialist. Nor a tour guide. Whatever I will or might do is up here—*taps head with index finger*—and I'm the guy with the key. I'll take the key, and the ideas, with me when I go.

​And that will be that.

I've written before about the linear way in which I work—start at the beginning, then write straight through until the end, if I can get there. (I've also written before about how that linearity is subject to the needs of revision, when I'll happily move things around, delete things altogether, or augment the bits that aren't quite cooked.) This, too, is a terribly inefficient system, in that my early days of writing fiction were marked by a sense of loss and bewilderment when a manuscript just didn't go. I'd stash whatever I'd managed to do on a hard drive somewhere, nurse my wounds, shake off the disappointment, then try again with another idea. Fortunately, a new one would be at the ready. Planes and runways and all that.

Those half-baked attempts, tucked away in their little folders, were dead things I couldn't bring myself to bury, even though I knew I wouldn't resuscitate them. A few things got salvaged for other purposes--Somebody Has to Lose, at 14,000 words my longest short story, is one such reclamation. But mostly, they take up computer memory and lie dead and crumbling.

This used to bother me a lot, just from the standpoint of industry: All that work for nothing. All those words expended and nothing tangible to hold.

​Boy, was I wrong.

For one thing—and apologies for such a hoary cliche—there's a lesson in every failure, and not every failure is what it seems. This would have come as quite the surprise to the me of 15 years ago, who upon breaking through and at last writing a novel thought he had figured everything out.

I didn't know anything. If possible, I know even less today than I knew then. Or I simply know different, better things.

For instance...

I've learned to wait on it. The manuscript that became And It Will Be a Beautiful Life came out slowly amid several stops and starts, and over the course of a few years. I started it in Montana, pecked away at it in Maine, and found my way through, at last, upon returning to heart earth. It wasn't entirely a function of geography, though I'm convinced that had much to do with it. I simply had the patience to wait for the memories and the imagination to steep properly. That's age. That's experience. That's trust. That's love.

A while back, an artist friend introduced me to a well-known author with this: "Craig is a book-a-year guy." True once, but not so much anymore. As a less experienced novelist, I wouldn't have trusted myself to wait for the right idea to emerge in its own time. I wanted, needed, to write the next book, and quickly, if only to prove to myself that I still could.

Today, I have no such worries. I know I can do it. I also know the idea I should be working on will let me know when it's ready. Giving it time and space to bloom is granting myself grace in the bargain. I'm increasing the likelihood that I'll find my way through because I'm letting the thing come to me instead of stampeding it.

So, about the planes and the runway...

My next novel is just a couple of weeks from being released, the idea having germinated and taken root and blossomed nicely. The one likely to be next is written and ready for the publishing gamut, and that took me the better part of a decade, start to finish. After that? Planes on the runway, baby. I have three manuscripts in various stages of development. I suspect, but don't know, that all will find their way to the finish line. (Big disclaimer: If I have enough time. I've reached a time of life when I worry less about the ideas and more about whether I'll be around to snag all of them.) I'm enchanted with all three stories, but it's not time to finish any of them yet. Soon. Eventually. I trust the process, if not the clock.

At long last, I trust the process.

*--It's Monday afternoon. Thanks for the long weekend, presidents.

*—if you'll indulge me.

Let's talk about sentimentality. The hook for this is simple enough; just yesterday, I posted something old/new at The Short Story Project: a 2011 story of mine called Comfort and Joy, which appears in my collection The Art of Departure. In the blurb that accompanies the post, I described the story as "unabashedly sentimental," which it is, then I proceeded to be bothered by that description for the next few hours, until I sat down to write this.

Why was I bothered? Perhaps because sentimentality is not highly regarded as a quality of serious fiction. While I'm fairly solid in my commitment to not caring terribly much what someone thinks of me personally—within limits, of course, my being human and all—I do get a bit crinkled when my work isn't taken seriously. See again: being human and all.

Let me be clear here: I'm not holding out Comfort and Joy as some superior work of art. It's not. I haven't read it in years, but I know where it fell in the course of my fiction-writing career (early), and I'm certain that if I looked at it again, I would see much I wanted to do differently were I given another shot at it. But for better and worse—tilted heavily toward better—there are precious few do-overs in publishing. Mostly, you do it and live with it.

I can live with Comfort and Joy. Its primary strength is this, more than a decade after it was written: It is precisely what I wanted it to be. I am taken with Capra-esque cinema, and I set out to write a Christmas story that captured a similar feel: an isolated old man with a compelling but obscure backstory, a little boy burdened by loss, a mother at loose ends, and the unlikelihood of their forging connections with each other. Happy ending? God, yes. Essential. Like George Bailey being rescued by the people whose lives he made better. Like Clarence getting his wings.

Comfort and Joy hit every note I wished to play. Can you occasionally hear my fingers on the strings? Quite probably. But that's a limitation of the craftsman, not a failure of the story. One of my all-time favorite quotes is this one from Roger Ebert: "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it." So it is with any artistic endeavor, I believe. Did you, the artist, do what you set out to do with the work? Yes? Congratulations! You've found success. What other people think you ought to have done is beside the point. Let them write their own stories if they feel so strongly about it.

My intent here is not to launch a spirited defense of my own work but to pose an essential question: If art is about the human condition—its variables, its beauty, its ugliness, and all the imaginable in-betweens—how can sentimentality be relegated to the outside of that? I'm not talking about the glorification of treacle or granting myself free rein to load up stories with so much sugar that readers' teeth fall out. I'm talking about acknowledging a human yearning for sentiment, a human response to what is stirred up in its wake, the emotional outlet it supplies. To my mind, it's rather like humor, another quality often underplayed and undervalued in so-called serious literature. Zaniness may not carry the heft and complexity of irony, but it damn sure offers a compelling reflection of humanity as I know it and aspects of human beings as I know them.

Finally, let's talk about happy endings.

There's little upside to being scholarly about my own work—let me acknowledge that before I say this next bit—but if my stories demonstrate anything, it's that the narrative and the pages eventually end but the story never really does. Think of Edward Stanton looking across the street or Mitch Quillen driving home to his kids, or, more recently, Max Wendt waiting to find out where the flow will take him next. There's so much story beyond the page, and my particular way of writing often compels me to put the responsibility in readers' hands when my words are expended: It goes somewhere from here. Where do you imagine that is? I love doing the same with the stories I'm told. George, the richest man in town, isn't going to jail or being run out of town on a rail. Is Potter? Will Nick someday move along and open a more rollicking joint for men who want to get drunk fast? Do George's kids eventually get out of Bedford Falls, the way he wished to, and will he encourage them in the way his own sainted father encouraged him? It's up to me. What a great privilege.

​So, in my unabashedly sentimental short story, the ending comes as the old man stares out of a broken window and beholds unfettered joy. But the lives inhabiting the story, presumably, go on, into other days and moments, into other happinesses and heartbreaks, into gains and losses and despair and redemption. Experience enough of those things and you just might become sentimental about them.

...if you'll indulge me.

Tonight, Yellowstone Repertory Theatre wraps up its nine-performance run of Straight On To Stardust, my first full-length play.

To say it's been a privilege would be a damnable understatement.

To say it's been fun would be to undersell the word.

To say I'm going to miss it...

Well.

Yeah, I will. I hope this isn't the end, but if it is, I couldn't have enjoyed nine days and nights any more than I have, and I certainly couldn't have seen my play taken on a maiden voyage by any group more loving and talented than the YRT ensemble and its intrepid leader, Craig Huisenga.

I'm a writer, so I'm not terribly unusual in that I want nothing more than to undertake the next writing project. Another play, perhaps. Maybe a novel. A short story. I don't know. The idea will tap me on the shoulder soon enough, and I'll be in my seat, doing what I do. In the meantime, I'd like to see where else Stardust might alight. Have some ideas? Talk to me. Want to download the media kit and read an excerpt, see some photos, read some reviews? Have at it.

​But about that craft talk...

Occasionally, I'll read a book review, or even the book itself, and the reviewer and/or I will be awed by the incredible sweep of a story, how it captures an era or a movement or a moment in our lives, and I'll have that inevitable feeling of being unworthy: How, I'll wonder, can I call myself a writer of fiction when I lack the imagination to conjure a story that so richly conveys detail and so expertly takes in such abundant themes?

This is doubt, by the way, standing on the shoulder and whispering poison into the ear.

The problem: Those in the throes of such doubt often lack the ability to stand back and gain perspective in the moments when they most need it. So we ask ourselves why we should bother when someone else, or many someones else, do it so well.

In my calmer, less doubt-ridden moments, I'm able to center myself in this truth: I am not, as yet, a writer of sweep. I am a writer of the interior, in ceaseless exploration of fear and sloth and errant motivation and mistrust and love and betrayal and every possible in-between that makes us maddeningly human. I write from the inside out to better understand not just others but myself. Maybe, ultimately, especially myself. On that subject, I am taking a lifelong postgraduate course from which there is no bestowing of a diploma. There is only the next lesson.

I've been thinking of these things a lot in these past few weeks of repeatedly watching Straight On To Stardust play out in front of me. This is a story of family fractures and of interior lives that are explosive in combination: a son who misses his mother and stretches out, flailing, for his father; a daughter who searches for a way in with her inscrutable dad; an ex-wife who still loves the man who denies her intimacy; a friendship held, frozen, in time and the cosmos.

When you reside in the interior and work from there, you discover, eventually, that most of the scary things behind the door you keep trying to bust down have their roots in childhood. Anybody who's been in therapy knows this; it's why counselors start there as they help their patients tunnel into the now. Generational trauma flows from child to child, often through the clearinghouse of adulthood. When we don't handle our shit, we roll it downhill to the next person. Someone, eventually, tries to pay the overdue bill. It's a hell of an inefficient way of living, with incalculable damage inflicted in the main and on the margins, but here we are. Again and again and again.

It doesn't take much imagination to consider how these interior damages have great reach beyond our own lives. How might the life of one particularly public narcissist have gone differently had he been hugged more often by his father or been told that he was loved? Or let me take this to an intensely personal place: Why did I equate love with eventual abandonment throughout my 20s and 30s and 40s? (It's rhetorical, this question. I know the answer. I know it now. I learned it the hard, necessary way in my mid-40s.)

It's a hell of a thing, this trauma. It's given to us, in most cases. No instructions, no way of opting out, here it is, and it's ours to carry. It often happens when we're young, but there comes a time when that's no longer an acceptable excuse for our clinging to it. Yeah, we were just kids, and yeah, it should have gone another way, but it didn't, and now the onus is on us to not inflict it on someone else.

You up for that, the responsibility of that? Some of the most wrenching, yet illuminating, stretches of my life have come while I strained to get to yes when faced with that question.

It's why I write. To hold these things up to the light. To understand them. Sweep? I'm not thinking about sweep. I'm thinking about getting through this life.​ How do I do that? How do the characters I'm living with do that? Can I listen closely enough, feel acutely enough, be compassionate enough on their journey? Can they find their way through? Can I help as I walk with them?

I want to. I need to.

This, I suppose, could fall into the category of a Saturday Afternoon Craft Talk, except it's Thursday afternoon and I don't much feel like being bound by time.

We're coming up hard on the first of November, and that will mark 15 years since I began writing my first novel, 600 Hours of Edward. The backstory of how that book came to be is oft-told, no repeats necessary. I will say simply that it was not only my first novel but also the first book-length manuscript I ever finished, which marked something of a watershed by showing me I really could finish something of that size. Before then, I'd always had hope, which is something, but it's far less durable than evidence.

My favorite moment in the process of drafting a novel comes fairly late, when at last I see not only where the road ends but also a clear view of how I'm going to get there. When, exactly, this moment comes is variable. Sometimes I see it from the distance of thousands of words and have to buckle up for a long ride to it. Sometimes I don't see it until I'm almost on top of it, rather like rounding a bend and seeing your destination city laid out and sparkling before you.

Whenever the moment comes, it heralds an important development: I'm going to finish the first draft of this thing. First drafts lead to second drafts, which are my favorite part. That's when I find out whether this thing I've done is worth a damn.

I've never made much of a secret of this: I often know how a story will end before I write the first word of it.

Now, I'm not always right. But I often am. In the case of 600 Hours of Edward, I knew every word of the last line before I wrote any of the other 70-some-odd-thousand words that precede it. And sure enough, when Edward got there, the ending I envisioned was waiting for him. I had no expectation that such a thing would happen again—hell, I had no expectation that there would be a second novel—and that lack of assumption has served me well in the inevitable cases of endings that never come because I can't get out of the muck and arrive at them.

But it has happened occasionally, a function of cinematic thinking, I believe. When I write, I'm also cueing a movie that never gets released and plays for an audience of one: It's an interior visual guide to the look and feel and tone and quality of the story I'm trying to write. Even when Edward was just a flicker of a thought, I could see an ending for him. The struggle lay in getting him there. I had no idea how to do that. That's the voyage of discovery that makes the whole undertaking worthwhile.

Here, then, are nine novels' worth of endings (I'll leave the ending of Dreaming Northward to you, sometime this coming spring), along with any interesting (or not) details about them (click the covers to learn more about the books):

"All I have to do is look both ways and cross."

As I said above, these were the 11 words I knew when I began to write Edward's story on Nov. 1, 2008. What the rest would be was a delicious mystery that I hoped I could solve.

"And still I wondered: If my children someday learn my secrets, what will they think of me?"
​
I'm not a father (except of pups and kitties), but a couple of times, I've had to find my way with a character who is. Mitch Quillen was speaking clearly to me by the end of that book.

"I know she is."

Despite Edward Stanton's love of language, my dude tends toward the simple observations. In the second novel featuring him, he ended with brevity. I didn't see it coming.

"I know this much, too: Never again will we keep our hearts waiting."

I'm going to say it: This one remains a little cryptic, even to me. But sportswriter Mark Westerly said it with such finality that I had to trust him.

"His son moved closer, almost imperceptibly, and then, in an instant, fully there, and Samuel slipped a hand across the older man’s shoulders, and Sam leaned into the warmth of his child and waited and hoped for the despair to pass, as all things surely must."

I got nothin'. Didn't see it coming. I love open endings, and man, is that one wide freakin' open.

"That’s a fact."

Hi, Edward. Of all the characters I've written, he's the least like me but also the one who speaks most unmistakably to me. Will I write him again? If he demands it, absolutely.

"Can you believe that?"

Out of context, it's a little hard to catch the nuance of what disgraced and defeated newspaper editor Carson McCullough is saying. It's pure incredulity, a good sign for his life beyond the page, I think.

"Be the ripple."

​As it turns out, this was Elisa's line, and I think it's just perfect. She, in fact, was the one who recommended ending the story the way we did; I'd had a different, lesser idea. Collaboration for the win!

"Even without doing the math, Max could see so many ways all of this could flow."

I knew where the story for Max Wendt would end. (Max, in my opinion, goes on and on beyond the strictures of the book.) But I didn't know the words until we got there and found them shimmering on the Maine seashore.

... if you'll indulge me:

The solitude inherent in composition is something I find absolutely indispensable to the experience of trying to write a novel. It might not be my favorite part—it's awfully hard to top the feeling of completing a first draft or holding the published artifact in your hands for the first time—but I cherish it nonetheless. If it were suddenly not a part of the effort, if writing became a spectator sport or, worse, if I were relegated to a minor participant in the whole endeavor ("AI, take a wheel"), I would just quit. Be done. The joy would be gone.

This is not to say that I believe the writing of a novel to be an iconoclastic endeavor. Not at all. By choice and habit and history, I'm alone on the first draft. The second. Maybe the third. But even then, even with those two words "the" and "end" on the last page, I'm far from being finished.

And this is where I start getting by with a little help from my friends.

Some writers swear by the workshop. If you've not experienced it firsthand, you've probably seen it in the movies. A pile of red meat in the form of pages is thrown to a group of other writers, who tear into it with equal measures of hostility and glee.

Who am I to argue? I didn't come from the academy.

I swear by the beta reader. This is someone tactically chosen to read a manuscript at a fraught point—for me, that's when I've done as much as I can do with it alone and still know in my heart I haven't done nearly enough—and provide actionable feedback on what works and, especially, what doesn't.

I choose different beta readers for different reasons, and though there have been repeat invitees over the years, the roster tends to change with the project. Three to five people, generally. Enough to get an accurate sample, to weed out the outlying sentiments, and a manageable enough number so I don't lose sight of what compelled the work in the first place. I never want to get separated from my own vision. I just want to be challenged so the work, in the end, is better.

So I choose on the basis of life experience, temperament, wisdom, intelligence, and specialized knowledge about the subject matter of my work. I'm lucky to have many, many friends who fall broadly into those categories. I choose on the basis of someone's ability to separate herself from her own inclination for how to resolve something (that's my job) and instead simply articulate why she sees a problem. 

I've been very, very lucky in my choices for these roles. They've made my work immeasurably better. I simply couldn't do it without them.

I was thinking of this today when I finally got off my duff and picked up the manuscript I'm calling She Heightened Everything, after the printout has sat for months on my office table. (You can see a snippet of it above.) Several weeks ago, one of the beta readers I asked to participate sent me her feedback, and man, was it extensive. Like I said, I've been very, very lucky.

Almost all of it was useful to me, but even that couldn't overcome my hesitation to re-engage with the manuscript. I've been preoccupied with a new job, other creative endeavors, and uncertainty about when the book in front of it is going to at last be published. (I think we'll have an answer soon.) She Heightened Everything has felt so far away from my immediate range of concerns that I've simply been unwilling to dredge it off the hard drive and get moving.

But today, I felt differently about it. So I set my shoulder into it and started working through my beta reader's laundry list of concerns. I'm not through everything, and there are some things on which we simply disagree (this is inevitable and natural and fine), but I'm back in it.

She's making my work better. I don't know when you'll see it, or if you'll see it, but it's better today than it was yesterday, and that's everything.

Thanks, Courtney. I owe you, big time.

*--First in a series, if I can remember to do them. I've been posting these for years on Facebook. This is a better home for them.