Ten Years Later

It was a Tuesday.

It was the Tuesday of the sixth week of my new life.  

It started like every other Tuesday had and would over the two years that I'd spend living there.  In that apartment, my first apartment.  

Tuesday morning, early September.  I woke up before my alarm went off bathed in the early autumn light of rural Missouri. 

It was a good day.

I got up, showered, got dressed and pulled down one of my white porcelain cereal bowls out of the cupboard.  Those bowls I'd stolen from my parents some six years earlier, in the midst of the life that came before the one I was now living.  The bowls my son and I eat out of every morning, now, two or three lives later.  

When you master regeneration, they all begin to blend together, don't they?

I grabbed a bowl and sat down at my desk, pouring Wheaties into it and firing up my world.  Yoda the mac, Boba Fett the PC, loaded the CD changer with new music, hit play and sat down to a message from Tom.  An old friend from the life before this.

Elusive1: Holy Shit Man.  Turn on the fucking TV.

Nevarro: What?

Elusive1: CN FuckingN.  Turn it the fuck on.  You're not going to believe this.

And like that my new life was over.  Not in the shower of sparks and celebration that normally accompany these sorts of things.  But in dark and smoke and…is that another plane?

I sat there, stunned, in conversation with a dozen people at once.  From all over the country, except the places that mattered, we talked.  We wondered, we all begged for information about friends from the old country that could conceivably be involved.  In retrospect, it seems like such a shallow,  selfish gesture in the face of tragedy.  But the nation is the smallest unit of human measure and in moments of transformation all we are capable of doing is wondering where our people are and how they are doing.

Nation.  A funny word that makes more sense now that it did then.  Nations are not about governments or elected officials and barely about ideologies.  They're about your people.  Who are my people, where are my people how do I take care of my people.

Then I looked at the clock.  Shit.  Work.  I had to be at work at ten.  It was almost ten now. Work was two floors down from that apartment, still warming up in the glow of autumn sun.  The kids.  The kids were all around me.  Next door, above, below.  Everywhere.  The kids.  Shit, were the kids?  Did the kids?  Fuck.  Kids.

I bolted from my chair. 

I didn't close my chat windows, I didn't say goodbye to anyone.  I ran out the door, stopping for a split second to grab my keys and put on shoes. 

I ran.

Down the hallway, tumbling down the stairs, didn't have time to wait for the elevator.  Two, three, four, six steps at a time.  Though I know it's incredibly unlikely I want to say I jumped the entire last set of stairs in my haste to get down to the lounge.  Down to the kids.

They'd begun to assemble.  The kids.  16, 17 and I'm sure 18.  They stood in front of a 72" TV and tried to make sense of images that barely made sense to me.  At 22.

I don't know how long I'd been there when Deb came up to me.  

"Baby E."  That was her name for me.  My boss, my friend, my mentor.  She'd known me since I was one of her kids, younger than the kids she'd hired me to work with.  "Baby E, we need to."

"I know."

So we had our staff meeting.  Meeting six for the year.  And unlike any before or since, it didn't go it's scheduled two hours.  It went about two minutes.

The rest of the day is a blur.  I sat with the kids since I didn't have to teach a class that day and they didn't have classes to go to.  I sat there and taught them about the new world order.  Who is this bin Laden guy? Why does he hate us?  How did we get here?  Where do we go now?  

I fielded calls from parents.  Yes, your child is alright.  Yes, they're here.  No, you don't have to talk to them.  Yes, things are going to be OK.

Parents, hours away from their children at this moment.  Becoming a father in the ten years since I understand the mothers and fathers I spoke to that day.  They were fighting two competing impulses; the urge to hold your child and never let go in the face of tragedy and the desire to hide from their children, lest they have to explain events that defied explanation. 

In the end, it fell to me.

At some point in the afternoon we had to track down "The Prophet."  One of the kids had become convinced this was the End of Days and he began to print up verses from the Book of Revelations to post around the dorm.  I tracked him down and handed him off to Brother Robert to deal with.  I was the historian, the political scientist on staff.  Brother Robert was (and still is) the resident Biblical Scholar.  The Prophet was in good hands.

But the damage had been done.  The kids were already scared.

At 4:30 Deb reminded me that it was my turn to take the kids to WalMart.

It was rural Missouri.  A WalMart town in every sense of the world.  And on Tuesdays, we drove the kids to WalMart to get whatever they "needed" for the week."  

"We need things to feel as normal as they can."  

She was right.  In the face of regeneration we must carry on as if nothing were changing.  As if going through the paces of our old lives would give us direction on how to live our new life.  

So I got the van.  

I pulled up to the loading dock and loaded 16 frightened teenagers into the van and drove them to WalMart.  We were seven hours removed from when I'd tumbled down the stairs and I hadn't taken a moment to myself.  I'd been surrounded by the kids all day, answering questions, soothing nerves and I was about ready to pop.  

The conversation in the van was about financial collapse, about The Prophet's warnings and about how expensive gas had become.  As we drove around town we saw two and three dollar increases from what we were paying the night before.  In the decade that's elapsed the prices we saw as the end of the world as we knew it have become standard.  

But it'd started to wear on me.  There was so much fear, so much unknown, so much misinformation making things worse in that van that I had to say something.

I yelled.

What I yelled at the kids doesn't matter.  It was something about not talking if you didn't understand what was going on.  Something about not being stupid kids anymore.  Something about growing up.  I don't know. But I do know that we drove the rest of the way in silence.

The rest of the night went on as they day before it had.  All of us glued to the TV wondering what would come next.

At ten we put the kids to bed and met one last time.

After that meeting Deb asked me if I was going to come back to work tomorrow.

Yes.

"Congratulations, you're really a teacher now."

I slumped against the elevator, twelve hours after I'd come down.  I waited there and felt the cold metal doors suck the heat out of my face.  There was the familiar ding and the doors opened and Newton pulled me in.  The button hit itself and I wandered down the hall, checking in on everyone as I went.  Everyone was good.  Everyone was calm.  Everyone was different.  Everyone had changed.

I got to my door, and pushed it open.  I grabbed a Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and sat down at my work station.  Yoda and Boba Fett glowed to life and there were all the messages sent to me throughout the day.  The windows I'd left opened and ones that'd just sprung to life.  Everyone letting me know that people were OK.  Everyone letting me know where they'd woken up after the regeneration.  Everyone telling me about the state of our nation.  

I couldn't reply.  My nation had grown that day.  The kids were now my people.  And I had to write down what'd happened so that I could remember who they were before their new lives had begun.  So I could remember who they were before we became family.  

And I cried.

As I look back at what I wrote that day I'm struck by the hope that existed in those hours.  The unity and beauty of what could be in the next decade if only we held fast to each other.

Looking back, I know how young I was.  How different we were.  And how proud I am of those kids.  

Regardless of what we lost and gained in the decade since, life has moved on.  My nation, my people have answered their calls.  My kids have grown up to answer their own calls.  

It is a Sunday. 

It is the one hundred and thirty fourth Sunday of my new life.

It started like many other Sundays in this life.  The Bears are playing on the TV and my wife and son are dueling with light sabers.  

Sunday morning, early September.  I woke up to the sound of my son telling me it was morning, both of us bathed in the early autumn light of rural New Mexico.

It is a good day.

First Day

Well folks, The Road to Goodbye is available through both Amazon and Smashwords.  Between these two vendors you should be able to purchase a copy of the book for anything with a screen.  Yes, whatever device your using to read this post could also serve as an eReader.  Head over to either site to find out how.

The Next Movement

Like I said, after two years of shopping I realized I had a decision to make; make the changes BBB wanted me to make, or do something different.

This is the different route.

Beyond the Red Line is a massive book.  And it's the first book in a series of four equally massive books.  When I was trying to end up in a Big Box Bookstore (BBB) I made a lot of cuts to keep the book at a readable size.  These cuts fell into two categories.  1) Good Idea Cuts and 2) Nature of the Beast Cuts.

Good Idea Cuts were ones meant to keep the story moving along.  Yknow, the kind of editing that separates good writing from terrible writing.  No problem with these at all.

Then there are the Nature Cuts.  The cuts where things went away not because they were badly written, but because they went off on tangents that made the novel unreadable in BBB's eyes.  My focus group readers didn't have a problem with these tangents as a matter of fact most members of this group loved the tangents. But BBB was convinced that the book would never sell with these tangents in, so I got rid of them.

At some point, it hit me.  If I release the book as a quarterly eBook, I could keep more of the tangents in.  And then, I could take the tangents that didn't get written, or that really don't fit and release them periodically as bonus chapters for free, or nearly free.  So that's what I'm going to do.

Beyond the Red Line started out five years ago as a therapy session designed to help me get through  a really rough patch.  What took it from two legal pads to the 93,000 novel it is today is the world that I stumbled upon.  I fell in love with the alternate universe I created and I want to tell as many stories about this world as possible.  Now, I have the option of doing that. 

The plan is to release quarterly issues on the following schedule for the next four years. 

March 22- Summer Quarterly
June 23- Autumn Quarterly
September 14- Winter Quarterly
December 12- Spring Quarterly/The Annual Print Omnibus

In between, I'll throw out singles that help develop things we already know about Diego and his friends at Willis College.  Look for those to start happening after the next quarterly drops in June. 

There are other projects in the pipeline, other worlds to explore and we'll get there in time.  Right now, let's see how this one works.

Origin Story

It feels as though origin stories are only popular in medias res, which for some this may very well be.  But for most, this origin is coming at the beginning of the tale.  It doesn't matter, we'll get back to real time in a few minutes at which point this whole introduction will seem self-indulgent.  But that's not really my problem.

It was late May and my last day of work.  My buddy Big C and I woke up that morning, got into a UHaul and drove into the office.  There weren't any meetings that day, no paperwork to push, no donuts to eat, just boxes to clear out of my office, keys to turn in and goodbyes to say.   By noon we were headed down Iowa St. past 31st and onward to Hwy 59 south.  Next stop, New Mexico.

What awaited me at the end of the trip was the unknown.  My wife and I had no apartment, I had no job and the longer I looked for either, the slimmer the pickings became.  Within a few days I was sitting alone in the un-air conditioned cinderblock studio college dorm room we were temporarily occupying feeling sorry for myself.  I'd left my beautiful home, my amazing job and my good friends to follow my wife across the country to her home state to be unemployed and living in a college dorm with college students who were less than pleased to have me, or my wife around.

Needless to say I began to think that I had hit the worst moment of my life.

Being a man of a particular age and pop cultural persuasion I was led to compile a list of the all-time worst days of my life.  I figured, if my current existence was so miserable, I might as well put my misery into some kind of perspective.  When I was done going over the previous 27 years I was left with a few incredible facts.  1) That day, and the days since I got into that UHaul weren't even in the Top 5 of worst days of my life and 2) All five of the worst days of my life were within ~18 months of each other. 

I was amazed.  Really?  That day, which felt so terrible and empty wasn't remotely as bad as the worst day of my life?  Really?

Then something strange happened, I started to think back to that worst day.  To the confluence of factors that had made that day so overwhelmingly terrible that it ended with me passed out on my best friend's floor.  And I realized that my memory of that day was beginning to decay, almost 9 years after the fact. 

So I started to write it down, the story of the worst day of my life.  Then, I started writing down the story of how I'd arrived at the worst day of my life and somewhere along the way the story changed and it wasn't about me and my friends anymore.  It was about this other universe and these other people that I'd never met but who seemed vaguely familiar.  I'd found a portal into an alternate universe.

Three years after that first day I had a book called "Beyond the Red Line." 

It was a coming of age tale about a kid not unlike me, but nothing like me. 

I began to shop it around the publishing industry, talking to different agents and editors for nearly two years.  In this time, I left my job in middle management at Borders Books because I saw the writing on the wall.  Big Box Books (BBB) are dying.  People liked what they'd seen of my book, but they didn't see a place for it in BBB.  Everyone I talked to couldn't figure out what table to put it on, or shelf to hide away in unless I made "changes."

Listen, I'm not an artist.  I'm not better than the people who made great suggestions about how to make my book more marketable.  And I'll probably write the book those really incredible people asked me to write for them.  But RedLine is not that book. 

I'm going out on my own.  Things have changed since Benny Russell said that self-published books might as well be written in chalk on a sidewalk.  eBooks have democratized the playing field, so I might as well get in the game.

This brings me to this blog. 

This is the official blog for both me as an author, and my publisher, Hill 203 Press.  This is where we'll document the ride we're about to go on...cuz it's gonna be a helluva ride.