Barry Lyga's Blog: The BLog, page 18

Dear Ms. Pelosi,

We don’t know each other, but apparently you have my email address and feel comfortable using it to ask me for money. I have some thoughts on your most recent request. But first, let’s take a look at it:

I am not — nor have I ever been — a registered Democrat. Nor am I a registered Republican. I suppose I’m one of those sought-after “independent voters” we hear so much about quadrennially.1 However, for the past several cycles, I’ve been pretty reliably in the Democratic corner, mostly because the alternatives are — I won’t mince words — typically insane.

But let’s talk, shall we?

I’m 45 years old, which is old to some, young to others. For most of those years, I’ve been politically aware. Let me put it this way: I remember John Anderson. (Not bad for a nine-year-old!)2 In my decades of following the political conversation, I’ve never seen a headline that contained the phrase “Democrats fight.”

Why is that?

Why won’t the Democrats put on a helmet and get on the field?

Growing up a blue kid in a red town, I was told constantly that Democrats were weak, wimps, unwilling to be tough. I never believed it.

Until now.

I see the weakness and it nauseates me because the Democratic Party may be all that stands between us and the abyss and the Democratic Party is made of paper.

In your email you say, “we can protect all our progress.” Can you tell me exactly how you plan on doing that? Can you also tell me why your email focuses exclusively on the defensive? “Uphill battle.” “Protect all our progress.”

Maybe these phrases have been focus-group-tested to resonate with Democrats. But, again, I’m not a Democrat. And I’m trying to figure out why I should trust you with my money and my hope for the future.

Donald Trump is a dragon. The Democrats, far from channeling St. George, are imitating the Three Little Pigs and looking for cover.

(Spoiler alert: Even that brick house will just be an oven.)

It’s been almost two months since our world slipped through a hole in the universe into a Bizarro reality and all I’ve seen from Democrats is variations on, “Hey, if Trump does X, lots of bad things will happen!” Imagine those utterances accompanied by a pitiful attempt at a spooky ululation, as though to drive home the point. We should be scared.

Well, hell, I am scared. I’m not looking to be scared further. I’m looking for someone who has an idea of what to do next.

What I have not seen from Democrats is fight. For a party that described Trump during the election in terms of an existential threat, the Democrats seem to now be saying, “Well, yeah, we said he was worse than anything we’ve ever seen before, but we’re still going to play the game the same way. So, send us money.”

And what is done with that money?

Did the Democratic Party send bigwigs to Louisiana to try to elect Foster Campbell, the man who could have been a bulwark against the Republicans running roughshod over the process of governing? No, they did not. Maybe because you determined Campbell had no chance of winning. If so, shame on you. Shame on you all. That’s playing the game the old way, where you give up in advance if the fight looks tough.

You don’t have the luxury of playing that way any more. You want people to rally to the Democrats in the face of Trump? Well, guess what — you have to prove you’re worth rallying to.

You have to stand up. Take a hit to the face, if necessary. Bleed a little. People will fight — even for a loser and a losing cause — if they think the person asking them to fight is just as invested in the battle. And a loss that comes at the end of a hard-fought campaign where everyone believes they did their best and had the party at their back will inspire them to do more next time.

Thus far, I have seen absolutely nothing from Democratic leaders to indicate that you lot are interested in sustaining a few body blows in the name of democracy.

“If Trump does X, bad things will happen.” Yes. No kidding. We know that. Tell us what you plan to do to stop him from doing X in the first place. It can’t just be “Give us money.” What are you going to do with that money? How will you stop him?

Absent that, what will you do to stem the tide of the “bad things” that follow X? What is your plan to obstruct Trump’s excesses? Other than asking for money, what is your plan to “protect all our progress?” What is your plan to absolutely crush the Republicans in the mid-terms and restore some balance and sanity to our government at the local, state, and federal levels?

The Republicans are damn close to being able to call a convention to propose Amendments to the Constitution. They need a governor and a couple of statehouses. History shows that they are much better at winning these than the Democrats are.

So, again: What’s the plan?

If you won’t tell me, I have to assume you don’t have a plan. I have to assume your “plan” is to consolidate your power base with donations and attempt to ride out a storm that could easily capsize the ship of state.

I have precisely zero interest in donating to that plan.

I need a political party that is going to fight for the survival of the nation, not the survival of the party. Sometime before the 2018 mid-terms, Trump will discover, fortuitously be delivered, or manufacture a pretext by which he will claim to need unprecedented executive powers. He will demand these powers of the Congress and make no mistake: Your Republican colleagues will bow to that demand.

What will you and your colleagues do, Ms. Pelosi? In that scenario, what will you do? What is your plan to explain to the American people that your vote against these powers is the right one? What political judo will you apply to turn this around on Trump? How are you preparing?

Or will your party do as in 2001 when George W. Bush insisted on the PATRIOT Act…and cringe…and close your eyes…and tell yourself it won’t be too bad?

You won’t say. No Democratic leader will say.

How am I supposed to trust you?

So, no, I’m sorry, Ms. Pelosi. I’m sorry, but I can’t give you $26.00 or more, even at a triple match. If your party leadership can show a little fight, a little fire, maybe I’ll consider donating to you. Otherwise, maybe you should send me $26.00. I’ll make sure it goes to an organization that, from November 9, has sworn to battle Trump every step of the way.

Sincerely,

Barry

My reasons for being so are steeped in history — 1990, to be exact. Let’s just skip it for now.I’m also told I did a killer Tricky Dick impression as a toddler.

Last year around this time, I saw that Holly Black had posted a Year in Review on her blog. On my podcast, I lamented that I hadn’t thought to do the same, and resolved to give it a shot.

So of course, I decided to do my first Year in Review post at the end of what may be the lousiest year in my lifetime, with the promise of more bad yet to come.

Oh, well.

Personal

In my personal life, it was a year of upheaval and complexity, but ultimately one of great joy.

My family moved from my beloved Brooklyn to the swamps of Jersey, which has been an adjustment for yours truly. I grew up shuttled between the suburbs and farm country, never feeling at home in either place. When I went to college in a city, it was the first time in my life I felt like I belonged somewhere. For reasons that no longer matter, after college I ended up back in the suburbs for a very long time. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I finally made it to the city again. And I loved it.

I miss it now, but the joy of watching my daughter spread her wings in a nice big house helps a lot. (Plus, I have a home office. Bliss!)

Oh, yeah, speaking of my kid: My wife and I are expecting our second shortly after New Year’s. Which probably means this should be in next year’s Year in Review, but most of the pregnancy was in 2016, so there.

The Secret Sea

Ah, this was the most bittersweet element of the year for me. My new middle-grade novel, The Secret Sea, landed on bookshelves in August.

And then, it just sat there.

Look, not every novel can be a slam-bang home run, but The Secret Sea was the culmination not only of years of work, but also a personal dream. It was exactly the kind of book I’d wanted to write since I was a kid. Everyone I showed it to loved it, and I thought the world would love it, too.

Sales were…there. As of this writing, it has exactly one review on Amazon. It’s been almost six months. I’ve never had a book go so long with just one review.

Why didn’t the book take off? Why didn’t people find it? I have no idea. If I were cynical, I would think it’s because the main character and his best friend are both people of color. But truthfully, I don’t think people even made it far enough along to learn that.

I am enormously proud of The Secret Sea. I think it’s some of my very best writing — earnest and heartfelt and cruelly honest in the way only middle grade fiction can be. But the world skipped it over. Ah, well.

The Book that Will Kill Me/Mystery Trilogy

Some good news, though, professionally. As 2016 limps bloodied and broken to the finish line, I received news about a couple of projects for 2017 that I’m really excited about.

First of all, I have finally found a publisher for The Book that Will Kill Me! I can’t say anything more until I actually have the contract in hand, but rest assured that once I do, I will tell you all about it.

Second of all, I’m waiting for the final approval for a trilogy that I am beyond thrilled to write. It’s sort of a lifelong dream project, so I’ll be shouting all about it once I get the all-clear.

Better yet, there are a couple of other possible projects flitting around in the wings. I’ll update you as/if they happen.

Travel

I had a lot of fun traveling this year. I attended my first-ever anime convention as a Literary Guest of Honor, visited the folks in Youngstown, Ohio and spoke at a couple of their libraries, and spent a day at the Tweens Read book festival in Houston. I also spent some time in upstate New York at Northshire Books and made several appearances in the New York area. As my family grows, I find I travel less and less, but I appreciate it more and more.

Bang

Perhaps the biggest news of 2016 for me, though, was not merely the announcement of my new YA novel, Bang, but also its inclusion at EW.com! The site ran a cover reveal and excerpt from the book. (If you haven’t read it yet, try it out.) Bang comes your way in April 2017. I can’t wait for you to see it!

In conclusion…

2016 didn’t manage to kill me. Bring on 2017!

Every year, I take a moment to post some books I read over the past twelve months that I think you should consider. This was a crazy-busy year for me, so I didn’t get a lot of reading done, but here is this year’s crop of recommended titles:

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
Uprooted by Naomi Novik
When Friendship Followed Me Home by Paul Griffin
Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen

My daughter’s speaking vocabulary is still limited to toddler-ese, but one thing she can definitely say is Call Gramma.

She usually does this while pointing at my iPad or my phone. She doesn’t actually mean to make a phone call — she wants to FaceTime, but while she understands the word FaceTime, she can’t say it. Hence, call Gramma.

She says the same to my wife for her other grandmother. She’s enjoyed FaceTiming them both since very early in her life, and now she has ability to demand it. Once presented with the iGadget in question, she can even navigate to FaceTime and tap on the right contact in the list.

But I realized something the other day that made this adorable tendency a little…odd.

I think my kid thinks her grandmothers are apps.

No, really!

She says “call Gramma” and we do, and then after a few seconds, she wanders off, occasionally stopping by to peer at the screen and giggle. And then, after I’ve signed off, she’ll stroll back over, look at me, and say, “Call Gramma.”

Unlike a couple of months ago, she doesn’t summon forth her grandmothers so that she can interact with them. She just conjures them to the screen, giggles at them, and then goes about her business. And that conjuring part can happen over and over!

She doesn’t understand wi-fi, video calling, networking, or even distance. All she knows is this: When she wants to see Elmo, she taps on an icon and he’s there. When she wants to drop shapes into holes in her favorite game, she taps on an icon and it’s there.

And when she wants to see a grandmother…

She taps on an icon…

There’s no need to engage, then. No need to “stay on the line”1 because there’s always another tap. “Call Gramma,” run around and play, “call Gramma” again, run around some more, “call Gramma…” Lather, rinse, repeat.

Don’t worry — this isn’t a post in which I rail against the demons of technology. My daughter will realize soon enough that her grandmothers don’t live inside the iPad, always waiting, always ready to heed the call of her persistent, tiny finger taps. In the meantime, it’s sort of hilarious to watch, as she invokes the holy tap-tap-tap and delights herself with her grandmothers, over and over and over again.

Oh, man, how old does that make me sound?

This one’s easy. I’ve already written about it!

Check out this piece I wrote for Mulholland Drive a few years back. It’s basically got the story down pat, though in looking at it now, a couple of details (mostly about timing) are off. No big deal, though.

Words are not enough, but words are all I have, and I hate that.

I didn’t want to drop my daughter off at daycare this morning. I wanted to keep her home and hold her all day, but she’s too young, she doesn’t know, and the disruption to her routine and the moroseness of her father wouldn’t have helped her or me, so I let her go.

Haven’t slept save for handfuls of minutes, stolen bits of panic-streaked dreams in darkness. I want to believe — desperately — that this is just another gone-bad election, that I survived Reagan and Bush and W., that it’s no different, but of course it is, it is.

For years, we’ve mocked the right for living in the Fox News/right-wing bubble, but — as Bill Maher has pointed out repeatedly — there’s a left-wing bubble, too. Social media allows us to communicate with anyone, but more often than not, we choose only to communicate with people who agree with us, who reinforce our beliefs, our wishes, our desires. When Nate Silver had the temerity to suggest that Hillary wasn’t a lock on election, for example, the left went crazy and bent over backwards to “prove” him wrong. It sure felt good at the time.

How’s it feel now?

I’ll tell you how I feel: I am absolutely petrified for my friends who do not have the luxury, as I have, of having been born white, male, cisgender, and straight. If this is a nightmare for me, I literally cannot imagine what hell they’ve already conceived, with the knowledge that reality very well could be worse. I yearn to be a comfort to them, yet I know that nothing I do or say will ever — could ever — compensate for what our fellow Americans have unleashed.

We’re living in a dystopian novel, but there’s no plucky hero who can rise up to save us all.

So, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

Don’t think of 2020. That’s too far away. The midterms are in 730 days. It’s time to purify Congress and the statehouses, and start to build a new future. Let’s do it. It’s the only thing we can do — the only thing — that will both make us feel better and actually make things better.

A very cool episode…

Barry has a book challenged; guess which one! After reading Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, Barry has an epiphany. Leia requests her favorite musician. Morgan plans and executes a toddler’s birthday party without any help.

Today would have been my maternal grandfather’s 100th birthday.

I have his birthday in my calendar and when he passed nine years ago at the age of ninety-one, I didn’t delete it. So every year, I get a reminder, and last night it told me “Tomorrow: David Kipnes 100th Birthday.”

One hundred.

He almost made it, too.

When I told my wife I was going to write about my grandfather, she said, “You’re getting sentimental in your old age.” Which struck me as funny ’cause, man, I’ve been sentimental my whole life. I still own the baby blanket my parents put in my crib, for God’s sake! (It’s even older than I am. The blanket was probably manufactured in the late sixties; I was manufactured in 1971.)

This is my mother’s father, my Zadie, in 1991 at the spry age of 75, with my Bubie:

She predeceased him by a little over six years. In those six years, I watched him go from inconsolable and incoherent with grief, a man who wanted to die, to laughing with his first great-grandchild (my niece) and claiming that he’d told God he wanted to live to be a hundred.

“And then I told God,” he went on with a twinkle in his eye, “that if He wouldn’t let me get to one hundred, that would be all right — I’ll take a hundred and ten.”

A hundred and ten. Can you imagine?

Another time he said this to me: “I want to make it to a hundred. And I’m talking to God about another hundred after that, but we’ll see. I doubt He’ll give it to me, but that’s what I would like.”

You have to understand something about this God talk — don’t read it as serious and portentous and religious. My Zadie didn’t have time for that. If he believed in a God, it was in a happy trickster God. A God you could play cards with and tell very inappropriate jokes to.

Here he is in World War II, serving at some ridiculously hot and humid post south of the equator:

That’s him on the right. And if he took that cap off, you’d see he had damn near no hair even then. (Thanks for passing down those genes, Zadie. And to my unborn son: I’m sorry for what you’re going to inherit, kid.)

Here’s a bit of what I said in my eulogy:

I think of stories, when I think of him. He had a million of them….

God, could the man tell stories.

I think of him, I think of the stories. When I close my eyes, I can see him, I can hear him. Running through a segment of narrative, so clear and sure. Then, suddenly, stopping. And you could almost hear his brain working as he searched for the right word. The perfect word. He was fastidious about that. He had an astonishing vocabulary and if sometimes the pages on his mental thesaurus took a little extra thumbing-through, well, he was fine with that. I would watch and listen and wait to see which word he was going to pull out of nowhere.

It was amazing to watch him tell stories. He would lose track of himself and go off on these crazy tangents, making my mother say, “Get to the point, Daddy,” but he couldn’t be deterred. He would just keep plowing through and rambling and stacking words into sentences and paragraphs until somehow he came back to his main story and managed to wrap it up.

It took him dying for me to realize that my own proclivity for storytelling came — at least in part — from him. One more gift passed down, and if male pattern baldness is the flip side of that coin, well, I’m okay with that.

One hundred. Damn.

Having a child necessarily and logically kickstarts your sense of mortality. I’m going to die, which isn’t a surprise, but suddenly seems to matter. I always said that I would leave behind a couple of bookshelves, but of course now I will also be leaving behind children.

I’m not one of those people who believe that you live on through your kids. I think that’s actually a noxious idea that obviates your children’s own essential humanity. They’re not your legacy; they’re their legacy. Go build your own.

My other grandfather lived to ninety-three, so if you buy into such things, I drew a decent number in the longevity lottery. Given modern medicine, if I don’t do anything stupid, I can probably beat their scores and hit triple digits.

My wife says to me — whenever I mention this — “Do you really want to live that long?”

And I say, “Hell, yes!”

I don’t want to live forever, mind you. I’ve read too many comic books and sci-fi novels to be sold on the idea on immortality. But somewhere in the low one hundreds sounds nice to me. Long enough to know my grandkids, not merely see and hold them.

Let me shift families for a second here.

This is my dad’s side of the family. In the back row, you’ve got my grandmother and my dad. The woman sitting on the arm of the chair is my grandmother’s mother. And the lady who looks just thrilled to be there is my great-great-grandmother. I, of course, am the dude with no hair sitting in her lap.

Five generations. Apparently, this was a big enough deal that the local newspaper ran this photo. I have a clipping somewhere, but I can’t put my hands on it right now.

Five generations. My great-great-grandmother lived long enough to hold her great-great-grandson in her arms. I never knew her, but she at least met me.

I knew my great-grandmother very well. (It helped that she got married when she was, like, fifteen. The past is a different world, people…) And of course I was lucky enough to know all of my grandparents for a very, very long time.

I can’t imagine even the combination of genetics and medical advances pushing me to the point that I can get to know my great-grandchildren much less my great-great grandchildren (especially if my kids wait as long as I did to have their own), but I think I can be around for a few years after the grandkids are born. And hell maybe, just maybe, I can play the role of the dour old person sitting in the chair, holding one of their clueless babies. My great-grandkids won’t know me, but they’ll have the picture.

Is it crazy to want this? Frivolous? Maybe. Probably. But my life was endlessly enriched by knowing my grandparents, and even just by seeing that photo, of knowing that my great-great-grandmother (who by that point in her life probably just wanted to be left alone) held me.

This is what we can give them. We can show them, Here is who and where you come from. We touched your skin and you touched ours. We were real.

I thought of my Zadie as the Happy Zenmaster. The man could laugh heartily even while breathing through an oxygen mask. He could do yoga moves that make my tendons ache just thinking about them when he was in seventies.

Man, I miss him. I miss all of them, to tell the truth, but today he would have been a century old and I miss him so much. I miss his laughter and I miss his stories and I miss the goofy words he invented, the ones that sounded like they should actually be real words, but weren’t.

He had a big, echoing laugh, unself-conscious, the kind that embarrassed you in restaurants.

I would give a lot to hear it again.

Recently, a young writer commented on the original POV entry of this series, saying this:

I’m writing a full length novel and wanted to ask for some of your advice. I always get confused about POV, I wrote this book half way in the 1st POV and now I feel like I should’ve written it in 3rd POV. I’m confused. I’ve spent six months writing 18 chapters, and now I have to rewrite everything. Have you ever come across such a problem? And how do you tackle it?

I’ve never actually encountered this issue. I’ve had a situation where I had to change tense — wrote something in present tense, decided it was better in past tense — but I’ve never goofed on the POV before. So, truly, I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be.

When I had to do that tense switcheroo, though, here’s how I approached it: I did one chapter. Just one. And then I sat on it for a couple of days. And then I went through it again, just to make sure. Because it’s tempting to look at a change like this as a hard slog that is best done with your head down, charging straight ahead ’til the end.

I disagree. Big changes like this are best done piecemeal, with plenty of time to reconsider. You may think changing from first person to third makes all the sense in the world right now, but when it’s done, you may find you think differently. Rather than do all of that work on all eighteen chapters, do one. Then really ponder it.

Consider, too, that changing from first to third isn’t merely about switching all of your Is and mes into s/hes and her/hims. First person has a different set of requirements than third. Sure, go through quickly and change the pronouns, but then really take that chapter apart and think about what you’ve gained and what you’ve lost in the conversion. You’ll be tempted to change as little as possible, but I encourage you to dig deep.

I guess what I’m saying is this: Don’t despair. Don’t look at this as a failure. Look at it as an opportunity to improve your book and to improve your ability to examine your own work critically. It’s a chance to reinvigorate your story. The lessons you’ll learn in this process will carry forward into every other story you write, so don’t look at it as “This is slowing me down.” Look at it as, “This is preparing me for the future.”

Good luck!

Two interviews have been posted for The Secret Sea, so I figured I’d point ’em out to you…

First up is SciFiChick.com, where I say stuff like:

It’s about family and friendship and what survives death and how far you’d be willing to go to save someone you love…and what could make you not save them.

Then we have the Teen Librarian Toolbox, where I say stuff like:

…their worst nightmare is a super-smart, fiercely independent 12-year-old girl!

Check ’em out!