December 3, 2024

No Words

There appeared all over the land a slim booklet, entitled Common Sense. And by April of 1776, almost every adult in the thirteen colonies had read or had read to him some part of the booklet. In December of 1775, only wild-eyed radicals called for independence; six months later only the most conservative elements - and few they were - of the American popular front stood out against independence. In that six-month period, the country united itself, tightened itself, and set its face solidly against the enemy, the loose alliance of thirteen far-flung colonies becoming a solid coalition.

And by testimony of many, not a little of this was due to the slim book Tom Paine wrote.

• From Howard Fast’s introduction to The Selected Work of Tom Paine & Citizen Tom Paine

“How are you writing now? How do you get yourself going?”

A writer asked me this after my last newsletter. They told me how distraught they were after the election, and how it affected their productivity.

Basically, since election night, they’ve had no productivity.

It’s a fair question. Grief tends to pull us away from what we enjoy, illuminates our world in a sickly light. It can be tough to sit down at a desk and write about imaginary people during our own hardship. And our job is, in some ways, to unglamorously play music on the Titanic as it sinks.

Well, that’s a dumb job.

And that’s why, I think, it’s important to occasionally change the song we play. I don’t think “Nearer, to Thee, My God” would have been the music I’d have chosen on that ship. I’d have wanted something a bit more motivational. Maybe Pharoahe Monch’s “Simon Says,” which has lyrics that would have been more appropriate to my mood at that time:

Get the fuck up!

Simon says, get the fuck up!

“Simon Says,” Pharoahe Monch

I don’t think rap existed in 1912.

Anyway, if all I wrote were novels, then I think the election - and life’s other occasional unpleasantness - would be pretty derailing. Of course, the world factors into my novels, and there is respite to be found in reading and writing fiction, but I don’t know if that would be enough. A novel can take years to write, and it’s tough to carry the same mood and emotions. What you want to say in November may not fit in what you’ve been writing from January through October.

So what are you saying? We should all get newsletters?

No, this is my thing, and I have the only writer’s newsletter in the world. Get your own thing.

But also, yes, you should. Or essays. Or book reviews. Or short stories. Or poems. Or columns. Or songs. Or anything that gives you the opportunity to do something else. I’m often lost in my own novels - in the prose and characters and submerged in a world that’s slowly forming around me. So, when I do write something else, it often feels like creative tension is being expended. Like there’s a need in me to say something that the current confines of my novel doesn’t allow.

But what if you can’t? What if the world has you too down?

In 2017, a sixty-four year old man opened fire on a crowed at a Las Vegas music festival. Using bump stocks (banned afterward, but the Supreme Court overturned that decision this year) he killed 60 people and wounded over 400 in under ten minutes. It is still the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in US history.

I remember sitting in the parking lot outside of a grocery store, numbly scrolling through social media as people lamented another mass shooting. And as I scrolled through post after post, I kept seeing the same small sentence from the writers I follow:

“No words.”

Even in my own fear and grief, I felt a dull anger as I scrolled. Part of it was the unoriginality of the cliche (I expect more from my heroes), part of it was the dereliction of duty - no words from writers is thoughts and prayers from politicians. We should be better.

Don’t be a dick. You mentioned grief earlier. Sometimes people need to heal.

Absolutely! I believe in self-care. But I also believe in writers. And, to the writers reading this, no matter what happens over the next four years, you need to remember:

You have words, and you need to use them.

“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

• Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe

But it’s hopeless! This election is going to fundamentally change the country. Even if it was a slim majority, it still indicates that a significant number of Americans want the hell he’s promised.

I want to move to Vancouver.

I was pretty dejected the night of the election and the morning afterward. It seemed that, not only was I on the losing side, but a side that was destined to be more than a failure. I felt incorrect, which is perhaps the worst way to live.

Loss has a finality we can eventually understand, but doubt is seeping poison, one that infects as it remains.

And yet, writers are BUILT for this. There are very few times when we are sure of ourselves. We don’t know - for certain - if a story or an essay or a novel is going to have the right effect on its audience. We don’t know if it will even have an audience. Sometimes our work impresses us; mostly, if we’re any good, it doesn’t. There will be times when it feels like no one - including you - believes in what you are doing. And there will probably be times when, truly, no one does believe in you.

Any good writer has faced those moments (they are always only moments) and kept on.

Doubt is a tyrant, and all tyrants are temporary.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

• James Baldwin, from an interview in Life magazine

Also, look, Vancouver doesn’t want a bunch of Americans wandering around asking how hockey works and where the nearest McDonalds is and making “that’s what she said” jokes.

But what can I write? How can I possibly help?

I don’t know why you write, and maybe you don’t either. I mean, I know it’s for publication and success, and you probably write for you in some very direct and emotional way…but I think there’s more to it.

There was a time when you read a book that moved you, and maybe you still have that book, its cover torn and the glue holding the pages to the spine out of sheer stubbornness, but you’ve kept it and you’re never giving that book away - you’ll never lose it, no matter how often you move homes. That book changed something for you, and I think you write because you want to give that particular feeling to someone else.

And - this is the important part - you know you can.

That’s the knowledge that comes when you know you’ve written something truly good, and the pencil in your hand feels like a spear, and you’ve pierced that fucking doubt right in its chest.

But there is another truth and that truth passes through time in the very same way an irresistible force passes through an immovable object. That’s what I said: this truth is so irresistible that it passes through immoveable objects. It is the truth of a desire for a refined and impassioned portrait of the presence and the power and the possibilities of the human spirit. Can you imagine that? I said: a desire for the refined and impassioned depiction in music of the presence and the power and the possibilities of the human spirit. That is the desire that lights the candle in the darkness. That is the desire that confounds dragons who think themselves so grand. We have heard the striking of the match and have felt ourselves made whole in the glow of the candle for a long time.

“Premature Autopsies,” written by Stanley Crouch, performed by Wynton Marsalis

But I’m scared. I’m scared for me and my family and my friends and the people I don’t know who are going to suffer, both in this country and throughout the world.

And I can’t believe we’re going through this again.

I can’t believe I have to feel this despair again.

I know. There were many times when I thought those days were over. After January 6, 2021, I really thought no person could ever support him again. And then, after Republicans in Congress refused to impeach him later that year, I realized I’d greatly underestimated tyranny and hopelessness.

Over the next four years, you will be tired, and you will be afraid.

And then you will reach the place where you are tired of being afraid.

And that is when you sharpen your pencil.

And that is when you get to work, and you write something that will reach the people like you, people who need your words, and those words are going to be remembered by them, and shared, and you will let them know that, not once, not ever, did he or anyone else ever overpower you.

EA

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I’m pretty pretty pretty honored that PEN/Faulkner and DC Public Libraries picked me as one of three writers for their 2025 DC Reads program (along with Lauren Francis-Sharma and Alice McDermott). The three of us will be part of virtual book clubs, a group panel, and we’ll each give individual presentations, all in February and March of 2025.

For my individual presentation, I’ll be giving a talk about the history of crime fiction in the DC/MD/VA triangle and how it ties into the writing of rebellion (which is lolz sort of on my mind lately). And, and and and, jazz singer Sara Jones is going to join me, singing songs from the periods I discuss. Cool, right? SO COOL.

You can read more about the program here, and dates and locations are below (registration to open soon):

Wed., Feb. 12 - Virtual book for When She Left (I’m far too scared to attend this)

Thurs, Feb. 20 - The History of Crime Fiction in the DMV, with Sara Jones. Held at Southwest Library in DC.

Thurs, Mar. 20 - Panel with Lauren Francis-Sharma and Alice McDermott. Held at MLK Library in DC.

Double Barrel Bluff, by Lou Berney.

Ed. Note: Any Lou Berney novel is a celebration, and after a number of standalones, he’s returned to his early Shake Bouhcon novels, which were fast and funny and, as always with Berney, beautifully written.

The Plot: During his years as a wheelman for the Armenian mob in Los Angeles, Shake Bouchon didn’t think of himself as the settling-down type. But now he’s happily married to Gina, the love of his life—and former adversary—in Indiana, of all places. The great thing about Bloomington, for two people with checkered pasts, is that everyone is nice and no one knows them. Until the day a brutal Armenian thug who has always hated Shake shows up in his backyard. He demands that Shake help him find his missing mob boss, the pakhan—the dangerous and beautiful Alexandra “Lexy” Ilandryan, who also happens to be Shake’s ex-girlfriend. Shake’s got a lot of history with Lexy, so he reluctantly agrees to travel to Siem Reap, Cambodia, where she was last seen. Once there, he finds himself tangled in an underworld of Cambodian gangsters, mob politics, and opportunistic expats, where the stakes aren’t clear and everyone is looking to score. With only the help of a clairvoyant hippie and the Armenian thug, Shake becomes involved in a high-stakes negotiation for Lexy that might cost him his own life. But perhaps most threatening of all is Gina’s wrath when she arrives in Cambodia intent on saving Shake from himself — and from all the people trying to kill him.

Alter Ego, by Alex Segura.

Ed. Note: Alex Segura’s first standalone, Secret Identity, was a revelation when it was published, nominated for a slew of awards and taking home the LA Times Prize for Best Novel. The sequel continues Segura’s love of comics and stirring emotional depth of his protagonist, Annie Bustamante.

The Plot: Annie Bustamante is a cultural force like none other: an acclaimed filmmaker, an author, a comic book artist known for one of the all time best superhero comics in recent memory. But she’s never been able to tackle her longtime favorite superhero, the Lethal Lynx. Only known to the most die-hard comics fans and long out of print, the rights were never available—until now.

But Annie is skeptical of who is making the offer: Bert Carlyle's father started Triumph Comics, and has long claimed ownership of the Lynx. When she starts getting anonymous messages urging her not to trust anyone, Annie’s inner alarms go off. Even worse? Carlyle wants to pair her with a disgraced filmmaker for a desperate media play.

Annie, who has been called a genius, a sell-out, a visionary, a hack, and everything else under the sun, is sick of the money grab. For the first time since she started reading a tattered copy of The Legendary Lynx #1 as a kid, she feels a pure, creative spark. The chance to tell a story her way. She's not about to let that go. Even if it means uncovering the dark truth about the character she loves.

Dominoes Danzon, and Death, by Raquel V. Reyes.

Ed. Note: It’s a pleasure to see the world of cozies alive and well, in the assured hands of veterans like Donna Andrews and relative newcomers like Mia P. Manansala and the Caribbean Kitchen series by Raquel V. Reyes. It’s no easy trick to mix murder and humor, but writers like Reyes do it with flair and skill.

The Plot: It’s been three years since food anthropologist and cooking show star Miriam Quiñones-Smith had her last brush with death. Her Spanglish culinary show, Abuela Approved, is topping the charts. Her parents are back in Miami and living with her in Coral Shores. And her kids are great. But when bones start popping up in unexpected places, Miriam’s idyllic life is threatened. Her husband Robert’s much-delayed hotel project screeches to a halt when human bones are unearthed. Tribal representatives, forensic archaeologists, and a pompous professor rain down on the possibly ancient site. Then a fake skeleton with the name 'Smith' etched into it is found floating in the bay with an ominous note. Is it a threat to Miriam’s husband or her inlaws? And when Miriam’s boss Delvis is seen going off on a tour guide who marched through the crew-only area on set and is later found dead, Delvis is declared the main suspect. To protect her family and friends, Miriam must dig up the truth that has been hiding in plain sight.

Battle for the Veiled City, by Puja Guha.

Ed. Note: Guha has made a career for herself with her popular, celebrated Ahriman series, which offer a blend of international politics and high action. This is the fifth book in the series, and readers will want to binge the entire Ahriman Legacy,

The Plot: After her partner Kasem Ismaili is arrested for his past as the deadly assassin the Ahriman, former agent Petra Shirazi will do anything to assure his freedom. She strikes a bargain with the CIA: Kasem’s freedom and a new identity in return for one last operation. To bring down Kasem’s nemesis and the man who blackmailed him, General Majed. The operation takes them back to where they first met in Tehran. While confronting the darkest memories of their past, the stakes of the mission are clear. The pair will need to execute a mission that would normally take an entire team with minimal outside support. Or die trying.

It's giveaway time! The winner of any one of the four books listed above is:

zar_____x6@gmail.com

Congrats, and I'll send you an email soon!

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