Welcome to the Wild Blue Yonder Newsletter!
Thank you for all your support and encouragement, and for sticking with me on this weirdly awesome carnival ride that transforms ideas into novels.

This Issue: Updates on Baghdaddy, Cypher 1.0, and Sam’s bar mitzvah.

Well, I was overly ambitious. I figured if I was organized, I could work on my new Cypher book while my first book, Baghdaddy, was in the middle of a major edit. But it didn’t go as planned. Baghdaddy is a gritty, emotional rollercoaster, and the editing process, at this stage, is triage. Not every word gets to live. Some sentences don’t survive even after hours of surgery.

My new book Cypher 1.0 is about world building and ‘what-ifs,’ a young adult view and creating imaginary friends in my head. Changing gears between the two books was hard. I did finish a new Cypher chapter, but restructuring a novel is even tougher than it sounds. At the same time, we were pulling together our son Sam’s bar mitzvah.

To put it in perspective, it was like performing ER surgery on a shooting victim while at the same time, trying to deliver a baby. All while trying to get Sam to temple on time. Fortunately, my wife Jo took the lead in Sam’s ceremony.

I grew up Catholic, so I didn’t know everything that went into a bar mitzvah. It’s a coming of age ceremony in Judaism, and Sam had to work hard. He had to learn Hebrew, decode an ancient language, and think hard about an unfamiliar subject. After that, he had to stand in front of the entire congregation and connect those dots to make a biblical lesson from long ago real and relevant to how we live today.

He did a great job.

Sam is a teenager. He grew up in a military family where Jodi and I spent a lot of time away from home in war zones. So, it was almost divinely appropriate that Sam’s Torah portion dealt with the rules of conflict and war.

Anyone who’s ever raised a child, particularly two-year-olds and teenagers, has lived through conflict and uncertainty, where seemingly simple things are frustrating and hard. There are times when you don’t really know what to do as a parent, or as a young man trying to find his way in the world. There are times when you’re angry and don’t always know why. There are times when you just have to do the best you can at that moment, persevere, and have a little faith.

Having done both, raising a teenager is a lot like going to war.

Teenagers are working desperately hard to figure out who they are and who they want to be. To do that they have to step into the shoes of a lot of different kinds of people and live a lot of different lives, at least for a little while, to discover who they really are. And even though I understand that, I don’t always like those strangers living in my house.

Although there are a lot of them, they move on, and we have watched Sam become, day by day, a little more of who he’s going to be. And that’s amazing.

With Sam’s Bar Mitzvah complete I was able to finish editing Baghdaddy a day early, so we’re still on track for a Spring 2019 release. Probably late Spring because I have an ambitious ‘wish list’ of people I’d like to see endorse and review the book and those folks are busy and hard to reach even if they do want to read the story.

This morning was cool and bright and beautiful. I watched big hot air balloons floating over my neighbor’s roof in a jagged line as I worked out the last kinks in my Cypher book. The Cypher kids just fled a place called Stratos, and they’re racing to where their father’s being stored. Imagery of where they’re headed follows.

It doesn’t look like their life is getting any easier.

Thanks again for reading my newsletter.
More information on my books and events will follow.

Bill