I like silly words. Doozy. Lollygag. Brouhaha. And my personal favorite, snog.
When I find silly words in unlikely places, it makes them hysterical. My oldest, Xander, calls sparkling water static. And as it sizzles down the throat and plinks it’s can, it really does drink and sound like static. It’s a funny word that fits.
Today I restocked our static stash. You can buy it in pure fizz or flavored varieties that, depending on the mix, taste refreshing, or like Pledge or a bad imitation of something good that went very wrong.
I bought La Croix Apricot, Cran-Rasberry, Mango, and Pamplemousse flavors. Why was Pamplemousse not in English like the others? Great question. But it is a silly name. It could be a sidekick in a YA Mystery as in, “Pamplemousse, it’s time we tell the widow Jenkins who murdered her husband.”
It could be a good guy or a bad girl, or part of an incantation, or Grapefruit in French. Who knows?
I ponder the possibilities while I gulp down the last tittynope of Pamplemousse still in my glass.
A Newsletter for Books by Bill Riley – September 2018
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.
The Hardest Baghdaddy Edit is Complete.
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.
Sam’s Bar Mitzvah
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.
Getting ready for the next flight.
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.
WARNING – Stratos Infiltration Detected. National Security Data Breach.
Thanks again for reading my newsletter. More information on my books and events will follow.
Since my first book Baghdaddy is still under pre-publication review, by the ever-vigilant boys and girls at Langley, it’s time to do what writers do – get cracking on my new book.
For those of you who know me, I’ve wanted to write this book for a long time. It’s a young/new adult thriller about how absolute power corrupts, and the real power of family. Even if those family members tend to fight like cats and dogs. But after my parents passed away Baghdaddy just wouldn’t stand in line and wait to be written. So, the time is now.
The working title for my new novel is CYPHER 1.0 – Ashur’s Tears. It’s a story that blends “what if” science with magic, and I’m watching the Payette River wend through a snowy forest, from a toasty room – as I work the kinks from my plot.
The view from my window
Writing a book is a lot like making a baby. A glint of an idea. A raw attraction. An enthusiastic week (or two or three) of plot debauchery – the fun and exciting positioning of “what ifs.” Then, a lot of time goes into what fits where, and what works and doesn’t.
Even after you figure it all out, a happy, healthy dose of flexibility, patience, endurance, and vigor is still required to make something new, and mostly wonderful, that didn’t exist before.
For Ashur’s Tears, I’m using several of Blake Snyder’s screenwriting methods to help better visualize my story, and to improve my writing efficiency. If you’re interested in writing a novel his Save the Cat! series of books are well worth reading. His method of organizing a plot not only gives a good breakdown of the “what goes where” in a movie, but he also looks at plot points as a series of “beats” that, like a drum, drive the rhythm of a story forward.
With a little luck I should have my plot worked out, and most of the scenes written for the first act, by the time I come back down from the mountains in Lowman, Idaho after the first week of January.
A Birdhouse on Birches
But now, I have to go. I left the Cypher children, my main characters, in a perilous place and I have to check in on them to see what they’re up to, and figure out what happens next.
More to follow. Visit me at www.billrileyauthor.com
