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Barb Law Shelley asked me tough questions and Rase Littlefield took great pictures, but I always feel a little sad about what I put photographers through. I’m truly grateful they want to take my picture, but I feel like I don’t give them enough to work with.

It’s like when my barber spends a half-hour making the couple dozen hairs I still have on my crown stand even and at attention for my usual hair cut. Over the years, too many follicle soldiers have fallen from my formation and retreated down my back, but my barber still gives it his all.

It’s the same for pictures. I’ve gotten better at smiling, but it wasn’t for any reason I expected. It was because my young teen son Sam had been pissed off at me for a while and when he finally told me why it took both of us some time to work through. Mostly because I didn’t realize I still did it.

Sam thought I enjoyed punishing him.

I don’t, and it stung to hear. Normally, I’d have set it aside as an in-the-moment barb, a teen’s reaction to a restriction, the more adult-child cry for lightning to strike me because he didn’t get his way. But something was different. When our argument reached its crescendo, it wasn’t the generic “I hate you” it was specific and chilling. “You always smile when you punish me like you like it.”

It took a few weeks to circle back to it. I haven’t talked much to my boys about my parents. All they knew was that my father passed away before they were born, and my stories about growing up focused on things I learned and a few funny stories. But I wrote a book about it and both my boys can read.

When Sam and I were ready to talk about hard things we did. For my part it started and ended with “I love you” and it went like this.

I’ll tell you a story that isn’t in my book. I smile when I hurt the most. I wish I didn’t, but it’s true. I think smiles should happen when we’re happy, but when I was a lot younger than you, my punishments were brutal and severe. I wasn’t allowed to show anger or fear, or cry.

If I did, my punishments were so much worse. It wasn’t a great way for a kid to grow up. But I learned that if I stayed calm and smiled, no matter what happened, the beatings quickly ended. Eventually, I was able to get away and get strong enough so that never ever happened again.

I try hard now to smile when things are good, and I’ve gotten better at it.

But when I’m hurting the worst, I still smile. I know how screwed up that is, but that calm, maybe even that smile has gotten me through some pretty terrible things. Sometimes I was even able to use that calm smile to think and not react and stop bad things from happening.

I wasn’t punishing you because I enjoy it. I’m your father, and enforcing the rules is part of my job. I know that you’ve seen me smile when things were the worst between us and that it hurt you. But not everything is what it seems.

We agreed to work together, and Sam seemed genuinely relieved. There are great things on the horizon for us, and I want to be able to smile right for them when we get there.

**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.

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.

**WARNING – Stratos Infiltration Detected. National Security Data Breach.**

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

Bill

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