Welcome to the End of Book Shit where we get to say anything we want about the book. Sometimes they’re long and wordy, sometimes they’re short and pithy. You never know. But they are never edited, so excuse our typos. And they are always last minute. Like… right before we upload. So don’t mind us if we ramble.
Also - if you enjoyed this book please do us a favor and leave a review where you purchased it. It helps us more than you realize. We’d really appreciate that. TY!
On a couple of different occasions in this book, characters comment that there’s “a lot to unpack.” That’s true for them as characters inside the story and that’s also true for the story itself. There is a lot to unpack. An amazing amount, if you will. And not just in terms of the plot and its complexities and revelations, but also in terms of the ideas we are finding ourselves examining as we write.
The word “complicated” appears repeatedly in this book. This is not an accident.
We are exploring betrayal, trust, hope, despair, forgiveness...
We delve into how one processes loss and moves on from the past while taking a look at how one prepares for the future.
What does it mean to be alive and how does one face death? The perpetual cycle of new life emerging while — sometimes simultaneously — other life is ending. For, indeed, right now, at the very moment you are reading this, someone is dying.
And someone else is being born.
Someone is celebrating and someone is suffering.
It is all happening now.
And now.
... And now.
So, yes, there’s a lot to unpack within the pages of these books. An amazing amount. Because, quite simply, there’s an amazing amount to unpack in every single moment of our lives. If we choose to unpack it.
And so... What I’d like to talk about here is one of the less obvious but, I think, related and possibly more important ideas presented in this particular installment.
At a certain point in this book Alec makes the observation that anger is essentially a substitute emotion. Which is to say it is a secondary one. It is the emotion that springs up to cover the true, prevailing emotion that gets masked underneath when the anger emerges.
It is a shield.
I’m not saying that it’s insincere. Or unnecessary. It can be very sincere and most often it is very, very necessary for survival. I’m just suggesting that it is, in fact, secondary. And frequently it only surfaces to protect us from feeling something more ... authentic. Usually because that authentic feeling is painful, or at least uncomfortable, and the anger takes what was an emotion we felt victimized by and transforms it into something we feel gives us power and energy.
It seems like it’s active and not passive. It seems like it puts the ball in our hands and re-forms the vicissitudes of life into something that gives us the illusion of having control.
And I would like to suggest that our anger is, in fact, just the opposite. It is not the powerful weapon that spares us hurt. It is actually the thing that keeps us in a perpetual cycle of pain and disallows us the chance to heal and grow.
When anger overtakes whatever our hearts genuinely want to feel, we are suffocating that instinctive, gut-level reaction to the thing it is that we convince ourselves is “making us” angry. If it’s fear (fear of loss, fear of heartache, fear of pain, whatever), then we are denying ourselves the chance to confront that fear, inventory it, and learn how to deal with it so that in the future whatever it was that caused us to become afraid no longer holds its sway over us.
If it’s sorrow, the anger rises up to block the sadness, once again denying us the privilege of learning to sit in our melancholy until we make friends with our heartbreak and it no longer feels burdensome. Because it’s not a burden to feel sorrow. Or to feel fear. It is a privilege. It means that we are alive. Not just breathing and walking and talking, but actually living a fully realized existence.
We cannot presume to wall ourselves off from the things that cause us anxiety, indulging our anger and denying our purer emotions, and expect to ever grow into anything more than we are now.
And, y’know, hey... That’s fine. There’s no rule that says you have to grow or learn or advance in any way at all while you’re here on this planet. But it’s no coincidence that the people I’ve met who are most resistant to the idea of growth and take the greatest precautions to keep their personal risk at a minimum, are also the ones who are most afraid of dying. Perhaps it’s a chicken/egg conversation, but I might want to suggest that it’s not always fearless people who take risks and go on adventures. Sometimes it’s that through the process of adventuring you become less afraid.
I’m not talking, necessarily, about life-risking adventures like squirrel suiting or shark wrestling. I’m talking about adventuring into your own psyche. Your own individual worldview. Challenging yourself to look at the things that make you feel angry or resentful and take a look under the hood of that feeling to see what’s actually making the engine turn. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’d be willing to bet that what you’ll find is just a withering set of feelings that you’ve never dealt with.
This is not pontification, by the way. This is coming from someone who spent much of his life angry at everything all the time. I’ve talked about this before in another EOBS, but I grew up with a mentally ill parent. Something I haven’t talked about is that I also grew up with addictions. Drugs. Alcohol. The usual. I have always presumed that the two things are related. Largely because, with one parent in and out of the hospital all the time, and the other parent so distracted by that that they couldn’t possibly be expected to notice everything going on with their kid at every moment, it provided the ideal opportunity for me to do whatever the hell I wanted.
Which, at fourteen, was excellent. Talk about adventures? I had some goddamn adventures, that’s for certain. I don’t know that I really enjoyed them or appreciated them, usually because I was too fucked up, but it gave me a chance to do some shit that was — to say the least — educational.
And I never once, at all, felt angry. Because between the distractions of my misadventures and the chemically induced haze I maintained, all my feelings were muted. The state I stayed in was what the anger would later become for me: A substitute for having to feel anything I didn’t want to engage with.
And then, at twenty-one, I got sober.
And that’s when the wheels fell the fuck off.
With nothing to mask the more vulnerable emotions I found myself feeling all the time, I had to find a new way to cover them. It seemed like a matter of survival. So, I got really, really angry. All the time. I don’t even know that I understood how angry I was.
A few years back (maybe fifteen or so now), I made contact with someone I had known during that time in my life and had then lost touch with. I forget how or why she and I reconnected, but I just remember that in an email she wrote something like, “It’s so great to hear that you’re doing so well. I always recalled you as that angry young man with so much misplaced emotion, your fists would shake with the energy of your impuissant frustration.” (Or something like that. I may be embellishing. I just recall it being fairly elegiac and also a little bit like, “Really? Why the fuck didn’t anybody say something at the time??)
The reason, of course, that no one said anything at the time is that you cannot coach someone into an evolved state of being. They must find it on their own.
Which brings me back to my point: The only way personal evolution can occur is via a path of discovery that is illuminated by a willingness to get comfortable with your discomfort.
In other words: Sit in your sorrow. Make friends with your fear. Celebrate your sadness.
Whatever the thing is that’s pissing you off, don’t get pissed off by it. Allow it to exist on its own terms, in its own way, and run its course in its own time.
There will be one more book in this trilogy. One more set of adventures for our heroes to face that will challenge their ability to best their anger, adventure into the unknown, and find what for them will be a happily ever after.
As the authors, we know where we intend for the story to go. But we must face the reality that as we get into it, the characters, the story, the reality of these people may carry us somewhere we’re not comfortable with. Like all our characters, Alec, Christine, and Danny tell us where they want to go. And sometimes... Sometimes those assholes take us to places we don’t want to travel. So, there’s no guarantee that won’t happen in the final book in this story.
And, if it happens, it will be on us not to get angry and not to try and rend the story back into a place that causes us to feel more comfortable. As storytellers, we have to sit in our own discomfort with that fact that sometimes a story will tell itself and, eventually, a story must end in whatever way it wants to end.
We can fear it, we can be saddened by it, we can even resent it, but we will ultimately have to accept it if we are to learn from it.
And if we engage with it correctly and honestly, we emerge as better storytellers and better people.
The world is a scary fucking place. We are living in a frightening time in the history of the human experience. And yes, someday we are all going to die.
But rather than raging at those truths, I would encourage all of us, every single one (yours truly included), to take a breath, take a look around, observe our feelings without judgement, and see how long it takes before, instead of being mad as hell about it all, we look at the complications we have to unpack in these big, messy, finite-so-live-it-while-you-can lives of ours and think...
“Goddamn. Isn’t it all just ... amazing?”
JM
24 January 2019
Welcome to my first End of Book Shit for 2019!
Like most people I like to take stock of my year when the new one starts. Look back and think about what I was doing five or ten years ago. But this New Year I’ve been thinking about seven years ago because that’s when this whole fiction author thing started.
Almost exactly seven years ago I made a decision to write a fiction book. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I take that back—I had no idea what I was doing. I just kinda had this weird science fiction story in my head and back then I was working as a hog farm inspector for the state of Colorado.
This was a part-time gig and I mostly worked from home. But about every two weeks I had to drive in to Denver, pick up a state car, and then drive back out to the Eastern Plains of Colorado where all these hog farms lived. My territory was literally from Julesburg, CO (which is on the border of Nebraska) to some random number of miles south of Holly, CO (which is pretty close to Oklahoma and right up against the state line of Kansas.)
So I had a lot of time on my hands. The actual inspections took anywhere from thirty minutes to three days, depending on the number of farms I had to look at. So some days—those days I went south of Holly—I would literally drive for about six hours, do my thirty-minute inspection on their two farms, then turn around and drive home.
I did a lot of thinking in that state car. So I came up with this story about a girl name Junco and built a whole world based off the Eastern Plains.
When people think of Colorado they think of the mountains but half of the state is prairie. Most of that is farm and ranch land and it’s very rural. All these farms were on dirt roads and there were never any street signs that made any sense. It was CR CC or CR ZZ or CR 157. Like, I never really knew where I was. I just knew where I needed to be and figured it out along the way. I can remember someone calling me from the office asking me where I was. And I was like, “Hell I don’t know. Somewhere between Limon and La Junta, bitches. What do you want?”
Going down to Holly I literally based my direction off a flag pole and a lama. (Turn left at the flag pole, turn right at the lama… drive south until I see the farm.)
And I remember being in one of my farm manager’s trucks as we were looking at farms south of Burlington, and he and I were talking about getting out of this fucking hog farm business.
He wanted to sell his house, put his kids and wife in an RV, and go travel. Maybe write a travel blog. And I was telling him how I was writing too. I had my whole science textbook business but I really wanted to write fiction.
I think about him a lot because I liked that guy. He was a very good guy. All the hog farm people were. Just honest people who worked in agriculture and did a job no one ever wants to think about. The state regulation I was in charge of enforcing was an environmental one and I’d say 95% of the time every single hog farm in Colorado (and I had about 120 of them) passed their bi-annual inspection. Every once in a while I’d have to write someone up, usually for a torn water liner edge because we get wicked winds out here and if the edge of something is flapping, it’s definitely gonna rip. But most of the time it was just me and these farm guys riding around in a dirty white pick-up truck shootin’ the shit.
So this Burlington guy had a dream to go do something cool. And I did too. I lost touch with him after I left the hog farms so I never did find out if he sold his house and went traveling. But I did write that book. I wrote three of them that year and have written more than 50 since then.
So I’ve been thinking about that decision a lot lately for some reason. Probably because it’s January and it’s the anniversary of when I quit the hog farms and became a fiction author. But mostly because I often wonder what my life would’ve look like if I hadn’t taken that chance. And then I feel so grateful that I did.
2018 was INSANE for me. So much has changed, and so much happened, and so many things are still in the works, it’s just crazy.
And I don’t really have anything to relate back to this story, The Square. But the EOBS is all mine. You can read it, or not. Appreciate it, or not. I just get to say whatever I want. So that’s what I’m doing. Just sharing my random thoughts with you.
I also want to wish you a very happy new year and say… if you’re thinking about making a change this year—whatever it is—do it.
The perfect time will never come. Believe me. There is no perfect time.
Just believe in yourself and take that chance. Because you never know what will happen. And if you had asked me seven years ago if I’d be here now, writing this for you, I’d have called you crazy.
But here I am.
Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.
Julie
JA Huss
1-23-19
(Also in Kindle Unlimited)
(Also in Kindle Unlimited)
(Also in Kindle Unlimited)