Life, Death, and Long-Term Planning

So... this happened last week, but I hadn't shared here yet. THE TALON OF THE HAWK won Best Fantasy Romance of 2015 in the RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Awards!!! Look at that amazing company. I'm just thrilled that this book won. Not only because, well - winning! - but because this particular story really gutted me to write and remains a special book for me.
This week's topic in the Bordello is Long Term Plans - when to stick to the script, and when to deviate.

I'm going to tell you all a story. This should come as no surprise.

I should caveat that I have a precarious relationship with long-term planning. I absolutely believe in having a vision for my life. I have many long-term goals - they're simply not tremendously detailed. Those deals where you lay out one-year, five-year, ten-year plans? Mine tend to be along the lines of "visit Maldives, snorkel at Lord Howe Island and be BFFs with Tina Fey." I am decidedly NOT the person who sets salary goals, etc. I've tried. It doesn't work for me.

This is why.

David and I have been dealing with a THING these last weeks. It's not really about us, but it's impacted us both on profound levels. A few years ago, David's brother (who I'll call R for privacy) was diagnosed with lung cancer. A really bad kind. The news hit David particularly hard as it came not long after their father died. A couple of weeks ago, we found out that, after years of treatment and remission, the cancer was back and it didn't look good.

I haven't seen David cry many times, but this was one.

This threw us into a limbo of uncertainty. R was hospitalized a good thousand miles away from us, in a part of the country where it's both ridiculously complicated and outrageously expensive to fly. This means a thirteen-hour road trip. Moving to Santa Fe has come with this price for us. We're no longer a two- to four-hour drive from family. We agonized over what to do. David spent a lot of time on the phone with his other brother and one sister, along with our son, daughter and daughter-in-law. Plans were made and discarded any number of times. We made decisions and changed them as the news changed. David wanted to see his brother, but the brother would be in surgery, or too out of it to see anyone.

This ever-changing window of opportunity, a moving target at the end of a road trip that would consume at least three days, maybe more, was further complicated by a planned trip to Tucson Festival of Books, an eight-hour drive in the other direction. I'd cancel if I had to, but it was a huge professional opportunity for me - I was on a panel with Terry Brooks! - and it was also my mother's birthday. In addition, David just started a new job in Socorro, NM, about two hours south, in an acupuncture practice there. Newly made patient appointments would have to be canceled. We'd make the sacrifice without question, but only if it made sense to do so.

Finally the brother said he most needed to be left alone and not be bombarded with company and we respected that.

We went to Tucson last weekend and it was even better than I'd hoped. Everyone I met was wonderful. And Terry Brooks, one of the most gracious superstar writers I've yet met, read reviews from THE PAGES OF THE MIND to the audience before the panel started and gave me the most incredible boost. David and I had a lovely weekend enjoying the Tucson sunshine. News was that various surgeries had gone well, so all seemed well.

This last Thursday, David was in Socorro when we got the news that all was NOT well - the doctors gave the brother days to live and he was being sent home. Again we made massive plans. David would be back in Santa Fe by midday Friday, we'd drive up to Denver, pick up our daughter and grandkids, drive up to Cheyenne, stay the night with David's sister, then all make the final trip to northern Wyoming. Then a major winter storm hit Colorado on Friday, dumping heavy snow from border to border. We revised the plan to leave super early Saturday morning.

Now, I had tickets to see Amanda Palmer in concert Friday night at the grand opening of Meow Wolf, George R.R. Martin's art complex. I'm one of her patrons on Patreon, so I knew she and Neil Gaiman, another of my writer idols, had been in Santa Fe for over a week. She'd done a Q&A for patrons on Sunday night, but alas - we were in Tucson. When we decided to head to Wyoming on Friday, I scrapped the concert plan. I was going to give them away, but I couldn't find the email. When we scrapped that plan to go early Saturday, I didn't even think about the concert. Staying up late was the last thing we needed and, while I really wanted to meet Amanda, I was ambivalent. The timing felt bad, it seemed unlikely I'd get to talk to her at a gig like that, and the whole meeting-your-heroes thing. I'd had a great experience with Terry Brooks and didn't want to ping the universe for too much, you know?

So we went to bed early, and David and I got up at five am Saturday morning (yesterday), ready to be on the road by six. We turned on our phones to find voice messages that David's brother died during the night. His other brother said we might as well hang tight for funeral plans.

At a loss, up far too early, already caffeinated with no particular plans, we hung around for the morning. It was good, actually, to simply rest. David talked with family a lot. I read a book. I told David anything he wanted to do with the day was good by me. He suggested we go have lobster pizza and wine in the sun at Rooftop Pizza, raise a glass to his brother, and celebrate life.

We headed into town and the historic plaza was mobbed on this beautiful spring break weekend. Our favorite parking lot was full, as was our second favorite. Between the tourist drivers and pedestrians, it took a long time to wend our way back around. Then we nabbed a meter spot a few blocks away - hooray! - and walked to the restaurant. As we approached the street corner where there's this little courtyard area, I saw a redheaded woman changing a baby's diaper and singing.

We continued to cross the street, but I said to David, "I think that's Amanda Palmer."

I wasn't uncertain if I should go say hello, but David talked me into it, saying I'd regret it if I didn't. We crossed back. She'd just finished changing the baby and handed him off to a sunbathing guy who I knew must be Jason Webley.

I said, "Are you Amanda?" She smiled and said yes and I told her I was one of her patrons. She asked if we came to the concert last night and I said no, that we had tickets but... And in there she asked for our names. David had been hanging back, as he figured this for my deal, but I had the strange urge to explain, so I introduced him and said that his brother passed away that night so we didn't make it.

She was genuinely stricken and asked David it was unexpected and he said cancer She told him she'd just lost someone to cancer and that it was the anniversary of her brothers death - and she hugged him, long and hard - like a full minute. It was extraordinary because David doesn't like hugging strangers, but they connected in this and his whole body softened with the shared grief. And it hit me that he'd needed this.

Then we talked about death a little, and how David and I were going to eat lobster pizza and drink wine in the sun. She said that was the perfect thing to do. It was kind of surreal and awesome.

And perfect.

By the time we got up to the balcony a few minutes later, she and her friends had moved on. Our timing had been serendipitous.

You all know how I feel about serendipity.

So all of this is by way of explaining why I'm not much for long-term plans. I'll make them - but I'll also discard them in a flash, because some of the best moments come as gifts from the universe, bestowed on a schedule not our own.

As we ate lunch, we talked about how this is a wonderful thing about living in Santa Fe, that we could run into Amanda Palmer on a street corner. And David said, "now you just need to make Tina Fey be your friend."

Totally in the plan!

And always in the plan to savor this beautiful life we've got.

Guide to Destroying Your Characters Without Necessarily Killing Them'

When it comes to damaging our heroes and heroines, we tend to go with physical injury. And after talking about all those weapons last week, it makes sense that being shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, shot with bits of sparkly bits of molten plasma, or whatever, would be the first thing we think of. But there are so many delicious options available. I'd like to offer up the start of a list for your consideration. A sort of 'Guide to Destroying Your Characters Without Necessarily Killing Them'

Protagonists have goals. Any goal worth pursuing requires that choices be made, which leads us to:

1. Choices have consequences, up to and including injury and death.
2. The bigger the goal, the bigger the consequences of a protagonist's choices must be.
3. Physical injuries heal, but they do so at a knowable rate. Don't let your reader Google that for you.
4. Physical injuries have possible lasting impact - closed head injuries are some of the most mysterious and unpredictable injuries around, but the medical info on *likely* recovery and permanent deficits are out there on the interwebs. Again, you do not want your reader doing that search for you. (Also, amnesia is not a yes or no thing - it's a complex condition with windows of memory that open and close as the brain injury heals - fascinating stuff, but as a literary device, no longer as simple a device as once it was.)
5. Psychological injuries are far harder to treat effectively and often have lifelong impact. Witness the lasting damage PTSD can do. Try not to think of your most horrifying memory. That shit still haunts you, doesn't it? How long ago did that happen? And it's still with you. Mental/emotional trauma LASTS.
6. Injury, whether mental, emotional, physical or all of the above, is a rock dropped in the pond of a story - it ripples through the entire community of the story. How does this injury affect everyone else in the story? Secondaries. Antagonist.
7. How does a protagonist's injury change the direction of the story? Does it?
8. If a protagonist makes a choice and gets hurt, that's one kind of injury. What happens when a protagonist makes a choice and someone else gets hurt? What does that scar look like? What's the guilt load? (Though please, leave the 'kill all the parents' to Disney, and all of the 'kill the poor hero's beautiful, loving wife who's only in the story so we can kill her off and motivate him to become the 14yo fantasy badass' to every Hollywood script ever.)
9. Pair high emotion with injury and you have a recipe for lasting trauma. Careful how you sprinkle that around - too many of your fellow human beings are suffering for real. If it serves the story and is integral to it, go for it.
10. Careful with miraculous cures - just like injury, most treatments follow known protocols - all of which can be found on line (if you follow some of the medical science blogs there are cutting edge experiments out there that are making some strides with mental/emotional injuries) - which is not to say 'go become an MD'. You aren't writing a procedural...unless...you know, you ARE.

That's the start of the list of - not so much rules - as suggestions. What else belongs here? Are there injuries that can't be recovered from? (I've read some romances that have made the hero's past so horrifying it's a wonder he's remotely sane, much less capable of emotional attachment - and I've had to call bullshit on a few of those.) Bring me more list items! This can't be all there is when it comes to torturing characters.

The Big Fear

This time of year, they say the veil is thin.

The intangible boundary that keeps the ghouls, the spirits, the restless dead from interfering with the living grows porous. Gaps form, huge rents are torn in it. The Wild Hunt rides, scooping up the dying and taking them away, to wherever bodiless spirits go.

The Day of the Dead. All Saints Day. All Hallow's Eve.

It's all about death.

Which is what we're fundamentally afraid of, isn't it?

Oh, we can talk about fear of success, of intimacy, of failure, of people not liking us. But those are all the little fears. The things that we struggle to overcome. But, no matter what we do, we all must face that we will die. It's the big Fear. No one knows for sure what happens after. All we know is that our precious mortal flesh eventually wears out and we're forced to leave it behind.

It's almost impossible to grasp, that this must happen to us, to those we love. So, we grapple with aspects of it. We wrestle with aging. We tease ourselves with stories of monsters and serial killers. Over and over, we grab the idea of death in a choke-hold and try to make it be something else.

What else can we do, after all?

We can't defeat death, so we play with it. Dance the skeletons and fly the creatures whose streaming gauze reminds us of tattered flesh. Revel in the gruesomeness of it all. Death might take us, but it doesn't have to crush us.

Embrace the fear and fling it back.

Laugh. Laugh in the face of death.

Dance with the dead, for they are us.