The end of Thor marks the end of an era for me. I still feel like I’ve been kicked in the head with a steel-toed work boot. I guess that’s how it goes. Life is a blend of all the ups and downs, as Mike Cooley of the Drive By Truckers sings on “Carl Perkin’s Cadillac”.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been a writer, or a creative person. My earliest memories of such things were me sitting on the living room carpet, copying and pasting art paper into a haunted house, complete with sliding paper ghosts and spooks. Through junior high and high school while teachers gave their lessons, ideas would pop into my head. Scenarios. Situations. Quotes. Characters. I’d jot these down in my notebooks. Sometimes I’d put them into a short story or screen play, or I’d just let them be. Gripped in my hand, between my school books was always a copy of a Stephen King or John Steinbeck novel. Most of the teachers hated it, told me I should only bring the work books into the classroom. A few English teachers loved it, but most did not. I’d blow off classes and sit on a bench in a nature preserve, writing short stories and essays. This was my education: elbow room, creativity, things that I could touch and feel and see all around me. Real things.
In my early twenties I decided to get serious and try to get published. My first short story (a ghost story) was accepted for an anthology in a now defunct press that was sold into a children’s book division. The story never got published. My interest turned to girls, and more girls, and all the social and career craziness of your 20’s. I stopped writing short stories and screenplays. But I never stopped writing down scenes, quotes, characters and other ideas. They went into Windows Notepad, year after year, piling up. Several years ago I opened this folder, wondering why in the hell I was doing it. It was then I realized I needed to make a decision, and make it fast. Either I’d pursue what seemed to be a natural tendency towards crafting fiction, or I’d stop the note taking, stop wasting my time. I made the decision to move forward. A certain cat was at my feet on that cold January night…a certain aquamarine-eyed Russian Blue by the name of Thor. I looked at him, said “can I do this?” and he made his infamous “gnar!!!!” sound and went back to sleep.
I returned to that short story that never got published. It was as good a starting point as any… a twenty-something male who’d found himself trapped by a mysterious creature in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
And then I started to write the novel. And wow the writing was shit for the first thirty pages. Then something happened: it all came back. The writing improved with each chapter. Each page was exhilarating, a revelation. I felt better in mind and body than in quite some time. I worked on it through the winter, not letting myself skip a day, as Stephen King so rightfully suggests in “On Writing”. Thor was at my feet every night, keeping them warm, purring, cheering me on. There were self-inflicted questions concerning my ability. But the people around me believed, and they way I was feeling, I started to believe, too. Winter thawed to spring and burned to early summer, and it was at this point my first short story acceptance came to be: an anthology with New York Times best-selling author Steve Alten, the legendary Ramsey Campbell, and The Flock author James Robert Smith (Warner Brothers is set to make the film soon). To say I was shocked would be an understatement.
Thor was at my feet almost every time I wrote fiction the last several years. He was my writing cat. He cheered me on, kept my feet warm on those chilly nights. He’d also take the brunt when I’d get excited by a scene. I hated when that happened. I’d get so into the work, I’d stretch out and inadvertently put my foot into his rump or belly (and he did have a belly).
It’s another cold, windy January in Chicago. Only this time there is no Thor at my feet. He was right when he responded “gnar!!!!” when asked if I could do this. This year, I became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction and fantasy writer. Another shock. The list includes insanely talented writers all across the world. I also qualified as an associate member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. What does this mean to the reader? Not much, and it is the reader I will always prioritize. But for the writer, these are good things. Trust me. Like the reader needs to be buoyed by the prose, sometimes the writer needs to be buoyed by recognition of his or her work.
Everything that has happened the last several years goes right back to that cold January night, before I started the first word of my first novel. There’s something about occupying a room through the night, navigating those hours of silence, with another living, breathing thing, human or not. Everyone’s minds, furry or not interlace in those hours-a great spiritual melding as the world sleeps. Well, at least most of it.
For me, it all goes back to “gnar!!!!”. Indeed, my old friend. Indeed.
There wasn’t enough fur in my writing office since Thor’s passing, so I decided to grow a beard in his honor. Already, the ideas are brewing for a new novel, even as I mourn. That is life, snow melting over the decay. Soon flowers will grow, each petal more bittersweet than the last.
