The Wait.

If you’ve been reading my latest blog posts, you already know I’ve been thinking of the characteristics I have in common with my characters a lot lately. Realizing how much of an extension of myself they are has been a bit on the jarring side, to say the least. But there are some characters I have less in common with. And that’s what I’ve been exploring recently. 

Since the moment I wrote him into existence, I’ve loved the calm strength of Aaron Sanger. There is a stillness to him I’ve always admired. In a world where most characters are vying for the attention of everyone around them in one way or another, Sanger stands apart. Solid and self-assured. Reasonable and restrained.

He’s such an outlier. A serious detective that listens to sad cowboy music in a world of wild musicians who play just about anything but country. 

But he’s also someone who doesn’t speak his mind often. He keeps his thoughts and feelings largely to himself until they absolutely must be shared. And if you’ve read any of my books, you know that everyone around him has no trouble blurting out what’s on their mind. Derek Sharp most especially. Maybe that’s why they don’t get on. Maybe that’s why Derek is so jealous of Sanger. Sanger has a stillness that Derek can never have. 

I admire stillness in people. Maybe we admire what we are not. I’ve always been a bit of a restless wanderer. It’s hard for me to just be. To stop and just appreciate a moment. To take in all the variables of a situation and just be still about it without continuously ruminating on it until I just have to get up and get the fuck out of the house.

I hate waiting for what I want, too. I always have. When I decide I want something, I take the steps to make it happen. Whether it’s coming up with a plan, stashing cash, or just saying ‘fuck it’ and doing it right away, I don’t hesitate. The waiting is always the hard part. The part where I start overthinking and imagining the thousands of possible outcomes my decision will have. Some good. Some disastrous. It’s better for me to just do the damn thing and face the consequences without thinking about it too much.

But when something you want is entirely out of your control, you have no choice but to put your desires aside and just be. That’s Sanger’s biggest talent. Just being. What else can you do when you’ve been in love with your married best friend since the moment you met her and her husband is possibly the kindest human being on the planet?

In the final book of the Clementine Toledano Series, Gods and Devils (Release Q1 2022), I take Sanger’s stillness away from him. Q ripped the rug right out from under him by suddenly ending their relationship in Until the Devil Weeps, and Sanger becomes completely unmoored. The sudden loss of a friendship he relied on more than he even knew was too much for him and it sends him on a downward spiral. All the past pain and hurt and trauma of his life comes roiling up and he has no mechanism to stop it. So, he turns to a couple of old friends of mine, anger and alcohol.

Here’s the thing about anger, the secret that nobody ever says out loud: It feels fucking good. When you’re hurt and lonely and confused, anger feels like power. It feels like control. It’s an armor to hold you upright when your body wants to collapse to the floor and can’t stop crying. It straightens your spine and gives you a reason to keep moving. And when the anger fails you at the end of the day, a few extra drinks numb your real emotions nicely.

The problem with this quick fix for heartbreak is that it’s not sustainable. And if you really embrace the anger, it will warp your perception of the world to the point where it will start warping you, too. This is where we find Sanger in Gods and Devils, just one stop short of Rage-Stroke City.

I spent a good deal of my life being an angry person, so I know what it can do to you first-hand. I’ve spent years struggling not to be. Every once in a while someone will see through it and notice and it scares the shit out of me because I try to hide it so well. I dated someone for a few months a couple of years ago and he saw it right away. On our third date, he told me he could see it, what an angry person I really was, but that I was kind and generous and tried not to be was something to be admired.

It was a good line. But he was right. It’s not your flaws that define you. It’s how you strive to overcome them. 

Knowing how seductive anger can be doesn’t help poor Sanger. He wants to be seduced by it. He lost the one person he ever loved all the way through and just gives up. Lucky for him, Q comes back with a life preserver. But what do you do when that someone doesn’t come to rescue you? You have to become that someone for yourself and that’s not easy.

I’ve always thought daily positive affirmations were rubbish. Growing up when Stuart Smalley was on Saturday Night Live just reinforced my own skepticism. But when your inner monologue is a constant negative voice in your head about all the ways you fail, taking a moment to read the opposite or say it out loud has power. And it works. External validation feels good, but if you don’t internally validate yourself, that well will never be full and you’ll always feel hollow.

It’s strange how often my own life follows as a trailing arc of something I explore in my writing. But as I finish this latest rewrite of Gods and Devils, getting it ready for a beta, I’m grateful that years ago when I started this novel, some part of me knew that one day I’d need to be reminded that anger is not a solution and patiently waiting for what’s next to happen is a viable alternative. The wait is not in my control, but being a passenger just means I get to watch the scenery and be still. After years of giving anger free rein, I’m going to take a page from Sanger’s playbook and just be still and quiet and wait.