The Shattering

For the last month or so, it seems like I am constantly cleaning up broken glass. At first, it was funny. Firstborn and I would say “Oops, we have the dropsies!” But lately, it’s stopped being funny and started being just plain strange.

We came home a couple weeks ago to find the glass in our outdoor table shattered for no apparent reason. And when I say shattered, I mean not a single piece of it was spared. Every square inch had been haphazardly divided in four and carved up accordingly.

After cleaning it up and scouring the patio for errant pieces, I thought we were safe, especially after a big rain storm came through and washed it clean. During another big rain, Firstborn and I were splashing through puddles and dancing (it’s a thing), and he cut his foot open on a stray piece of glass.

A water glass got kicked off the coffee table at our Passover seder and didn’t shatter, even though it fell onto the cement. But when I went to refill it, it cracked in half.

And this past weekend, I was pulling a glass down from the cupboard to get some water, and my elbow hit a wine glass that was on the counter waiting to be put up in the china cabinet. It shattered, and a shard of glass lodged into my elbow. And when I say it shattered, the goblet exploded into jagged shards and the stem stayed put on the counter like nothing had happened.

I’m not a superstitious person, but that’s a lot of broken glass, kids. 

And  now that I think of it, my pondering the meaning of broken glass started long before these  physical events. Two years ago, while I was working on Chasing Those Devil Bones, I was stuck. So stuck that I had to jump ahead to the seventh book of the Clementine Toledano series and write it, almost to completion. It was while writing this book that I came up with the idea of the Scarification album that Q and Derek write together in Chasing Those Devil Bones. 

Scarification is a concept album about a child who carves their skin open with broken shards of glass to let the magic inside of them bleed out. It's dark and tragic, much like Derek and Q themselves, and the idea for it came out of nowhere. I was writing a scene in that seventh book (working title, Gods and Devils) and it just wrote itself.  This isn't a surprise now. I've learned that Derek Sharp demands to tell his own story when he wants to and I have very little to say about it. And now that I'm getting closer to revealing the deeper meaning of this album in the series, broken glass starts following me wherever I go. The universe is a magical place, no?

The shattering. That’s how you end a Jewish wedding. The breaking of the old life and the beginning of the new. A reminder that even in joyous times, sadness exists. 

In my own life, this constant reminder of shattering is a little more prescient. You see, my life is awash in new beginnings at the moment. I’m starting a new book (working title, Until the Devil Weeps), taking on new challenges in my career, and, as for me? I’m a walking, talking fresh start.

When something shatters, there is no going back. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, but a lot of the time, it’s not. I spent years being miserable and uncomfortable in my own skin. It took two years, three novels, and a concerted psychological and physical effort to retrieve the fragments of myself that still existed and pull them back up to the surface.

And until a few days ago, slipping back into my old patterns was a comfortable pair of pajamas that constantly stared at me from the hidden corners of my inner closet.  But then that piece of glass lodged into my arm.

As I stared at this sharp object protruding from my skin, watching the blood trickle down my arm, I realized that I can’t go back. There is no going back.

Also, that having a piece of glass stuck in your arm is painful. I yanked it out and was relieved to find that I didn’t need a stitch. It hurt for the rest of the day and most of the next morning. But somehow, during those few hours of discomfort, my own shattering was complete.

Sometimes you need a physical reminder that new beginnings are ugly and painful before they’re inspiring and beautiful. Birth may be beautiful, but laboring is an unpleasant, agonizing business. 

That these transformative experiences are so rare in a lifetime is the reason they’re so common in fiction. It’s the main goal of any character-driven book: How are the characters transformed by their experiences?

In That Old Devil Sin, Q learns that world is beautiful and can offer love.

In Devil Take Me Down, Ben faces the ugliness of the world that he can ignore so easily, most days.

In Chasing Those Devil Bones, Sanger discovers that he can’t walk through the world alone.

In The Devil’s Luck, Derek decides that he can trust someone with his vulnerability and still be safe.

Of course, larger transformative experiences happen in each book, but it’s important for me that all my characters get a little something out of the raw deal that I hand them every time I start a new Clementine Toledano mystery.

And there’s a lesson in that. Life hands out raw deals all the time. The important thing is to get something out of it.

The Tipping Point

Once I was in a band called Hadji. Looking back on it, we were a great band. We did amazing things that nobody in the New Orleans music scene was doing 18 years ago. Don’t believe me?

Check it.

So, we did what bands did back in 2003. We packed up our gear, said goodbye to our friends and moved to Los Angeles. And we worked, and we struggled, and then it happened: that magical tipping point.

We showed up at the Derby on a Saturday night, and it was packed. The opening band was perfect to hold the crowd. There was a film crew there wanting to do a documentary on us. Us!

As we walked to the stage to set up, the soundman came up and told us we were moved to the last position on the bill. I started to argue. This is our slot. We’re supposed to go on now. This is our moment.

But I lost the fight. The band that was supposed to play last was on “tour” and said they needed to hit the stage right then and there because they had a long drive ahead of them. They were lying, of course. They wanted to play in front of 500 enraptured people. The people of Los Angeles are not well known for their attention spans.

Unfortunately for all of us, the out-of-tune, combination Reggae-Punk musical stylings of said band cleared the bar  exactly 90 seconds into their first song.

And that, my friends, was that.

You don’t get a big moment like that twice. That was ours, and we lost it. Things fell apart pretty quickly after that.

It’s a hard thing to lose a dream like that. To have to let go of something you’ve put so much of your blood into. But we had to. Our drummer was battling some demon we didn’t know about until it was too late. Our bassist needed to make ends meet for his family. And I was tired.

By the end of the year, a hurricane wiped out our home city and stranded us all in Los Angeles. So, I went on, on my own, for about two more years. Making film scores. Doing remixes. Mixing records for other people. But my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I just didn’t want to continue.

But when you’re a creative creature, you can’t let go of that energy easily. I hit the pause button for a while, throwing my energy into learning everything I could about Judaism. Thinking G-d would have some answers I didn’t.

Then I tried gardening. I loved it; until I didn’t. I moved on home improvement, which frankly I only enjoy in small, concentrated bursts. I tried photography for like a nanosecond, but that really isn’t my bag. (Don’t believe me? Check out my Instagram feed.)

And then, one magical morning in November of 2012, I rediscovered writing. I remember how bad traffic was as I made my way to my office that morning and I was really desperate for a good book. The last Harry Dresden book had left me thirsty for more (hint, hint, Jim Butcher. Come on, already, dude) and I couldn’t find anything to scratch that itch.

Then other itches bubbled back up to the surface. The band itch. I missed my band. Missed my bandmates even more. I thought how long it had been since I’d spoken to our original drummer. He’d quit years before the move to L.A. to make his own move to New Zealand. I thought about those sweaty, dusty nights, packing up the U-Haul for out-of-town gigs, carrying that fucking drum coffin of his down the steep steps at our rehearsal warehouse and dropping it into the trailer.

“She was a good ol’ girl, but I just had to go and kill her.” –Kyle Meades, ladies and gentlemen.

And that’s when it happened. That lightning spark of an idea. That flash of creative stimulation: what if a dead body had tumbled out of that case?

And Clementine Toledano was born.

I wrote the first two chapters of what would become That Old Devil Sin in an afternoon. A flurry of words came rushing out. I could see everything so clearly.

I’m not going to lie, the first few characters and places in that book were initially inspired by real people and places I know. Until the characters came alive all on their own and took their own form. But that moment was the beginning of me really starting over and building myself back up.

Before that, I’d lied to myself about being ok after Hadji broke up. I wasn’t ok. I wasn’t anywhere near ok. Everything I was, all the mythology I’d built up around who I thought I was, was centered around being the leader of that band. And when it was gone, so was my center of gravity.

And it’s fucking tough to live without a center of gravity, y’all.

It’s even tougher to build a new one.

Now that I have FOUR books under my belt, (did you catch that? That’s right, The Devil’s Luck is D.U.N. done. Just five more chapters to edit and off to beta!) I’ve built a new core. And it isn’t based on a mythology. It’s based in reality.

I am more than a musician. I am more than a writer. I am more than any one thing that defines me, and I do not lie to myself.

That last part is key. While I daydream of one day quitting my job and writing novels the whole world will read, I know that the likelihood of this ever happening is very small. That doesn’t mean that I don’t try to write the best novel I can. It doesn’t mean that I don’t plan marketing strategies and try to make that dream a reality.

But it does mean that I don’t let the rise and fall of my books’ Amazon rankings define who I am.

Having talent does not guarantee success.

But at some point in time, all the hard work and positive thinking and self-actualizing visualization have to come to a head and raw, dumb luck will tip the scales one way or the other. It’s just the way the universe seems to balance itself.

The trick is not to let it tip you over.