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.

Like a Newborn Screaming

Writing is a lonely business. 

I know I’m not the first author to write those words, much less think those words. Before I wrote my novels, I thought that this phrase referred to the process of writing being lonely. You can’t rely on anyone but yourself, your talent, your vocabulary, your research. I mean, the process of composing music is devastatingly lonely, so why would writing words be any different?

But writing, for me, isn’t lonely. Especially not when I’m writing about Q and the boys. They keep me company. Sometimes, they’re more real than the people I encounter every day. And even when I’m drafting manuals or technical articles, it’s not lonely either, because I’m imagining the person reading them. What they’re most interested in learning. What worries they may have. How I can make their day just a little easier.

So, no. Writing, in and of itself, is not a lonely business. But writing is just the beginning. It’s the gestation, not the birth. Release a novel sometime, and you’ll understand why newborns scream bloody murder when they come into the word. Because you see, the business of writing is a cold and lonely hellscape of desolation.

Why? Because that, my friends, is where only your intestinal fortitude holds you upright. That is where you must say you did something good. Something to be proud of. Something worth all that time and energy you spent doing it. And guess what? Most days, you and only you are the person validating your work.

Don’t believe me? Most of my friends have not read my books.

Let that sink in for a minute.

My husband has not read a single one of my books, blogs, or articles. (And it’s an ongoing point of contention in our marriage, but still, not a one.)

I’ve often wondered why that is. And I don’t have to really think that hard about it. I know why. They are all terrified of being the only person in my life to look me in the eye and say, “Your books suck.”

That is how much the people in your life love you, folks. They’d rather hope that maybe you have a ton of talent and are not, in fact, wasting your time on an art form you should abandon, than actually find out for themselves that you don’t have a lick of talent and be forced to tell you that you should quit or, worse still, smile politely and lie to your face. 

The logic goes something like this: I’ll tell this person whom I love that I’m proud of them, but I won’t read the book, just in case it sucks.

Still don’t believe me? I used to live in terror of having to listen to my friends’ albums. I still do. I’m picky. I used to be a professional audio engineer, and it makes me hear things all funny. For example, a friend sent me his new track a few months ago, and it had a terrible phasing issue (if you don’t know what that means, trust me, you’d rather not know, because then you’ll hear it, like all the time); and I debated for ten solid minutes before I erased my text that read, “hey, the string part is out of phase with the bassline and that breakbeat is about 1/32 out of time for half a measure at 1:38," and replaced it with “Love it!!!”

And it gets worse. I literally ranted about how poorly one of my friends’ last albums was mixed to my coworkers for twenty minutes one afternoon. "The guitar solo is always the loudest thing in the mix!! How could they be doing this for so long and so successfully without learning that one little thing? Who the hell mixes a metal record without automating levels? Seriously, what in the good fuck is that??"

And did I say that to their faces? Hell, no. I told them the new record was great. Because it was and it was too late to fix it anyway, I mean it was already out there. And besides, it wasn’t their fault their engineer has his head up his ass. And I can’t tell them that either because they love him and I’m sure he’s a lovely person if they love him so much they don’t care that he can’t mix their guitars properly. And that would make me the bad guy. And I don’t want to be the bad guy. 

You see what I mean? Terror. Absolute terror. 

So, I get it. I truly understand why only the bravest of my friends reads my books and, even braver still, tells me where I fell short (I’m looking at you, Heather and Jim. You’re both god damn warriors). Unfortunately, it also means that, by and large, I am the only person in my life that reads the words I write and knows that I should continue. And that’s ok. Because, in this particular endeavor, it’s my talent that keeps me up at night. My talent that tells me to wake up at five in the morning and write, even though it’s hard.

Because, even if one of my friends told me my books were terrible, it wouldn’t matter. Because I don’t do this for them. I do this for me. It was the same with music. And, looking back on the things I recorded, I can see where I fell short. But I can also see where I succeeded. And that’s a great feeling. 

“I am creating” is so much more powerful to me than “I am succeeding.”

I succeed when I create something I am proud of. Something that I want to share with the world. Something that gives me so much inner joy that the people who love me most are terrified to read it and tell me otherwise.

But the joke’s on them. Because they’re missing out. Don’t believe me? Click on this link and find out for yourself.

Chasing Those Devil Bones is NOW AVAILABLE.

Chasing Those Devil Bones is NOW AVAILABLE!

I wrote another book, y’all! It’s a real thing. I have a copy in my hand right now and it feels yummy. It’s a strange thing to have written to completion, not one, but three novels, edited them, re-edited them, designed covers for them, and published them. But that’s what I have done. And I’m going to go ahead and brag on myself for a moment, if you’ll indulge me.

Now, please click on this link and buy Chasing Those Devil Bones for $2.99, that’s the price of your favorite large coffee drink. (And it stays way hotter and lasts longer, too.)

That was fun. Now back to work.

As Chasing Those Devil Bones makes its way through the digital birth canal and out into everyone’s Kindles and iPads, I am sitting at the 95% completion mark of the next book in the Clementine Toledano Mysteries, working title, The Devil’s Luck. And I am stuck. This happens, sometimes, usually when I’ve plotted out the crux of Q’s current mystery one way, but Q and the gang are running roughshod over the story and have another solution in mind. Unfortunately, they’re all thumbing their collective noses at my shouts of “We only have 10,000 words left! Wrap it up!” And, as much as I love the team’s additions to this plot during the writing process, I refuse to go full boat Umberto Eco and write a 200,000-word mystery.

[Author’s aside: Umberto Eco’s book, Foucault’s Pendulum, referenced above, is one of the greatest books in modern history and I will personally punch anyone in the nose who disagrees. Ok, I won’t really punch you, but it is one of only three books that I’ve read more than four times, so you should give it another chance if you didn’t like it.]

Part of my problem with The Devil’s Luck, is that I know how it ends. I just don’t know how it gets there. You see, I’d written the ending before #NaNoWr2017 even started, well, at least the emotional context of the scene. The scene itself came later and I big-huge-googly-eyes-LOVE it. So, it must stay. And as much as I loved writing more than half this book in three weeks, it’s left little time for the machinations and marinating that come with slogging along for six to ten months, writing 300 words one day and 3000 the next.

But if I’m being honest with myself, the larger part of me is just plain old scared. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you already know how much I LOVE this new book. It brings me so much joy to read it. It’s so full of life and breath and music and stench and laughter and everything that I love about the city I used to call home. What if I fail it in these last moments?

What if I fail?

Lord, I could write a novel that would put Eco to shame on word count about my fear of failure. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done some things in my life that a lot of people would consider to be brave.  I was scared shitless doing every last one of them. But I did them.

But there are other things I didn’t do because I was too scared. And those are the things that I regret.

A dear friend of mine constantly tells me to not worship at the Temple of Regret. Over the door of my personal temple is written a single word: FEAR.

During the bravest period of my life, I read the entire Dune saga from beginning to end (you know you’re a SciFi nerd when that’s on your Bucket List). If you’ve not read it, first, shame on you, but the omnipresent religion of the Bene Gesserit uses the following litany to overcome fear:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

There are many brilliant things about Frank Herbert’s Dune. For me, this continues to be the most brilliant. A simple, powerful series of words that so perfectly describes that feeling you get when you let go of your fear. A void. A nothingness. And there is tremendous power in that nothingness.

I repeated this litany over and over during that bravest period of my life. I repeated before I went I stage for the first time. I repeated it as I walked into Nothing Studios to interview for a job working for Nine Inch Nails. I repeated the shit out of it before I met Trent Reznor for the first time, followed by a whole lot of “act cool, act cool, just say ‘nice to meet you.’”

I don’t know when I stopped doing that. Maybe I should start again. Right now. Because, here I am, kneeling at the entrance to my Temple of Regret, looking at those big letters in iridescent green script: FEAR. Already convincing myself I’ll fail this novel when I’m so close to finishing it. Focusing on everything I’ve done wrong up to this point instead of all the things that I’ve done to make it so charming and wonderful that it terrifies me to have written something so good.

But I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. And only I will remain.

So, this is me. Standing back up and dusting off my knees to return to the fray and finish this lovely book I'm writing. Because let’s face it, I felt this same fear when I wrote Chasing Those Devil Bones and the wondrous thing still brings me to tears multiple times even though I have actually lost count of how many times I’ve read this final draft of it. And I hope anyone who reads it enjoys it as much as I still do.

Chasing Those Devil Bones is now available on Amazon.

Other Clementine Toledano Mysteries:
That Old Devil Sin
Devil Take Me Down

And, Coming Soon: The Devil’s Luck

New Year: New website, New Book, Refurbished Me.

2017 has ended, and everyone is doing their obligatory year in review. I’m not sure when this trend started, but for some reason, I blame VH1 for it. Maybe it wasn't them, but I’m still going to say it’s their fault we all feel obligated to do this annual summary of our lives.

I’m not going to lie, 2017 was a strange one for me. It started out with the inauguration of a grossly incompetent man as President, instead of the grossly overqualified woman who ran for the same office; confirming everything I’ve felt, witnessed, and suspected about misogyny in America: it’s here, it’s there, it’s fucking everywhere.

January was a rough one. February, too.

What depressed me the most was the realization that I’d let misogyny and outdated notions of womanhood impact my decisions for the last decade or so. Somehow, during my 30s, I’d had enough with bucking the system and decided to go with the flow. I mean, there are only so many times you can show up to mix a session or to wire a rig in a studio and have the person who hired you ask where your boyfriend is, or have the band think you’re the coffee girl even though you’re miking the damn drumkit, before you just want to burn the world to the ground.

I couldn’t change the world, so, I essentially gave up. I left Los Angeles. Moved back home to Louisiana. Met a nice man. Got married. Had a child. Did all those things that were expected of me, as a woman, to do. Problem was: I’d never wanted that life.

And then it happened. On November 9, 2016, a big old jolt of cold, liquid rage filled me so completely that I suddenly just couldn’t keep up the facade anymore. This person I was pretending to be, wasn’t me. It didn’t make me happy. It didn’t bring me any sort of solace, strength, or inner peace. It sure as shit wasn’t doing anything to advance the cause of feminine equality, so why the hell was I keeping it up?

When I cast off that mask I’d put on so long ago, what I found was transformative. A moment of self-discovery. An utter calm. Not tranquility, mind you - there is still plenty that makes me wish I could walk around, carrying a battleax, and decapitating people - but stillness.  The kind of stillness a warrior gets before a fight. The kind of stillness that brings everything into laser-like focus.

And the funny thing is that it happened over the course of months. It happened so fast that I could watch it almost in real time. This decision to stop lying to myself and to just be.

I credit writing with the speed of this transformation. Writing is largely an autobiographical experience. You write what you know. What you’ve encountered. What you’ve felt. What you’ve witnessed. All altered, of course. Exaggerated, manipulated, molded, but still, it’s all you and anyone that tells you any different isn’t very self-aware.

My friends and family who’ve read my novels usually assume that I’m Q. And in some ways, I am. But I’m also Ben. I’m Yvie. I’m Derek. On my best days, I’m even Sanger.

In March, after I released Devil Take Me Down, I quickly began finishing Chasing Those Devil Bones and encountered a huge problem: I had absolutely no idea what made Detective Aaron Edgar Sanger tick, and he was a huge part of the story.

Like many writers, when I’m stuck I do one of two things: do a writing exercise or write the ending first. I did both, even though it meant that I had to write the final two novels of the series before the third book was even halfway done.

It was a catharsis. Writing as group therapy. The characters helped me to work through all the pain and confusion I was feeling in my own life and, at the end of it, I was ready to move forward.

I joined a gym to cast off the weight I’d put on. Some people feel better when they’re a little overweight. I’ve never been one of those people and am happy to report that I now have a healthy BMI for the first time in a decade, thanks largely to starting the Whole30 program and sticking with it for much longer than the requisite 30 days. Self-denial has always been one of my best talents, so it suits my personality well.

Vodka and I have had a very long, passionate relationship and I needed to put us on a little break so that we could reunite in a healthier way. We’re still casually seeing each other a few times a month, but I’m now in a pretty intense committed relationship with mineral water. Those little bubbles just slay me.

I did the National November Writing Challenge. I didn’t get to 50,000 words, but I did get a wonderful start on Book 4, which is cruising along towards a thrilling ending, more on that in another blog post.

I finished Chasing Those Devil Bones, which will be out next Saturday (pre-order is available now)

I decided to stop standing in my own way. Self-promotion has never been my strong point. It was a problem when I had a band. It was a problem when I was trying to make it as an audio engineer. It was a problem when I was writing film scores. It’s not going to be a problem anymore. In Chasing Those Devil Bones, Q’s mentor, Stanley Gerard, tells her that she thinks too much and it’s always been the thing that stood in her way. Just between us, Stanley was talking to me, too.

And finally, I’m going to take opportunities to get help from remarkably talented people when I am presented with them. You’re looking at the result of that right now. This website redesign by Redwood Digital Marketing could not have turned out better. And I’m thrilled at the result. The biggest of thank you’s and shout outs to Katelyn Redwood for her amazing work. I am constantly in utter awe at the number of talented people I am fortunate enough to be able to call my friends and Katelyn is a woman of many talents who has always topped that list.

So, that was my 2017. Like all stories, it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Some wondrous things happened; some very strange things happened, too.

But now it’s 2018. In Judaism, the number 18 represents life, renewal, rebirth. And, whether it’s fair or not, I have a feeling 2018 is going to be full of all three of those things.

Happy New Year!