Good or Bad, Things End For a Reason

     Packing up my books today, I was struck by how many pages I've written toward my novels just since 2009 when I first moved into this apartment. The Carson trilogy alone comes to about 1300 pages and comprises about 504,000 words. Of course, that doesn't include countless tens of thousands of words toward other Carson novels that I'd started but haven't finished or the short stories I've written and published featuring Carson. It also doesn't include the other five novels I'd published since 2010, one totaling 175,000 words.

     That's a lot of words and it doesn't include probably a million words I'd written toward this blog at the same time. There was a common denominator in all this output since 2009: Barbara.

     When she was still able to read until the end of 2019, she'd read literally every word I'd ever written, especially toward my fiction. It was my writing that brought us together, after all. When she realized I was single again in early spring of 2009, she came from the shadows of the comment section of this blog (She'd discovered me through the blog roll of the Rude Pundit, something I have to tell Lee before I kick the bucket) and that's how it started.

      She became my number one fan and was my first editor years before I hired Tamra Crow to do all my copyediting. The Scott Carson trilogy, as it now stands, wouldn't have been midwifed into being without Barbara. (I told this story to a store clerk just 24 hours ago when I dropped off all three paperback editions of the Carson trilogy because he's a writer, himself.) This is why I say that:

      Since reading Caleb Carr's THE ALIENIST and THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS in the mid 90s, I decided I wanted to write historical psychological thrillers when the time came. That idea gestated for an unimaginable 16 years until, by 2012, I thought I had a throughline that I could turn into something. So one summer day in 2012, while we were, as usual, sitting at the same table at which I now I write this, I gave Barbara sort of an elevator pitch.

      "Here's an idea and tell me what you think: Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Sitting Bull, Arthur Conan-Doyle and Sigmund Freud chase Jack the Ripper in 1888 Whitechapel. What do you think?" She said I should run with it. By November, I'd written the prologue and part of the first chapter. By February 2013, I was off to the races.

      It was the first novel I'd completed in five and a half years and it changed my life. A little over seven years later, I had a trilogy. And it wouldn't have come into being if Barbara hadn't given me her blessing. That's how much I respected her opinion. She read Tatterdemalion, at least a couple of times, then The Doll Maker, my Carson short story, "The Kid", my pair of short stories in Bridge of Tarnished Angels (another featuring Carson) and all my other novels.

      When she was no longer able to read, I read her every single word of Hollywoodland, all 186,000+ words, because I wanted her to know that story, too. I owed it to her because I owed the entire series to her.

      Looking at all the space those books took up on a shelf in my living room bookcase, I'm amazed that I was blessed with that much fecundity. 2009-2019, or right before Barb's dementia began to present, was the best decade I ever lived and I'd like to think the same was true for her. Let's face facts- I'm 65. How many more decades do you think I have left in me? That decade was the best one I ever lived or even will live. Yeah, not all my novels were easy to write but about half were blessedly easy, considering I'm a pantser.

      And when I had to put Barb in the hospital a little over a year ago, I was nearly 100,000 words into yet another Carson novel entitled, The Prodigal Son. I've started and dropped two others since then. I honestly cannot imagine marshaling the energy and discipline necessary to write even a short novel (which, for me, is under 130,000 words). And, if that's the way it shakes out, then I'm OK with that.

      That's because most of us don't even write one book in our lives, let alone nearly a dozen. But it was no coincidence that my fecundity starting in 2009 also dovetailed into the same year Barb moved in with me and we began a blissful life of the codependency that relationship experts tell you to avoid. She was my muse, my editor, my critic and number one fan and her faith in me, love for me and loyalty to me never wavered by so much as a micron in the nearly 14 years we lived together.

      And it's no coincidence that my desire to write novels died when she left this house for the last time on March 8th last year. And, again, if I never write another book again, I'm perfectly OK with that.