I’m Writing All Over the Place

Stephen George asked me to write something about what a Haslam administration will mean for women, you know, other than us all having to send screenshots of our uteri to the state for monitoring. I chose instead to write about the massive demographic shift happening as this bout of prolonged unemployment hits men harder than it hits women.

You can read it here.

Howls

Some folks are with you in Rockland. I am with you in Walmart.

Jeremiah and His Brother, Wesley

I know you’re going to find this hard to believe, but in the past, whenever I have set out to “write a book,” I  have just set out to write a book, to start at the beginning and tell a story, one which ended in a way I knew not. I mistook writing for reading. I thought the pleasure would be in the discovery.

But one reason I’m glad to have A City of Ghosts under my belt and to have done some readings is that I have discovered that it’s nice to be familiar with things. So I am outlining and making notes, very slowly. Which is good, because I think I have a good idea but I haven’t yet figured out the major narrative arc, the thing that drives the action and leads to conflict.

Which is good to know and mull over.

But I was also thinking about how fewer and fewer people enter the ministry right out of college–many Methodist ministers, if not a majority, come to the ministry as a second career now–and how that means things that were very true when I was coming up are not true now.

I mean, if you meet a guy my age named Jeremiah and he has a brother, Wesley, you can be almost positive that their dad is/was a minister.

Now Jeremiah and his brother Wesley? Who knows? Steam-punk parents, maybe?

Ha.