Working Past the Scaries: The Tumbleweed Halloween Spooktacular

Also: Athletic Skeletons, Paranormal Rangers, and Stories on Stage features Mixed Company!

Can you believe the Tumbleweed is about to roll through its third Halloween? Founding Tumbleheads know this of course—that is, the three members of my family whose emails I signed up for the newsletter without their consent. My son still hasn’t figured it out. “Why am I getting this?” he asks every few months. I just chortle. He’s blocked me on every social media account, but he can’t stop the Tumbleweed! (Though you can, dear readers. Just click the unsubscribe button. I’ve rigged it to emit the sound of my soul shriveling.)

Rightfully grouchy as my son can be with me, he is also the source of the insight I want to share with you. This fall he has been running with his cross country team over hill and dale and next to the murky retaining pond and through the mysteriously itchy field. Last week at the league championships he ran his best time yet, charging to the finish in 18 minutes, ten seconds.

I congratulated him, but he was disappointed. “I don’t even feel terrible,” he said. “I could have broken 18 minutes.”

“Are you wanting to feel terrible?” I asked.

He nodded. “Every race when I know I’ve done my best, I feel like I need to throw up or stop running in the middle of it. I start thinking, ‘I have to stop now. I can’t continue.’ I never felt that way today.”

Huh, I thought, pondering this as someone who is incapable of pushing myself past nausea’s edge. When I learned about rhabdomyolysis, a serious condition caused by overtraining that recently sent twelve members of the Tufts lacrosse team to the hospital, I briefly pondered whether I should add this to my mental list of Things To Worry About. Nah, I decided. We’re talking about me here, queen of the 12-minute mile.

But then I considered my son’s observation. Do I push myself at anything past the point when I want to quit? Yes—the majority of the times I sit down to write, I want to quit. Before I typed that last sentence, I had a violent urge to flee my desk and fix myself a plate of nachos. But the feeling is most intense when I’m trying to write the first draft of a book, as I am attempting to do right now.

Some writers feel carefree on the first draft, and become grumblier as the drafts accrue. Not me—the first draft is my bugaboo. It’s my slowest, most difficult task, one I’m always in danger of abandoning. I move so slowly that there’s plenty of time for the Scaries to arrive and say things like, “Oh great, here’s another genius book idea you’ll spend years on so it can sit, unpublished, in a box in your closet.” Which is rude. That’s what the Scaries are—extremely rude voices that tell you to quit, and make some pretty convincing arguments.

But what my son already knows is: you ignore those guys. They are going to show up every time you’re trying to do something you care about that is really hard, every time you are working at the edge of your abilities. That’s where the Scaries hang out—at your edge, waiting to trip you, all whispery and mist-like and dark.

The fact that writing is hard and feels bad sometimes makes us think the message is that we are bad writers and are not meant to do this. We should just give up and be consumers, not creators. But my son reminded me that It’s supposed to feel awful, at least at the times when I am challenging myself the most.

My son loves running and wants to improve. And I love writing and want to improve. So feeling bad and quitsome during the effort is part of the natural process. There’s no such thing as rhabdo for writers, unless you’re really pounding the keyboard in an inadvisable way.

As my neighbor Coach Prime tweeted this week, “The 2 things that needs to change immediately are the Hate in your heart and the Quit in your soul. Hate & Quit will not attract Success at all.”

Okay Coach Prime, oh Captain my Captain, I will wring the quit out of my soul. I try not to keep hate in there to begin with, so that’s one less task to worry about.

The Assorted Whimsy Portion of The Tumbleweed

This week a turkey arrived to inspect my lawn. Why was he out and about in October? He doesn’t go around in November. Just as October is the humans’ spooky month, November is the turkey’s spooky month. The spooky month for dogs in America is July. Rabbits are stressed out by Christmas. Don’t ask me why.

The house in my neighborhood that goes all out for Halloween has an Olympic theme this year. First, here’s our favorite Australian breakdancer and her judges:

Next, it’s Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles honoring Rebeca Andrade:

Finally, I thought pole vaulter was Mondo Duplantis, but then I looked closer—

I think it’s meant to be Anthony Ammirati, the pole vaulter who knocked the bar off with the part of his anatomy that is tastefully covered on this skeleton with a gift box.

The Book Recommendation Portion of The Tumbleweed

I have the perfect book to suggest to you this month, Tumbleweedistas. Please scurry to your nearest library or bookstore and check out The Paranormal Ranger: A Navajo Invetigator’s Search for the Unexplained by Stanley Milford Jr.

Milford worked as a ranger for more than two decades, including a stint with the Navajo Rangers, who were created to protect the natural and archeological resources of the 27,000 square miles of the Navajo Nation. Milford is an engaging storyteller, describing the landscape, people, and vast scope of his job. During his years with the Rangers, he was selected to oversee the Special Projects Unit. I am delighted to report that these special projects included investigating citizen sightings of aliens and bigfoots—bigfeet? (Merriam-Webster says either bigfoots or bigfeet is correct.) Many of the people who witnessed mysterious creatures or events felt belittled by regular police, so Milford and his colleagues treated them with respect and truly listened to them and investigated what they reported. Milford intersperses the stories of his Ranger adventures with tales from Navajo creation myths, which meaningfully echo the unexplained phenomenon.

If you need to get your mind off current world events happening in this dimension (you know, just hypothetically), this entertaining, atmospheric, and unexpectedly moving book will do the trick.

The Happenings & Links Portion of The Tumbleweed

• I would love to see you in my class Special Topics in Fiction, which will run on Tuesdays from October 22 to November 12 from 6:30-8:30 p.m. mountain time. You can join at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver or on Zoom to learn about multiple perspectives, multiple timelines, unusual narration (beyond first and third person) and other fiction techniques.

• The wonderful people at Stories on Stage have chosen my story collection, Mixed Company, for their single-author show! Join me on Sunday, November 10 at Su Teatro (721 Santa Fe Drive) in Denver as the actors from Stories on Stage present my stories and satire in a 2 p.m. performance that will be followed by a Q&A and milk and cookies for all. Get your tickets here. And check out this flier in which they claim my stories are “hip and funny.” I plan to highlight this portion and give it to my children.

  

• My wonderful literary agent, Maggie Cooper, just published her first book of fiction, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies. If you want a distilled dose of wisdom and humor, check out this chapbook!

• On Friday, October 25, I’ll be at The Bookies bookstore in Denver to celebrate the anthology We Can See Into Another Place: Mile High Writers on Social Justice with some fellow contributors (7 p.m.).

• I have openings for one-on-one editorial work and writing and publishing coaching from November and beyond. Let me know if I can help you!

  As always, The Tumbleweed welcomes your questions and comments about writing, reading, taco eating, the Denver Nuggets, rabbit wrangling, Deion Sanders, and baby seals.