Tiki Man: Interview with an Author

 

When I read (which is constantly), I wear two hats, that of reader and that of writer. As the former, I want to be immersed in the story. As the latter, I’m interested in how other writers work their craftsmanship. Recently, I read a novel that impressed me as much for the way the plot was presented as it did for the character development. Both were stellar. I loved the writing so much, in fact, that I reached out to the author, Thomas M. Atkinson, on Twitter and—what do you know?—he was gracious enough to respond and even more gracious to agree to an interview. Below are my questions and his answers regarding how he constructed Tiki Man, his second novel.

Why did you make the decision to offer very little exposition at the front of the novel, parsing it out in small pieces as the story unfolds?

Well, as with the narrative voice, and the tense, I am trying (I think successfully since it hasn’t been an issue), to craft a more honest story, right? Because while Tiki Man is a story, it is actually Pere telling the reader a story, which is a huge distinction. The opening chapter is, without giving too much away, Pere telling the reader how he dealt with a problem that came up, and how he came to be taking care of Tammy. Now the reader’s takeaway is probably much different than Pere’s takeaway, but even Pere recognizes that how he handled it wasn’t the best way. But what Pere knows, that the reader has to suss out, is how much of his response was self-serving, that while he might have been perfectly justified in his response, that response was also an excuse for getting back to a very dark place, (but a very dark place where he was at home). In other news, I think that makes it both a more interesting read and a harder sell (because it isn’t what agents and editors are used to seeing).

Is Pere’s character based on someone you know?

He’s a composite of a lot of guys I’ve known (with a generous helping of Me). A lot of people have a hard enough time just getting themselves through life, and while they might be totally at sea when put in charge of a small person, it’s not for lack of trying.

Tell us about your process. Do you write every day?  How is your first draft composed? Longhand? Computer? Typewriter? Do you have a daily word count or a specific time frame?

First of all, no one should take anything I say about process as a recommendation or endorsement of my process. I don’t write every day, because I would write a lot of crap and then I'd get used to writing crap and then…. I write on the computer even though I suck at the actual typing part of it (I took “Touch Typing” in night school my senior year of undergrad. I took it pass/fail and only had to type 24 words a minute to get a D. The best I ever did was 23, but since the teacher was worried she might have to see me again, she passed me.) I don’t do drafts. As a matter of fact, my process might best be described as semi-benign mental illness. I think about what I want to write about. I obsess about it. I dream about it. And just when it is starting to become dangerous, I try to get it all down on paper. And what I get down is pretty much fully formed and while it needs some corrections, of course, it doesn’t need revision.

Who or what are you reading most often, and why?

News and nonfiction. Every couple of years I will go back and read all 20 books of the Master & Commander series by Patrick O’Brian. And I like to revisit William Gibson (Count Zero has one of the best opening pages ever) and Samuel Delaney (Nova). I try to avoid literary fiction because I’ve spent a long damn time honing my voice and I am primitively superstitious of any bleed-through from another author.

For Tiki Man, did you have an agent? Or did you work directly with your publisher? And how did you happen to choose Regal House? (I know I’m turning that trope around; we’re led to believe that authors, like ladies at the dance, must wait to be chosen.)

An agent?!? You’re funny. An agent once told me that publishers and readers aren’t interested in poor people with problems, so I threw my hands up, “Counts me out!” Regal House is one of the few publishers that doesn’t require an agent. They read the first 20 pages, asked for the entire manuscript and things happened very quickly after that. As I’d long suspected, what it actually took was for someone to read it. 

How important are reviews on Amazon and Goodreads? Do they matter at all?

I think they are very important. It’s hard to say if they affect sales, but I think they are enormously helpful in terms of what your readers are taking away from your book (and if it’s what you intended), which I think writers should care about.

How available are you for speaking engagements, talks at libraries, and the like?

I will pester anyone at anytime. I’ve done a number of book clubs, both in-person and remote, for Tiki Man and they’ve been fun for everyone. At the first one, somebody brought candy cigarettes so everyone in the club could play “Bitches,” a game the neighbor girls play in Chapter 1. It was awesome. Next week I’m doing a presentation on “Dancing Turtle,” my short story and its journey from prize-winning story to prize-winning play (I’m also a playwright.) This might sound dumb, but I am really excited about it because after I read the story, the intern company of Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati is going to do a staged reading of the play, so the audience can see the changes, the problems, the solutions – it’s something I’d like to see!

Of Saints and Cyclones

 

There’s a hurricane coming. It’s currently off the coast of Mexico, and it’s moving slowly north toward Southern California. As I view the wind speed model on the National Hurricane Center website, I can see that right now it’s more tropical storm than hurricane (“just” a Category 2), but still. It’s a hurricane, and it’s named after me. Yep. Hurricane Kay. Headed this way.

A brief history: The practice of naming hurricanes (which began aboard fishing boats, not in government offices, as you may have heard) came about in order to avoid confusion about which hurricane did what damage and where. Over time, and as the world grew smaller with more rapid news distribution, it seemed prudent to begin “officially” designating names, especially since it is possible to have several tropical cyclones brewing in different areas at once. So the World Meteorological Organization began preparing lists of names in advance for upcoming storm seasons. Women’s names, to be precise. Exclusively women. Because only women could be that stormy, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

My coming-of-agency decade was the 1970’s, and baby, we have come a long way. After years of protests, lobbying, letter writing, and other forms of civil pressure, the WMO prepared a list of names to be used in 1979 which alternated male names with female. Ah, I remember the (mostly male) TV newscasters going on and on about how amusing (in their view) this change would be. (As I recall, the term “tempest in a teapot” was used, so, I guess, kudos to that guy for at least being literate.)

No one ever mentions that change now, though. Huh.

And so we come to the list of tropical cyclone names for 2022. On the list of names for the Eastern North Pacific area, right there between Javier and Lester (both great names of respected men, so I feel I’m in good company), is Kay.

Waaaaaaiiiit a second. My daughter will be the first to tell you that Kay is not a female gender name, originally. No, no, no; it’s a British surname. (Shout out to my friend, Duffy Kay!) I know I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but indulge me while I mention again that my oldest grandson, Ben, was given my name, Kay, as his middle name—which was when my education on the origin of the name began, because my amused daughter said, “Mom, one of the Knights of the Round Table was Sir Kay. Google it.” So I did.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, dear Reader, “has Kay ever been used as a given name for males?” Yes. Yes, it has. Google it. Or check out The Bump online, which lists it as a “gender-neutral Greek name” meaning “pure.”

And this is what I love about my name. Because my mother was neither aware of nor interested in the origin or meaning of the name Kay when she chose it for my middle name. “We needed a saint’s name to go with your first name. I just picked it,” she told me.

Oh. Did I fail to mention that, in addition to Sir Kay, history and the Catholic church have also given us Saint Kay? I was a child when my mother told me how she picked my name, so all my life I assumed that Saint Kay was a woman. Until my paradigm was upended last year when I did a bit of research in preparation for my Saints Day celebration. (The Saints Day for Saint Kay is September 26. Come party with me!) So nope, Saint Kay was not a woman. Definitely a man. And guess what he is the patron saint of—guess, just guess—okay, I’ll tell you, because you’re never going to guess it: Saint Kay is the patron saint of sidekicks. Yeah. And according to The Hidden Almanac, “Kay is never represented on his own, but can be seen lurking in the background of numerous other saint icons.”

Sigh. Absolute story of my life. Never the bride. Always the wedding singer.

As a gender-non-conforming individual, I love all of this—the fact that my mom thought she was naming me after a woman but actually named me after a man, the fact that the man, Saint Kay, was never the front man on the spiritual stage but played back-up for some of the celeb saints, and most of all, that, when a small town with small-minded people tried to publicly shame me, I changed my name, dropping my feminine first name and choosing to be known henceforth as my hard consonant, three-letter middle name.

And look at me now. Hurricane Kay. Boy howdy.

Another Day....

 

Despite the heat, skies have been beautiful here lately, and I owed Maya (and myself) a long walk out in the hills to clear the cobwebs and to be reminded that Nature is still magnificent (even if what we see on TV isn't), so Saturday morning we left the house early for one of our favorite spots in the rolling hills just south of town. I also wanted to see how Maya would do on the fifteen-foot leash I bought for our hikes.

We hadn't gone a hundred yards when we saw this:

I think I know my sister well enough to know that if she's reading this, she's making an "Are you kidding me?!?" face if not saying that out loud. Yep. Sad. Someone had no use for Grandma's little white spinet piano, so they drove it out to the hills and pushed it out the back of a truck onto the ground. I've seen a lot of things out in these hills, but this just broke my heart. I thought of three different places it would have fit in my little house. Damn, people. You didn't have to toss it out like some kind of garbage.

Speaking of such: As I said, I've seen a lot of things out there. Our next discovery, about a half mile past the piano, was this guy:

Sad, huh? When we came upon him, his tie was askew, so I fixed it. Then, because Maya was just happy to be out in the hills, and she was willing to wait patiently, I sat him up so that instead of staring at the sky all day, he could see some sky and hills, birds and coyotes, maybe some dirt bike or mountain bike riders (I imagine the latter stopping to chuckle and take a photo), and possibly some more miscreants offloading junk they can't be bothered to drive to the dump.

Isn't he handsome? I love bears. People think I love giraffes--and I do, don't get me wrong--but my first love will always be bears. Stuffed ones, live ones. Doesn't matter. I have bears all over my house, in one form or another (mostly stuffed). And in my car. (Ask my sister, who sometimes rides shotgun. Raggedy Bear travels with me wherever I go.) I can't imagine what prompted someone to toss this dude out, especially when he was dressed so nicely.

But then, people aren't always thinking clearly when they drive out to the hills. See this big, beautiful oak, and that small yellow something at the base of its trunk?

If the device you're using to read this has the capacity to zoom in, you'll discover, as I did, that it's an empty Pacifico box. Niiiice. (For the uninitiated, that's beer.) I mean, if you're going to drive way out in the hills, sit under an oak and experience Nature, that just might be the perfect beverage to consume. From the Pacifico website:

"Pacifico is a pilsner-style lager with a crisp, refreshing flavor and a touch of grass-citrus and ocean mists."

Seriously. I want one now, and I don't even drink beer. (Well, hardly ever.) But the ad copy had me at "ocean mists."

I guess I'm glad the drinker(s) left all the empties in the box. I mean, they could have smashed them against the tree, creating a dangerous hazard for wildlife. Just to note, that box has been there a long time. Maya and I have passed it often. No, I haven't picked it up to carry it out. It's a mile in on the trail, and I have both hands full handling Maya on the way back to the car. And my phone, if I have to take a picture. Case in point, this lovely gourd and blossom:

After we saw that, we saw this. If I didn't know better, I'd say it was a bear print, but there are no bears out there. Just, apparently, tremendously huge dogs. I held my hand over it so you can see how big it really was.

It was a great walk, and Maya enjoyed having the freedom to wander a bit on her new leash. But all good things do come to an end, so we trotted back to the car for the short drive home. Just another day in paradise.

One Billion

Last week the jackpot in the Mega-Millions lotto topped one billion dollars.

One billion.

That’s a thousand times a million.

To give you some perspective (and I think we all need to gain some perspective on occasion), at the rate of pay I was earning as a high school teacher, I made a million dollars every twelve years. Roughly, in twenty-seven years of teaching, I made (and spent—trust me) two and a quarter million dollars.

But in order to make a billion dollars, I would have had to work a thousand times that long. Yep. If I’d kept working, I would have made a cool billion dollars after twelve thousand years (give or take a few hundred years).

Makes me tired just thinking about it, though I’m sure I would have enjoyed spending that much time with my students—kids who were kind, smart, funny, compassionate, and always entertaining. Sweet kids. Innocent kids.

It also makes me think, now that I’m living on my pension (and not earning much from my writing—I mean, you’re currently reading my words for freeee!) that perhaps I might have chosen a more lucrative line of employment.

Take gun sales, for example. Know how long it took gun manufacturers in the U.S. to earn a billion dollars? Ten years. Oh wait—they made much, much more than a billion in ten years. That’s just what they made on assault-style weapons. You know, AR-15s and such. Those sales alone earned them a cool billion dollars. In ten years.

Don’t you wonder what they do with all that money? I do. I’d like to think they put a few million aside to pay medical bills and PTSD counseling and grief therapy and renovations of the crime scene whenever there’s a mass shooting. I’d like to think that, all right. But I can’t. Because they don’t.

Ever wonder who pays the medical bills for victims of mass shootings? They do. The victims, I mean. Well, their insurance companies, but as we know, insurance companies only pay for certain things these days. “Out of pocket” expenses can be astronomical. Especially when you’ve been hit by multiple rounds that basically explode inside your body. (CNN has a non-graphic simulation video posted on YouTube of how the round from an AR-15 affects human tissue. You can view that by clicking here.)

Curious, I did a search of “mass shooting” on the Gofundme.com page. There are hundreds and hundreds of accounts set up to help victims. Because, as I said, if you’re hit but don’t die, you’re going to need really good insurance coverage.

Because gun manufacturers are using their billion dollars for other things.

Look, I know I’ve been harping on this issue for months. Is it too much?

Could it ever be “too much” as long as mass shootings are still happening?

Am I “one of those Dems” who want to “take all the guns away”? No. No, I am most decidedly not. I believe the founding fathers had good reason to say everyone who wants to have a gun at home should have the right to do so. I have no issue with the handgun my nearly-ninety-year-old neighbor is ready to bring out should civil unrest rear its ugly head here in our senior community. I have no issue with a single friend who keeps a gun in her nightstand in case her abusive ex-husband decides to come at her again. I certainly have no issue with my brother’s hunting rifles because he hunts deer humanely, and he eats what he kills (and anyway, most of the time he just has fun camping out with his friends and doesn’t bag anything).

But if we have any chance of stopping the type of carnage we have seen in recent months and years, we have to do something.

How about we reinstitute the ban on assault-style weapons? Because you know, they were banned for years. And the percentage of these types of mass shootings dropped dramatically. And in those years that they were banned, my brother continued hunting and neither my friend or my neighbor felt unsafe without their handguns.

I do have one friend who owns an AR-15 and feels threatened by any conversation involving gun control reform. He uses his AR-15 to hunt coyotes. So he can kill an entire pack at one time.

So yeah, I wouldn’t mind if we passed a law saying he can’t do that.

Mostly, though, I’m more focused on no more children dying deaths so violent, their parents have to give samples of their DNA in order to identify their bodies.

Give it some thought. Maybe call or write a senator. Or vote for only those individuals who sincerely support gun control reform. Please.

Because this:

And because this is a reminder of how quickly we forget:

 

Oh, by the way, we know now that someone in Illinois won that billion-plus Mega Millions jackpot. Wouldn’t it be cool if it were someone in Highland Park? Yeah, I think so, too.

Where Home Is

 

Because of my infamous great-grandmother, most people associate me with Missouri. That’s just Mom’s side. Dad’s family hailed from Illinois—well, Wisconsin before that, where the homestead was. Ireland before that.

But my dad mostly grew up in a small town in Illinois. He returned there after his stint in the army in WWII. He drove a taxi for a while, which is how he met my mom, offering her a ride home one night after she’d been pestered by a guy at the club where she’d been singing with the band.

Mom and Dad married in 1947, and Dad got a job on the local police force. A family story we heard repeatedly as kids was the time Dad got a call on his radio to Be On the Look-out for a two-year-old boy who had wandered away from his home on such-and-such street. My dad responded immediately and found him, blocks from home, walking with his dog, headed downtown. He recognized the boy right away—because it was his son, my oldest brother, Danny.

My siblings were born back there, but Mom and Dad moved to California just before I was born. When Dad passed away in 1963, Mom piled us in the station wagon and we drove back there to see all the aunts and uncles, all the cousins we would never have the opportunity to grow up around. And damn, they were good people, even when we were kids, accepting us, playing with us, as if we’d lived there all along. I was only nine years old, but I do remember that. That, and the small-town feel of everyone living within a short distance of each other. One night we’d be at Uncle Chuck and Aunt Betty’s house. The next night we’d be at Uncle Mo and Aunt Lee’s. Lots of Irish people. Lots of Italians. Lots of food. Lots of love. That’s what I remember.

Now, most of my cousins, except for a couple of them, have moved out of that small town, but they still live close enough to gather often. When my sister and I visited in 2018—my first time back there since 1963—there they all were, gathering in my cousin Mary’s home to hang out with us, just as they had 55 years earlier—as if we’d been there among them all along. Lots of food. Lots of love. Lots of stories to share. My cousin Donny drove us around town, pointing out where various people, including our grandparents, had once lived, and Fort Sheridan, where my dad would’ve been inducted into the army. All of it still there, all these decades later. Gotta love that small town life.

Recently I spoke with my cousin (by-marriage-but-who-cares) Stephanie, who told me about how the town still had that small-town feel. “I’m so near-sighted,” she told me, “I wave at everyone. This stems from an incident in my childhood when a neighbor called my mother and accused me of being rude because I hadn’t waved back at her. I just hadn’t seen her. Ever since then, I wave at everyone.” She went on to say there was a particular young man in the neighborhood who used to ride by on an electric scooter, blaring loud music. Stephanie and her husband worried about him being hit by a car. She always waved at him. “One day,” she said, “he actually waved back.”

You know, having been born on July 4^th, I’m a sucker for a Fourth of July parade. We have one here in the park, though it’s a golf cart parade—no marching bands, but if the local fire department isn’t on a call, they show up and roll through the park. It’s always fun. This year I watched with my neighbors, then got in the car to go look at a typewriter I wanted to buy. I had to veer off the road and send out a frantic text message, though, as soon as I turned on the radio and heard there’d been a mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois.

Highland Park. That small town where my parents met and married. Where my dad had received commendations for his service with the p.d. Where my siblings were born. Where my cousins, Kathy and Donny still live, and Stephanie just blocks away in Highwood. That boy she always waved to, the one that finally waved back, turned out to be the shooter.

Like me, Stephanie and her husband have always loved a Fourth of July parade, have always gone to the one in Highland Park with friends. “It’s our tradition,” she told me. This year, their friends could not attend, and Stephanie and Joe made a last-minute decision not to go. It may have saved their lives.

I asked her what the atmosphere in the town was like since the shooting, how people were coping. She told me she’d worked with one of the victims who died, that people were raising funds for the survivors, that Highland Park had been big on helping people during the pandemic, so once again the citizens dove in to help out. Lots of food. Lots of love.

This is small town life. Or was. As we’ve seen, small town life may never be the same again. There is—was—that sense of safety and security that everyone talks about when everyone in a town has lived there long enough to know everyone’s parents and grandparents: “That kind of thing doesn’t happen here,” the mayor of Highland Park said. She believed that… up until the day it did happen there. Be mindful. And, I hate to say this part, keep your eyes open and your wits about you. Because if it could happen in Highland Park, Illinois, it could indeed happen anywhere.

 

What Will it Take?

 

Remember back in 2016, not long before the presidential election, when that bit of footage was found and re-played with Donald Trump saying you (“you” meaning celebrities and/or powerful men) could grab a woman by the pussy? Remember how outraged we all were? And fed up? Remember how women finally started talking to each other about all the times they’d been violated in some way by men, whether verbally or physically? And women across the nation made pink pussy hats? And thousands upon thousands of women came out and marched to show support for one another? To say, ‘We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore’?

It changed things. Women changed things, changed the conversation or began it, or whatever, but all across the country, it was no longer okay for men to behave badly, and if they did, they might meet swift and dire consequences for their actions. Bravo, ladies.

If you’re a bit older (old enough to remember the 1980’s), the name Candy Lightner might not ring a bell, but you probably do remember MADD, the organization she founded after her thirteen-year-old daughter, Cari, was hit by a drunk driver and killed. MADD—Mother’s Against Drunk Driving—started out as many women’s movements did back then—with an uphill battle and a great deal of derision on the part of the (male-dominated) press. And yet, that small group of angry mothers who had lost loved ones to vehicular violence grew and grew into a nation-wide organization that is still active today.

Those women, in raising their united voices, raised our awareness of the horrific lack of legal consequences for drunk driving, and more importantly, they lobbied the courts and legislators doggedly for years until stiffer penalties were finally introduced, thus saving thousands upon thousands of lives. Bravo, ladies.

Women, when we are angry enough, when we are fed up enough, can be a formidable force.

Case in point: Rosa Parks. (Ms. Parks, by the way, did not sit in the “white” section of the bus. She sat in the “colored” section. Why didn’t she stand when the bus driver demanded she give up her seat to a white man? Because, she said, “I was tired.” One can only imagine how exhausting life was for a Black woman in Alabama in 1955.)

Which brings me to another case in point: Mamie Till-Mobley. She was the mother of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy who was abducted from his uncle’s home by three white men because his behavior had been perceived as inappropriate toward a white woman. He was tortured for hours, then murdered, his body dumped in a river. During that night of torment, Till’s body was mutilated and his face beaten so severely he was rendered unrecognizable. And yet, Mamie Till-Mobley insisted that her son be given an open-casket funeral. Why? In her words: “I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby.” People flocked to the funeral. The press came. Women fainted when they saw Emmett Till’s mangled face. Photographs were taken, and the images eventually shared across the country.

Mamie Till-Mobley’s courage forced people around the country—around the globe—to confront the atrocities of racism. Bravo, Ms. Mobley. Your son, and your love for him, will never be forgotten.

In one of my many conversations this week with other women—other mothers—about the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, a friend said, “All these funerals now, all these small caskets…. I heard a reporter suggest that we need another Mamie Till-Mobley. Maybe we need to have open casket funerals for these children, for all the children who die as a result of gun violence. Maybe that would turn the tide. Maybe if people saw that, it would make it real enough for them to vote for politicians who support gun control reform. I don’t know. It’s awful to think about. But maybe that’s what it will take.”

I’m asking the mothers, the grandmothers, the sisters, the aunts, the teachers: What will it take? What do we have to do to turn the tide? We already know that we can be a force to be reckoned with if we unite with a common purpose, if we are so angry, we refuse to accept the status quo. Are we there yet? Have we reached that “mad as hell” point yet? Or will it take just one more slaughter of innocent children to have us all out marching?

 

The lie all mothers tell

 

I’ve been working on a post about something that happened when I was hiking in Oak Glen last weekend. But then the shooting happened at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and I haven’t wanted to finish that. Because I’ve been thinking about this:

Bear with me. It’s a story.

When my kids were little, I loved that I could stay home. I did my writing when they were at school or sleeping, and I was there when they came home, hot or tired or rain-soaked or weepy or jubilant.

After my divorce, I had to go back to school full time in order to get my degree and start teaching. I tried to plan all my classes so that I could get the kids to school, get to campus for classes, then get back home before they did. But the university was far from home, and putting that much distance between myself and my children cranked my anxiety level way up. I will confess that there were some days I sat in my car in the parking lot after I arrived on campus, reluctant to give my attention fully to the day’s classes when my children were nearly an hour’s drive away. Keep in mind, this was in the days before cell phones. If something had happened to one of my kids while I was in class, someone would have a difficult if not impossible time reaching me. I had no family members, no support network living nearby. There were times when I had to fight the urge to turn around and go home just to be there. Just in case.

In those times, I calmed myself with self-talk that went something like this: The kids are okay. They’re all in school. They are protected, and they will be safe there until you pick them up.

Think of that in light of the danger kids face all over the nation in schools today.

My children are grown now, and for the most part, their children are, too; I have only one grandchild in elementary school. He lives in Arizona, another state that, like Texas, has very few restrictions regarding the sale and ownership of firearms. He’ll be ten in October, the same age as most of the children in the Robb Elementary School massacre. I have another decade or so to worry about his safety.

My daughter and her husband both teach high school here in Southern California. While our state has much more restrictive gun laws than Arizona (another reason to love Cali), that didn’t stop a student in 2019 from pulling a semi-automatic handgun out of his backpack and shooting five people at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, a quiet community much like the area where my daughter and her husband teach. Of course there have been other school shootings in California as well.

While I watched news coverage in the aftermath of the Robb Elementary School shooting, I just kept thinking of all the moms. All the mothers in Uvalde who sent their children to school that morning and told themselves the lie all mothers have to tell themselves now, regardless of where they live in this country: My children will be safe at school. Bad things don’t happen here. Not in our town. Not to our kids.