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With so many years spent making art and texts, countless firsts have come and gone: first workshop as my graduate program’s most nontraditional student, first contracts, first awarding of those coveted bona fides. There’s the first completed novel—that obligatory one-in-the-drawer; a second novel which would be the first published, to reasonable acclaim, and sad sales figures; and the first draft of a third novel, now in revisions after my agent’s close read.
Until last fall there was one first I had not experienced: An up-close encounter with mortality.
Oh sure, I’d gotten myself into dangerous scrapes: the near fatal car accident at 18. The heart-thumping race against a lightning storm while backpacking up a 14,000-foot peak in the Rockies. Class V rapids in the Grand Canyon. An idiotic rock-climbing venture with an “expert” whom every cell in my body told me not to trust. I consider myself a reasonable risk-taker with a faith in pushing physical and mental strength where it hasn’t gone before. After all, I’d always enjoyed perfect health. A doctor who examined me early last year said, “You’re trim, you’re active, and you have low blood pressure. You’ll live to be 100!” My body was the sturdy house for my mind, the dependable turtle shell from which I’d written and created for years.
But the body is a fickle partner to the mind. Mine started to turn on me last September, when I learned the bronchitis I hadn’t been able to shake was actually pneumonia—and something else.
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This week’s contest could be called a Freaky Friday the 13th Freebie. I’ve Monster Mashed a couple of books together just in time for Halloween.
One lucky reader will win the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and Everything You Need to Know About Nightmares and How to Defeat Them by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller. So, there’s one for you and one for the kids (or, depending on your age, one for you and one for the grownups).
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From the Department of Pinch Me I'm Dreaming comes the office memo informing me that less than two weeks from now I'll be sitting on a stage at the University of Montana interviewing bestselling novelist Lee Child in front of a thousand screaming Jack Reacher fans. I'm not sure how I got so lucky, but if you're in Missoula, Montana on November 8, stop by the Denison Theater to see how my luck plays out...
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