A Preview of My Writing

Here is a little insight into what you can expect from my upcoming newsletter. What follows is a blog post that I wrote in November of 2021. It’s a little on the dark side, but it looks at some things that are important to think about.

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My first blog post on my brand-spankin’ new website, and up until a few days ago, I was struggling to come up with something to write. Would I tell you about my favorite salad recipes or give you 100 ways to overcome writer’s block? Then fate, as she often does, dropped a big old steaming pile squarely in my lap, and it sat there just begging me to tell you all about it.

My brother-in-law was murdered two weeks ago; he was shot in the head five times. It breaks my heart that my wife is going through this, struggling to just get out of bed, and my mother-in-law has yet to fully accept that he is gone. Yeah, we're all going to get to know each other like that right from the start.

I have had a ton of questions since his death, many of them existential and beyond my ability to answer, but a lot of them have been of a writerly nature, and I feel I need to have some sort of answers to them before I can move on. The first is, how the hell do you write through tragedy?

I have been through some bad shit in my life, my younger brother died in a car accident when he was 19, and my best friend from high school killed himself in the middle of the COVID lockdown; and in these cases, I've had my work as a place of refuge. A place I could go and not think about it.

As a writer, my work is in my head, braided up with all the crap my family is going through. I spent a few days completely unable to write anything; it would have been difficult even to get my name on a piece of paper. Now that I can write again, everything seems to come out tangled with the tragedy.

This brings me to the second thing that has been nagging at me, how far can I go with my observations? How much of what I am seeing and experiencing can I put into my writing without crossing the line into being a shit person?

This is the first major tragedy that has occurred since I have been writing regularly, and there have been a lot of strange little things that I have noticed, for example, the murder pause. The murder pause happens when you tell someone that your family member has been murdered, and their mind sort of short circuits for a second while they try to come up with something appropriate to say. I've actually seen someone try to move in two directions at the same time.

There have been big things as well, like sitting in the room while the detectives were asking their questions or watching my mother-in-law repeatedly going through a cycle of breaking down at the realization that he's not coming back and then deliberately pushing that out of her mind, only to go through it again when something new brings it back into her consciousness.

In truth, I may just be asking these questions as a way of processing my brother-in-law's death, and there are definitely no simple answers to them. I hope the experience will give me a higher level of understanding that can find its way into my writing.

Sorry about the dark nature of this first blog post; next time, I promise to tackle something lighter; maybe I'll even give you some salad recipes or a few ideas on how to deal with writer’s block. Or, I might have come up with some answers to the bigger questions.