The plan and the prayer

Why this novella? And why now?

I guess I’d better get writing, since we’re just about six months away from Six Mile Store landing in your hot little hands. (Here are the obligatory USA/UK Amazon preorder links.)

Why this book?

I worked for many years in a gas station/convenience store that is quite a lot like the one described in Six Mile Store, though I wouldn’t say they’re exactly the same. For one, none of my regulars ever turned up dead. But for many years, I had the privilege of meeting thousands of strange and surprising people—some of whom came in daily or weekly, some of whom I saw once and then never again—and I collected them in my head, and they sat there for a long time and had nowhere to go. And they got big and noisy, so they had to come out.

This is not to say that any part of Six Mile Store is real or true. I have to emphasize: it is not. Nothing in the story ever really happened, or if it did, the context is so far removed from reality that it can’t be said to be based on anything real. But the characters on the pages are amalgamations of people I’ve seen at least once, whose stories I’ve made up for my own entertainment in my brain, for over 20 years.

Why now?

The problem for a while was that I didn’t have a storyline. I didn’t have any conflict (it was a nice place to work! kind colleagues, sweet customers, the loveliest job I’ve ever had actually), so all that I had to put on the page were weird little vignettes. But then, 20 years later in an entirely different country, I ended up with a manager so bad that I couldn’t allow her to go unpunished unwritten.

She gave me the conflict I needed, and the Story As It Is revealed itself to me. It pushed its way through my nerves and out through my fingertips and onto my keyboard and is now in search of a new home spread across many brains: my one rather threadbare brain is no longer enough to keep it satisfied.

I have to warn you, though, that the lovely, sweet, kind atmosphere I’ve described above is not what has translated onto the page (as I said, the story is not real). Six Mile Store is short, about 26k words, but it’s rural noir. There is sex. There are drugs. There is lying, jealousy, coercion, and illness. There are people who are very, very unkind to others, some of whom deserve it, and some of whom do not.

The plan

For the next few weeks ahead of the book actually coming out, I plan to talk to you about my writing process, maybe look at some drafts/things I’ve cut wholesale (and why), how I like to approach mood/dialogue, maybe even write some new in-world passages just for this newsletter, to whet your appetite and reward you for being my long-suffering reader.

I’d also like to set you some occasional homework, which is entirely optional but which may enhance your life. Today I’m pointing you to A Violent Gospel by Mark Westmoreland, his debut novella. Mark and I very obviously (obviously to me, I mean) come from the same kind of South, and that South is not the Azalea Trail Maids kind. A Violent Gospel is quick and brutal and dirty, full of bad religion and worse behavior. If you like it, let me know. (And maybe let Mark know too.)

The prayer

What I’m hoping from you, my friend who has been here reading me for a long time, is that you will send this newsletter along to someone you know who may be interested, if not in Six Mile Store specifically, maybe simply a regular discussion of one person’s writing process. And maybe that person will follow along, and maybe one day they will share it with someone else. Et voila, success???

Writing a book and putting it out into the world are tricky things, made trickier in a time where we are all starved of attention. Personal recommendations do make a big difference.

Thank you for reading!