by JA Huss
If it’s sorrow, the anger rises up to block the sadness, once again denying us the privilege of learning to sit in our melancholy until we make friends with our heartbreak and it no longer feels burdensome. Because it’s not a burden to feel sorrow. Or to feel fear. It is a privilege. It means that we are alive. Not just breathing and walking and talking, but actually living a fully realized existence.
We cannot presume to wall ourselves off from the things that cause us anxiety, indulging our anger and denying our purer emotions, and expect to ever grow into anything more than we are now.
And, y’know, hey... That’s fine. There’s no rule that says you have to grow or learn or advance in any way at all while you’re here on this planet. But it’s no coincidence that the people I’ve met who are most resistant to the idea of growth and take the greatest precautions to keep their personal risk at a minimum, are also the ones who are most afraid of dying. Perhaps it’s a chicken/egg conversation, but I might want to suggest that it’s not always fearless people who take risks and go on adventures. Sometimes it’s that through the process of adventuring you become less afraid.
I’m not talking, necessarily, about life-risking adventures like squirrel suiting or shark wrestling. I’m talking about adventuring into your own psyche. Your own individual worldview. Challenging yourself to look at the things that make you feel angry or resentful and take a look under the hood of that feeling to see what’s actually making the engine turn. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I’d be willing to bet that what you’ll find is just a withering set of feelings that you’ve never dealt with.
This is not pontification, by the way. This is coming from someone who spent much of his life angry at everything all the time. I’ve talked about this before in another EOBS, but I grew up with a mentally ill parent. Something I haven’t talked about is that I also grew up with addictions. Drugs. Alcohol. The usual. I have always presumed that the two things are related. Largely because, with one parent in and out of the hospital all the time, and the other parent so distracted by that that they couldn’t possibly be expected to notice everything going on with their kid at every moment, it provided the ideal opportunity for me to do whatever the hell I wanted.
Which, at fourteen, was excellent. Talk about adventures? I had some goddamn adventures, that’s for certain. I don’t know that I really enjoyed them or appreciated them, usually because I was too fucked up, but it gave me a chance to do some shit that was — to say the least — educational.
And I never once, at all, felt angry. Because between the distractions of my misadventures and the chemically induced haze I maintained, all my feelings were muted. The state I stayed in was what the anger would later become for me: A substitute for having to feel anything I didn’t want to engage with.
And then, at twenty-one, I got sober.
And that’s when the wheels fell the fuck off.
With nothing to mask the more vulnerable emotions I found myself feeling all the time, I had to find a new way to cover them. It seemed like a matter of survival. So, I got really, really angry. All the time. I don’t even know that I understood how angry I was.
A few years back (maybe fifteen or so now), I made contact with someone I had known during that time in my life and had then lost touch with. I forget how or why she and I reconnected, but I just remember that in an email she wrote something like, “It’s so great to hear that you’re doing so well. I always recalled you as that angry young man with so much misplaced emotion, your fists would shake with the energy of your impuissant frustration.” (Or something like that. I may be embellishing. I just recall it being fairly elegiac and also a little bit like, “Really? Why the fuck didn’t anybody say something at the time??)
The reason, of course, that no one said anything at the time is that you cannot coach someone into an evolved state of being. They must find it on their own.
Which brings me back to my point: The only way personal evolution can occur is via a path of discovery that is illuminated by a willingness to get comfortable with your discomfort.
In other words: Sit in your sorrow. Make friends with your fear. Celebrate your sadness.
Whatever the thing is that’s pissing you off, don’t get pissed off by it. Allow it to exist on its own terms, in its own way, and run its course in its own time.
There will be one more book in this trilogy. One more set of adventures for our heroes to face that will challenge their ability to best their anger, adventure into the unknown, and find what for them will be a happily ever after.
As the authors, we know where we intend for the story to go. But we must face the reality that as we get into it, the characters, the story, the reality of these people may carry us somewhere we’re not comfortable with. Like all our characters, Alec, Christine, and Danny tell us where they want to go. And sometimes... Sometimes those assholes take us to places we don’t want to travel. So, there’s no guarantee that won’t happen in the final book in this story.
And, if it happens, it will be on us not to get angry and not to try and rend the story back into a place that causes us to feel more comfortable. As storytellers, we have to sit in our own discomfort with that fact that sometimes a story will tell itself and, eventually, a story must end in whatever way it wants to end.
We can fear it, we can be saddened by it, we can even resent it, but we will ultimately have to accept it if we are to learn from it.
And if we engage with it correctly and honestly, we emerge as better storytellers and better people.
The world is a scary fucking place. We are living in a frightening time in the history of the human experience. And yes, someday we are all going to die.
But rather than raging at those truths, I would encourage all of us, every single one (yours truly included), to take a breath, take a look around, observe our feelings without judgement, and see how long it takes before, instead of being mad as hell about it all, we look at the complications we have to unpack in these big, messy, finite-so-live-it-while-you-can lives of ours and think...
“Goddamn. Isn’t it all just ... amazing?”
JM
24 January 2019
Welcome to my first End of Book Shit for 2019!
Like most people I like to take stock of my year when the new one starts. Look back and think about what I was doing five or ten years ago. But this New Year I’ve been thinking about seven years ago because that’s when this whole fiction author thing started.
Almost exactly seven years ago I made a decision to write a fiction book. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I take that back—I had no idea what I was doing. I just kinda had this weird science fiction story in my head and back then I was working as a hog farm inspector for the state of Colorado.
This was a part-time gig and I mostly worked from home. But about every two weeks I had to drive in to Denver, pick up a state car, and then drive back out to the Eastern Plains of Colorado where all these hog farms lived. My territory was literally from Julesburg, CO (which is on the border of Nebraska) to some random number of miles south of Holly, CO (which is pretty close to Oklahoma and right up against the state line of Kansas.)
So I had a lot of time on my hands. The actual inspections took anywhere from thirty minutes to three days, depending on the number of farms I had to look at. So some days—those days I went south of Holly—I would literally drive for about six hours, do my thirty-minute inspection on their two farms, then turn around and drive home.
I did a lot of thinking in that state car. So I came up with this story about a girl name Junco and built a whole world based off the Eastern Plains.
When people think of Colorado they think of the mountains but half of the state is prairie. Most of that is farm and ranch land and it’s very rural. All these farms were on dirt roads and there were never any street signs that made any sense. It was CR CC or CR ZZ or CR 157. Like, I never really knew where I was. I just knew where I needed to be and figured it out along the way. I ca
n remember someone calling me from the office asking me where I was. And I was like, “Hell I don’t know. Somewhere between Limon and La Junta, bitches. What do you want?”
Going down to Holly I literally based my direction off a flag pole and a lama. (Turn left at the flag pole, turn right at the lama… drive south until I see the farm.)
And I remember being in one of my farm manager’s trucks as we were looking at farms south of Burlington, and he and I were talking about getting out of this fucking hog farm business.
He wanted to sell his house, put his kids and wife in an RV, and go travel. Maybe write a travel blog. And I was telling him how I was writing too. I had my whole science textbook business but I really wanted to write fiction.
I think about him a lot because I liked that guy. He was a very good guy. All the hog farm people were. Just honest people who worked in agriculture and did a job no one ever wants to think about. The state regulation I was in charge of enforcing was an environmental one and I’d say 95% of the time every single hog farm in Colorado (and I had about 120 of them) passed their bi-annual inspection. Every once in a while I’d have to write someone up, usually for a torn water liner edge because we get wicked winds out here and if the edge of something is flapping, it’s definitely gonna rip. But most of the time it was just me and these farm guys riding around in a dirty white pick-up truck shootin’ the shit.
So this Burlington guy had a dream to go do something cool. And I did too. I lost touch with him after I left the hog farms so I never did find out if he sold his house and went traveling. But I did write that book. I wrote three of them that year and have written more than 50 since then.
So I’ve been thinking about that decision a lot lately for some reason. Probably because it’s January and it’s the anniversary of when I quit the hog farms and became a fiction author. But mostly because I often wonder what my life would’ve look like if I hadn’t taken that chance. And then I feel so grateful that I did.
2018 was INSANE for me. So much has changed, and so much happened, and so many things are still in the works, it’s just crazy.
And I don’t really have anything to relate back to this story, The Square. But the EOBS is all mine. You can read it, or not. Appreciate it, or not. I just get to say whatever I want. So that’s what I’m doing. Just sharing my random thoughts with you.
I also want to wish you a very happy new year and say… if you’re thinking about making a change this year—whatever it is—do it.
The perfect time will never come. Believe me. There is no perfect time.
Just believe in yourself and take that chance. Because you never know what will happen. And if you had asked me seven years ago if I’d be here now, writing this for you, I’d have called you crazy.
But here I am.
Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book.
Julie
JA Huss
1-23-19
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Johnathan McClain’s career as a writer and actor spans 25 years and covers the worlds of theatre, film, and television. At the age of 21, Johnathan moved to Chicago where he wrote and began performing his critically acclaimed one-man show, Like It Is. The Chicago Reader proclaimed, “If we’re ever to return to a day when theatre matters, we’ll need a few hundred more artists with McClain’s vision and courage.” On the heels of its critical and commercial success, the show subsequently moved to New York where Johnathan was compared favorably to solo performance visionaries such as Eric Bogosian, John Leguizamo, and Anna Deavere Smith.
Johnathan lived for many years in New York, and his work there includes appearing Off-Broadway in the original cast of Jonathan Tolins’ The Last Sunday In June at The Century Center, as well as at Lincoln Center Theatre and with the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. Around the country, he has been seen on stage at South Coast Repertory, The American Conservatory Theatre, Florida Stage, Paper Mill Playhouse, and the National Jewish Theatre. Los Angeles stage credits are numerous and include the LA Weekly Award nominated world premiere of Cold/Tender at The Theatre @ Boston Court and the LA Times’ Critic’s Choice production of The Glass Menagerie at The Colony Theatre for which Johnathan received a Garland Award for his portrayal of Jim O’Connor.
On television, he appeared in a notable turn as Megan Draper’s LA agent, Alan Silver, on the final season of AMC’s critically acclaimed drama Mad Men, and as the lead of the TV Land comedy series, Retired at 35, starring alongside Hollywood icons George Segal and Jessica Walter. He has also had Series Regular roles on The Bad Girl’s Guide starring Jenny McCarthy and Jessica Simpson’s sitcom pilot for ABC. Additional TV work includes recurring roles on the Netflix comedy PRINCE OF PEORIA, the CBS drama SEAL TEAM and Fox’s long-running 24, as well as appearances on Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS: Los Angeles, Trial and Error, The Exorcist, Major Crimes, The Glades, Scoundrels, Medium, CSI, Law & Order: SVU, Without a Trace, and CSI: Miami, amongst others. On film, he appeared in the Academy Award nominated Far from Heaven and will soon be seen in his first leading role on the big screen in the upcoming WALKING WITH HERB, starring alongside George Lopez and Academy Award nominees Edward James Olmos and Kathleen Quinlan.
As an audiobook narrator, he has recorded over 100 titles, iincluding the Audie Award winning Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff and The Last Days of Night, by Academy Award Winning Screenwriter Graham Moore (who is also Johnathan’s friend and occasional collaborator). As well as multiple titles by his dear friend and writing partner, JA Huss, with whom he is hard at work making the world a little more romantic.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife Laura.
JA Huss never wanted to be a writer and she still dreams of that elusive career as an astronaut. She originally went to school to become an equine veterinarian but soon figured out they keep horrible hours and decided to go to grad school instead. That Ph.D wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (and she really sucked at the whole scientist thing), so she dropped out and got a M.S. in forensic toxicology just to get the whole thing over with as soon as possible.
After graduation she got a job with the state of Colorado as their one and only hog farm inspector and spent her days wandering the Eastern Plains shooting the shit with farmers.
After a few years of that, she got bored. And since she was a homeschool mom and actually does love science, she decided to write science textbooks and make online classes for other homeschool moms.
She wrote more than two hundred of those workbooks and was the number one publisher at the online homeschool store many times, but eventually she covered every science topic she could think of and ran out of shit to say.
So in 2012 she decided to write fiction instead. That year she released her first three books and started a career that would make her a New York Times bestseller and land her on the USA Today Bestseller’s List eighteen times in the next three years.
Her books have sold millions of copies all over the world, the audio version of her semi-autobiographical book, Eighteen, was nominated for a Voice Arts Award and an Audie Award in 2016 and 2017 respectively, her audiobook, Mr. Perfect, was nominated for a Voice Arts Award in 2017, and her audiobook, Taking Turns, was nominated for an Audie Award in 2018.
Johnathan McClain is her first (and only) writing partner and even though they are worlds apart in j
ust about every way imaginable, it works.
She lives on a ranch in Central Colorado with her family.