The Crippling Fear of Creation

When I was an illustrator, every single time I sat down at the drawing table, I was overcome with the crippling fear that I’d forgotten everything–how to build a figure, how to put down a line, how to turn a blank piece of paper into a finished piece. Every. Single. Time.

I know this is not uncommon.Now that I’ve pivoted to writing, it’s the same thing. Whenever I begin something new, there is that voice in my head that pushes against all my past work, all my confidence, and says, “The words will not flow.”

It’s terrifying, but I push past it.

And it’s never true. The words are always there if I but put the fingers on the keyboard and begin. You’d think, after all this time–after 30+ years of actively making art of one kind or another–this would not keep happening. But, it does.

At some point I guess you either accept the fear as part of the process or you let it cripple you. It makes me wonder what function that universal, personal terror actually has. Is there a misunderstood friction necessary for creation within it, or is it an essential anti-force without which our tenacity and determination to create would wither?

I dunno. I just keep going.

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Cover Reveal: The Other Side of Fear

Very excited to announce that my book, The Other Side of Fear: A True Story of Murder, Forgiveness, the Peace Only Faith Can Bring, now has a cover and is available for pre-order!

You can pre-order on Amazon, right here. (Cover may not be up yet, but that’s it!)

Or, you can pre-order directly from Cedar Fort, the publisher, right here. Use the code PRE15 at checkout to get 15% off your entire order.

There’s only one word to describe your dad getting shot a dozen times: cool. I was twelve. The cost of terrible violence was more than just unknown to me-it was negligible. I never doubted Dad would live. He could put footballs into orbit, just like Superman. Only good things came from the shooting: my sixth grade popularity profile went way up and, bonus, my family got on national television. That was the peak. The comedown was finding out Dad was human after all-fallible.

He saw the world simply. Matters of faith were matters of fact to him. It frustrated us both that I so desperately sought a deeper, seemingly elusive understanding of things. Then, when I was nineteen and serving as a missionary, Dad was killed. I’ve never been as distraught or learned so much about faith and forgiveness as I did during the week that followed.

That’s all for now, I’m just super excited about this and wanted to make sure you saw it. I think the cover is perfect and I could not be happier with it. Thank you, those of you who read the chapters on this very website and encouraged me to resubmit to a publisher. That was definitely the right call!

The Trap of Nostalgia

I grew up in two places, primarily, and they are both special to me, but the first thing I think of when I reflect on either one is gunfire.

The place where I lived was the home I grew up in on Buckingham Way. My parents moved us away from there after a FBI sting operation at a mini-mart a stone’s throw away resulted in two Agents dying and the killers hiding out in our neighborhood. One of them in the house behind ours. We were trapped until the criminals were found later that morning; my first experience with quarantine. I remember it being a lot more fun than the current one.

The second place I grew up in was my Dad’s store on the very outskirts of Fresno, where he sold guns, fish bait, sodas, candy, and cigarettes—and not always safely (I’ll spare you the details in this post). Despite the violence of the area and my father’s occupation, I spent a LOT of time in “The Shop” working, playing, shooting plastic army men out back with a BB gun, waiting for dad to finish work so we could go to a movie, and playing “fish out of water” with the minnows in the tanks he kept in the back. Just to torture them. The Shop is firmly imprinted as a magical place on my brain, burned alongside every terrible thing that happened there and because of it. In The Other Side of Fear, my forthcoming book* about all the violence Dad suffered at the Shop and the growing up I did in between it all, I describe my time there this way:

A full-sized Donkey Kong video game cabinet sat near the front door. I spent every possible minute jumping barrels and rescuing damsels in distress, my Atomic Fire Ball cooling in a Dixie Cup full of water next to the joystick (a low-rent chemistry experiment that made it easier for me to skip the “fire” and get right to the sugar). Meanwhile, just a few feet away, someone would ask Dad if he could see a handgun before purchasing a Coke and a pack of Marlboros.

I knew there wasn’t much to it. The entirety of the Shop seemed quite a bit smaller than the three-bedroom house we lived in. Definitely dustier. Winds from the surrounding countryside and farmlands kicked up the dirt surrounding it on the regular, pushing it all inside and casting a thin blanket of wispy grime on the cracked cement floor. A broom behind the counter justified its existence by shooing it all away on at least a quarterly basis. Deep, muddy puddles dressed the Shop on all sides after a rain, with the exception of the side it shared with the bar next door. The front faced out toward the highway, a flat slab of concrete its only accouterment. If you could see it. The manmade parking surface was usually covered in oil and sludge.

The backrooms—secret places at every grocery store and mini-mart my father didn’t own—didn’t hide anything special. Just palettes of beer and soda. The walk-in freezer housing the fishing bait Dad distributed throughout the Valley, as effective as it was as a refuge during the summer, reeked of worm and earth.

I was Bill’s Son, the little prince within the Shop that was his kingdom. The Donkey Kong games were always free of charge. So were the New York Seltzers (always the Vanilla Crème) that gave such sweet relief when the temperatures swelled and the swamp cooler wasn’t cutting it. Drinks, Frozen Burritos of questionable nutritional value, and candy (whose nutritional value—or lack thereof—was never in question) were all there for the taking. Long as I asked King Dad first.

That is a child’s description of a childlike time, devoid of any discussion of the perils or appropriateness of such a place. I didn’t even blink as I ran past the .45’s and the 30 ought 6’s on glorious display in their glass cases. The moral implications of my father making his living by selling instruments of death were too unknown for me to even consider. Neither did I ever imagine that any of the many robberies or arson fires the Shop suffered could occur while I was there. They never had, so why would they? And it never, ever crossed my mind the emotional and financial toll running such a place and depending on it for income took on my mother and father. Not even when Dad desperately sought employment or business opportunities elsewhere did it occur to me that maybe he didn’t love the Shop as much as I did. I thought he just wanted a change of pace; somewhere else fun that I could run around in.

I try not to be nostalgic. There’s so much that’s new, and so many things old in this world I’ve never experienced that I think looking back, even wistfully, can be a trap. We can sometimes mistake times gone by as the very best times, especially compared with today, but it’s often not really the case. Saturday Night Live isn’t “not funny anymore,” you’re only remembering the good sketches. Likewise, recalling the 1950’s as a golden age for morality in the United States is to deny the reality of so many Black Americans and women for whom it was a time of denied rights and diminished personhood.

The Shop wasn’t just my own personal arcade and Dad’s kingdom. It was his death trap.

When I look back on my childhood, the wonderful sits alongside the horrific, comfortably. This is why I can both be glad my daughters haven’t ever experienced the violence and fear my brothers and I did, and I can want to tell them all about it like it was the coolest thing ever, too. Because it was. It was very cool. Fun, even. That’s both the prerogative of youth and the privilege of looking back. Of nostalgia.

Yesterday, I went and visited the site of the Shop, right at the end of Hwy 180 going West out of Fresno. It’s not there anymore. It was demolished some years ago, and nothing has been built to take its place. The Shop was right there, in the space where there is now only dark brown dirt and odd pieces of litter thrown out of speeding, passing cars.

I got out of my car and walked around a little. At near 100 degrees, it was hot, as it always seemed to be whenever I visited the Shop, even in the winter. There’s an AM/PM going up across the street and the highway didn’t used to end right there, but otherwise the surrounding area looks the same.

But it doesn’t feel the same. I got out of the car because I wanted to feel the space again, or at least see if I could. But I couldn’t. The Shop is gone, and it took all the ghosts with it.

Probably better that way.

*The Other Side of Fear is due out Oct. 13, 2020 from Cedar Fort Publishing and will be available in a variety of formats.

 

All Parents are Terrible

Parents are terrible. You know this incontrovertible fact if you’ve ever read any published memoir about growing up. There’s one universal theme to all of them: the parents should be arrested and the key thrown away for the cruelty they inflicted on their progeny, the writer. If you were a space alien and the only thing you knew about the parenting practices of earthlings was what you read in books like The Glass Castle and Running With Scissors, you’d be justifiably horrified and immediately set about liberating the youth of the world through abduction (wait a minute, you don’t think…?). In fact, for a lot of coming-of-age memoirs, that literally is what the book is about: all-time, world class, terrible parenting. It’s the very best revenge anyone ever devised against all the therapy they had to shell out for later: immortalizing the parental misdeeds in print.

I suppose there’s a universality to that experience, and it certainly makes for good copy, but it’s pretty far from my own experience and, at the very least, the experiences of most people who belong to the same Church I do* (aka the culture I’m most familiar with). I tend to think there are more decent parents out there than bad, and I’ll hold up my own as a good, if imperfect, example.

*I say this having conducted no studies and done no polls, so I’m speaking mostly from experience and observation. The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Church teachings provide a solid foundation for highly functional families. Any parents who draw from that deep, deep well are bound to get it more right than wrong.

Which brings up a good question: If I’ve written an entire book (tentative title: The Other Side of Fear) about my own growing up and my parents are a big part of it, how is the story I’m telling in any way interesting or exciting?

I guess it’s not. Save for a handful of chapters, my parents and I largely get along.

So, boring book.

I’m being a little facetious. Once you throw in the shootings, the murder, the bullies, the helicopters circling our house at 1am, the flooded city, the thief my dad runs down, the missionary tales, and everything else, you don’t really need to ladle bad parenting on top to have an interesting and exciting story. But bad parenting? No, that’s not really one of the ingredients I’m cooking with. My story is about growing up through through difficult things with good parents.

People clamor for good, clean, positive stories, but they flock to conflict and the controversial. These types of stories are not mutually exclusive, but they can be difficult to bring together, depending on the market and the audience, and, most importantly, the writer. Those who traffic in positivity can be afraid to let the real world in for fear they’re not being positive or uplifting enough. Their stories, consequently, can be, yeah, super boring. Meanwhile, those who focus mostly on conflict and controversy can easily choke out anything positive, or simply dismiss such notions altogether for fear of “watering down” or because their worldview doesn’t allow for it in the first place. I’m talking extremes here. The pendulum doesn’t only swing one way or the other, but I would argue that the mainstream creative world encourages a more cynical form of storytelling than not, and for good reason: it sells. At least, that’s the current thinking.

And I think it’s that kind of thinking that leads mainstream publishing towards bad parenting and cynical, isn’t-life-horrible? narratives, and away from any kind of positive, uplifting, religious narrative, even when done in a way that’s inclusive (another topic for another time).

I am not a fan of extreme positivity or extreme cynicism. Speaking of religion, I think good stories are like a religious life well-lived: accepting of the reality of the actual world we occupy while acknowledging the hope and reality that is above this world. It’s only when you combine the two things together that you get a story that is truly true and resonates and moves and uplifts and entertains and enlightens and encourages. You get your conflict and your controversy, and you slam it up against hope and positivity, and you end up with something that is dynamic. That isn’t so one-note and serves a defensible purpose.

My parents are both very human in the telling. They have flaws and foibles and quirks and maybe do not-so-great things because they are not perfect, godly beings. But, if I’ve done my job correctly, it all makes them more endearing than anything. There to prove them real and relatable, not to take them down. I can’t present them as real people if I only speak of them positively. And being real is the only way to get at the truth.

***

In other news…I’ve done a lot of the homework publisher Cedar Fort assigned me to get the book ready for publication. Writing my bio, submitting my author photo, etc. One of the big tasks that will take months to complete is reaching out to people for “endorsements.” These are the blurbs you read on the backs of books from people with some reputation whose praise you can trust. It’s a huge favor to ask someone of influence to read your book and appraise it, so I was a bit nervous to go out and ask. I hate asking for favors.

But, I’ve already gotten three “Yes” responses back! I can’t wait to share with you who they are (they’re very, very cool), but that feels premature right now and there’s always the chance they could read the manuscript, not like it, decline to offer their endorsement, and ask for monetary compensation for time wasted (wait…that’s not a thing, right?). But still, they’re willing to take a shot. Which is awesome.

Photo by Sebastian Voortman from Pexels

 

CONTRACT SIGNED: The Other Side of Fear Will Be Published This Year

I don’t understand how 15 years of heartache can be over just like that. When I signed the contract this morning, it was so simple. Almost anti-climactic. 15 years and with a few strokes of the keyboard and a click of the mouse, it was done.

To be fair, I spent about 8 of those 15 years completely ignoring this little book I’d written and all the disappointments that came with it. But. But, that’s all behind me now. Because Bullets and M&M’s aka Raised by a Dead Man aka A Suspicious Peace aka THE OTHER SIDE OF FEAR* will be finally be released this year by Cedar Fort Publishing.

“But Brock,” I hear you thinking (I have superpowers). “You’ve already had a book published, and don’t you have a graphic novel coming out in July?”

First of all, thank you for paying such close attention. That’s really flattering. Second, yes, this is not my first go-round with publishing, but this book is different. This book is my baby.

This book is the reason I started writing in the first place.

I can remember it distinctly: I was 28 years old, I’d just vomited a series of blogs about my dad, and I got the clear impression: write the book. I had never written a book before. Never written anything close to that length, but I knew I was supposed to do it anyway. Write my father’s story; make sure he is remembered and get it published. I was so clear about my mandate and never doubted the book’s publication despite the fact I was a first-time author and literally teaching myself how to write properly over the next 5 years it took to craft the tale. I was naive, but driven.

So, after that effort crashed and burned, I was left confused and a little aimless, but mostly confused. Why would I be inspired to write a book no one would ever see? “For your kids!” my kind friends would tell me. “They have no money!” I would shout back.

I’m kidding. If anything has changed between 2012 and now, it’s that I don’t really care about the money (shh. don’t tell the publisher), I just want to get the story out there for the same reason I felt compelled to write it in the first place:

I think it can help people. It has helped people already.

Cedar Fort is a fantastic publisher that’s been around for over 30 years. They are a big player in the Latter-Day Saint market, putting out around 150 books a year. Among them, they’ve put out memoir titles like More Than the Tattooed Mormon, Left Standing, and We Are All Paralyzed. They also have made great strides in mainstream publishing, even expanding their reach into multimedia to include movies, music, audiobooks, etc. Could we see The Other Side of Fear turned into an audiobook? It’s possible!

This is a big swing from my original ambition. Originally, I sought mainstream publication and acceptance of the book because I really, genuinely thought a good story well written is a good story well written, no matter where it comes from. But that’s not really how publishing works. They need to market, first and foremost, and there’s no place in the mainstream publishing world for a spiritual coming-of-age memoir with good parenting that doesn’t end with the author turning their back on their religion. There just isn’t. A hard lesson well learned.

If I had to guess, I’d say I had to wait this long to sign with Cedar Fort to shake my personal tree of knowledge properly and appreciate and be worthy of the market that’s been under my nose the entire time. There’s some amazing work being done in the faith world, and Cedar Fort publishes some of the best of it.

It’s a real full circle moment. I’ve got a connection to Cedar Fort I don’t think they’re even aware of. The first book they ever published was a collection of near death experiences called Beyond the Veil by Lee Nelson. My dad collected books like that, and my mom read that one as well. In fact, Mom was so inspired by the book she wrote Lee Nelson a letter all about my father’s 1989 shooting and how he would have died that night but for divine intervention.

Lee Nelson was so taken with my mom’s letter he asked for her permission to print it in the second volume of the series. And, lo and behold, there’s my mom in Beyond the Veil, Vol. 2, telling the story of my dad’s shooting 30 years before Cedar Fort publishes my version.

There’s so much to do next. Getting the right title and the right cover art designed is way up there on the list. Those two things alone can make or break a publication. There’s also more revisions to do on the manuscript now that Cedar Fort’s editors will have a crack at it (thankfully, I actually enjoy rewriting). Marketing plans will be crafted, a website will be updated/designed, and endorsements will be sought.

All of that is ahead. To those of you who took the time to read the chapters and offer your insight and stories of how it impacted you before I took it down off the web, I thank you. You’re a big part of why I had the confidence to risk putting this book out there…one more time. And here we are!

*It’s possible I’ll need to add another “aka” as Cedar Fort reserves the right to change the title yet again to something more palatable to the market. I’m certainly pulling for The Other Side of Fear, but if I’ve learned anything over the past 15 years it’s this: I know nothing. 

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Is the Hunt for Publication Already Over?

Over that past month I’ve been submitting The Other Side of Fear like crazy, and I think I might be done. I’ve sent either a query, sample chapters, or the full manuscript (or some combination of all three) out to 17 literary agents and 2 publishing houses. I’ve heard back from two agents so far. Both rejected the book, though one of them did forgo the traditional form letter to send me a nice, brief personal note about how much she admires the project but doesn’t feel she’s a good fit for it. Fair enough.

That doesn’t answer the question implied in the first sentence of this blog. Namely, why am considering quitting the hunt? I’ll get to that.

If you’re like me 11 years ago, you stumbled on that word “query” above. It’s short for “query letter,” and it’s the most basic document an author sends out when submitting. It’s a pitch, both of your book and, a little bit, yourself. It’s maybe the most difficult three or four paragraphs an author will ever write because it has to do so much in such a small amount of space. Agents and publishers receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of query letters every year, and there’s lots of ways to do them incorrectly. You both want to follow the expected format and convey the right information, and also stand out from the pack. It’s not easy. It really is a horrible piece of writing I loathe and hope to never write again.

When I first started this process, it was helpful to me to see what other authors had written as their query letters. In the spirt of that, here’s what I’ve been sending out (though I will modify it here and there, depending on who I’m sending it to):

 

Dear Mr. Agentman,

After my father is shot twelve times in an armed robbery and survives, I begin a journey of self-discovery and questioning of my faith that brings an unwanted, angry tension to our relationship. Eight years later, Dad is brutally gunned down again—this time with fatal results—and my world goes spinning.

There’s only one word to describe your dad getting shot a dozen times: cool. I was twelve. The cost of terrible violence was more than just unknown to me—it was negligible. I never doubted Dad would live. He could put footballs into orbit, just like Superman. Only good things came from the shooting: my sixth grade popularity profile went way up and, bonus, my family got on national television. William Shatner said Dad’s name! That was the peak. The comedown was finding out Dad was human after all—fallible. He saw the world simply. Matters of faith were matters of fact to him. It frustrated us both that I so desperately sought a deeper, seemingly elusive understanding of things. Then, when I was nineteen, Dad was killed in another shooting and I started an investigation into who he really was and what he was all about. I’ve never been as distraught or learned so much in such a short period of time as I did during the week that followed.

My book, THE OTHER SIDE OF FEAR: A COMING-OF-AGE STORY BETWEEN TWO SHOOTINGS, is an uplifting personal memoir about forgiveness, the challenges of faith, and how losing a parent can, in fact, be a very good thing.

If you are interested, I’d love to send you the completed 88,000 word manuscript. I’m a former Art Director, the writer and illustrator of the YA novel “Paper Bag Mask”, the creator of the comic “The SuperFogeys”, and the award-winning filmmaker behind the short film “The Shift”, now streaming at VidAngel.com. I live with my wife and three daughters in California. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Brock Heasley

 

It’s not terrible, is it? It doesn’t seem like much now, but man did a lot of work and revision go into it. And every time I hit “send” on an email and put it out into the digital ether? A heart-stopping moment. Every time. (That’s also about when I would second guess literally every single word in the email, but let’s not get into those neurotic weeds.)

I would be very happy to never send that letter again, and the thing is…I kind of think I’m never going to. Because, yesterday, I got another email back from one of the people I’d submitted to. It was a brief email. I knew immediately it was another rejection. The brief ones always are, and I’ve gotten so many I’m just numb to them. I feel no anticipation whatsoever, no thought at all that the letter back with be anything other than a rejection, so what’s to get worked up about?

Like I said, it was a short letter.

But (and you’re ahead of me here by this point), it wasn’t a rejection at all. It was an offer of publication. One of the two publishing houses I’d submitted to got back to me and they “love” the book and would like to publish it. It was that simple. A short email, giving me one of the greatest bits of news I’d heard in quite some time.

I spent a year getting to this point the last time I shopped this book, all those years ago. This time, it only took a month. I didn’t see that coming.

Now, there is a big difference between this time and last time. Normally, publishing houses are not places authors have access to. You need an agent to even approach the larger publishers, but for smaller and more niche publishers you just need a great, marketable story. The two houses I submitted to were chosen carefully. Both of them cater to the exact audience I think would really come out and support this book, and both of them have a long history of success.

The one who wants to publish the book? The very first submission I made this year.

I’m purposefully not telling you the name of the publisher. You might know it, you might not, but I’ll only feel comfortable sharing it once the dotted line is signed. There’s still a lot to figure out. There is the matter of what the contract looks like, of course, but also all those agents and the other publishing house I haven’t heard back from. It is customary to give notice of an offer to give everyone a chance to put the submission on the top of the pile and determine whether they’d like to pursue it or not. After a short period, I’ll close the window and make a decision.

In the meantime, I’m excited to talk to the interested publisher and find out more about what they see for The Other Side of Fear and what our agreement looks like. That’s the next step for them. The next step for everyone else is just to wait and see what happens.

But, barring some massive issue I don’t see coming, The Other Side of Fear will be published. How about that?

Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels