The Payoff: Patience rewarded.

The preorder is up and the wait is nearly over. The Payoff  goes live this Friday, April 30th. Thanks to all of you who have preordered already! I'm grateful to each and every one of you.

Cheetah 123 | Deposit Photos

Patience is a virtue, or so I've been told. We have all been forced to practice patience during this past year plus, waiting for our vaccinations to take effect and for the world to reopen. Some of us have been more gracious about this down time than others, it's true. But whether we grump or whine or take more drastic measures -- or sit back and resign ourselves to waiting -- it's all really just the way we choose to pass the time until the pandemic is over.

Even before the virus hit, we had a choice about how to react to waiting. There are all sorts of coping strategies available, from meditation to creative crafting to kickboxing. But really, the only thing that will fix the problem is the passage of time.

In The Payoff, Janis and Jan have had a lot of time to practice patience. Forty years, in fact. Raised together at a quasi-research facility called the Institute, they fell in love -- and then to protect themselves and each other from the woman who tormented them there, they split up. Four decades later, they have reunited to finally right the wrongs that were done to them all those years ago.

Seems like a ridiculously long time to wait, right? I received some similar complaints about Naomi Witherspoon's ten-year romance with Brock Holt in Seized. Why did she wait around so long for him to ask her to marry him? Why didn't she dump him when she realized he was a jerk? Well, to be honest, it was partly because that was the timeline that the story demanded. 

But the book's critics also didn't seem to want to give enough credit to inertia. You know, you're in this thing and it's not great, but it's really not that terrible if you squint just right, and you can manage it okay or anyway you tell yourself you can. And life happens and pretty soon you realize you've been with this guy for ten years and nothing's happening, and why is this owl dive-bombing you in downtown Denver?

Naomi was not so much practicing patience as she was practicing inattentiveness. She woke up pretty fast when Joseph showed up, though.

In The Payoff, Janis Fowler and Jan Marek are in a completely different situation. As children, they mentally granted outsized power to Dr. Tandy, who had total control over their lives. They weren't much more than children when they left the Institute -- they were certainly naive about how the world worked -- so they never had the chance that you and I have had, as adults, to recast our mental picture of the adults in our young lives as fallible people who don't control us any longer. And Jan had Seen that he and Janis would be reunited someday, and that would be the time they could finally give Tandy what she deserved. 

So they've waited. For forty years.

There are lots of true-life stories about couples who split up when they're young due to circumstances beyond their control and reunite decades later. Usually, in the meantime, they've gotten on with their lives: they've married somebody else, raised a family, worked, or gone to war. In these tales, when the couple gets back together again, they often find that while they're different people now than before they split, their reunion was worth the wait.

Janis and Jan seem to think their reunion was worth the wait. I'm hoping you, dear readers, will agree.

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I don't have a link for the paperback edition yet. I'll share that next week. And not to be too much of a tease, but I might even have news about a special edition of The Payoff then, too. 

Sounds like it's a good week to practice patience. See you next Sunday.

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These moments of impatient blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep masking up and social distancing! And get vaccinated when you can!

On balance, some book news.

Just last week, I promised that I would write about writing again, and here I am, doing it. You're welcome.

Authors are often asked where their story ideas come from. It's not a question most of us enjoy answering. Oh, sometimes we can pinpoint the moment or event where the first germ of an idea originated (the Transcendence trilogy, for instance, sprang from a wholly unplanned stop at the Newark Earthworks in central Ohio, and Seasons of the Fool came about because I wanted to write a novel set in the neighborhood where I grew up). 

But sometimes there's nothing in the real world to point to. Once in grad school, when I had a short story due, I wrote an opening sentence by stringing a bunch of words together and then wrote a story to fit the sentence. The story came out okay, but how would I explain how I got there? The Muse works in mysterious ways.

And so it is with my upcoming novel, which I drafted during NaNoWriMo this past November. I was pretty sure, when the first draft was done, that I'd written a steaming pile of crap. But after a couple of rounds of self-editing, I decided it wasn't as bad as I thought -- and could even be salvaged. So I sent it along to my editor late last night. And I now feel confident that The Payoff -- yes, at long last, the book has a title! -- will be published on or about Beltane, May 1.

The germ of the plot was a Facebook post or meme or picture -- which of course I can't find now -- about how readers would love to have a story about an elderly woman who solves mysteries or crimes or something. Hey, if there's a market for books where the main character is old, I'm happy to oblige. So the main characters in The Payoff are a man and a woman in late middle age who haven't seen one another in forty years. Deliberately. Because they didn't want to run afoul of an older woman who tormented them all through their growing-up years. Now this woman is back, and she's causing trouble for someone else who doesn't deserve it, and Our Heroes have decided it's payback time.

After the first round of editing, I sat back and thought about the novel's themes. I came up with three: balance, patience, and justice. Having those concepts in the back of my mind helped me shape my steaming pile of first draftedness into a novel that I'm pretty proud of. So I thought I'd talk about each of them in turn.

This week, the topic is balance. 

ElisaRiva | CC0 | Pixabay

(I could have gone for a pile of rocks beside a rushing stream to illustrate this post, but this image feels more true-to-life to me.)

The main characters are Janis Fowler and Jan Marek. Jan (who is male) has the ability to See people's futures; Janis can See people's pasts. Their talents cannot be called up on command; they happen when they happen. But over the years, each of them has figured out how to create circumstances that will kick their talents into action. 

In a way, Jan and Janis are a matched set. They balance each other. Together, they have a full picture of a person -- the experiences that shaped them, the choices they've made in critical situations, and how all that will play out in their future lives. Janis and Jan realized early on what takes some of us a lifetime to figure out: Choices have consequences.

While balance within ourselves is always worth cultivating, it isn't enough to ensure a peaceful life. We have to interact with others. Some of these others are seriously unbalanced; sometimes they have power over us, holding the tightrope we're forced to walk. One unhinged choice on their part and boom! Down we go.

If we're lucky -- if we live long enough -- we may get to see that person suffer the consequences of their bad choices. We might even be given the chance to deliver the consequences ourselves. And if we do it right, our balance can be restored.

That, right there, is The Payoff. 

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I'll put the book up for preorder here shortly. I'll let you know when that happens.

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These moments of balanced blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Keep masking up and social distancing! The end is in sight!

Practicing patience.

(copyright greg, flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0)

There's this thing I sometimes do when life gets frustrating (such as now, when I'm fighting with writing my weekly blog post on the iPad). I tell myself that I am practicing patience.

This does two things. First, it reminds me that patience is a good quality -- a virtue, even. And second, it underscores that patience does not spring full-blown and perfect from most of us, most of the time. That's why it's called practicing, right? Because practice is how you get good at it.

For the past several years, I've had plenty of opportunities to practice patience. I talked about one of them last week, when I mentioned that I've been temporarily back in DC for 16 years, waiting for my chance to move back to Denver. Well, I'm here now, and I'm still having to practice patience -- I don't know yet how long this current visit will last, and I don't know for certain whether I'll be able to make the move permanent this year. (Divinatory signs are telling me that this is my year to make the move, but I'm not willing to stake anything on that. I'm well aware that any divination is a snapshot, and things could -- and often do -- change.)

There's another situation that I haven't talked much about in public up to now. It has to do with my mother's estate, and I'm still not comfortable going into many details. But suffice it to say that I've been practicing patience on that for a number of years, as well.

And of course, there's your garden-variety indie-author patience practice: Will the next book be my breakout book? Will I sell any books today? Will I ever sell another book, ever again?

The thing about being patient is that at some point, you have to question whether it's not doing you more harm than good. It's one thing to put off having a cookie until after dinner, and another thing entirely to be so patient that people take advantage of you, or even forget you exist. At some point, you need to set aside your patience practice and do something.

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I have good news for those of you who have been waiting (patiently?) for my next book. I finished the first draft of Firebird's Snare this morning. I need to go back and do some tweaking on Dragon's Web, including making a cover for it. (That kind of took a back seat to writing the second book and, um, practicing patience about whether I was going to get to make this trip to Denver.) But I am confident that we are still on schedule for publication of the first book in the Pipe Woman's Legacy duology in late-ish May. Stay tuned, as they say in broadcasting....

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These patient moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.