Writing a novel is like growing a garden ~ a long haul, but
a joyous one.
When I was a kid growing up on a ranch, my mom grew huge
gardens. They had to feed not just my large family but other relatives and
workers too. I remember one year we have
six rows of potatoes I swear a 100 yards long that wound around along the creek
bottom. That was 1976, the second U.S.
centennial year, and we would listen to the radio as we picked potatoes and the
same commercial would come on again and again celebrating the date. It became a
running joke. At other times, I also loved nothing better than to be working on
a tractor in the fields near the garden and then to stop by and pick a tomato and
a turnip. I’d eat them while driving down the rows. Tomato juice dripped down
my chin, and I’d peel the turnip with my teeth and carve away bite after bite.
Then I grew up. My
husband is a born farmer, and so when we bought a house it wasn’t long before
we were planting gardens. It’s one thing
to watch your parents do a garden and another thing entirely to grow one
yourself. Especially since we live at 7,200
feet above sea level. Our summers are
less than three months, and so we have to be creative and use season extenders
as much as possible.
It’s funny how every year is different. Some years you’ll
get lots of string beans and others you can’t get them to grow to save your
life. We had a really hard time getting
carrots to come up for years, and with a straight face my husband’s granddad
said, “You planting the seeds upside down?”
Early on, something was getting to our plants. The extension person
suggested it was rabbits. Well, we had a
cat and a couple of dogs, and so it wouldn’t have been rabbits, but I believed
her, so I made my husband put up a rabbit fence. Turns out it was cutworms (moth larvae)
coming up out of the soil and eating off the bottoms of the stems, making the
plants fall over, but ever since then my husband’s given me a bad time about my
“tiger fence.”
You wouldn’t think so, but we do really well with
tomatoes. Well, my husband does ~ that’s
his project. The thing about tomatoes is
that they grow 24 hours a day and so they need heat 24 hours a day. We don’t have that here because it drops too
low in the evenings, and so we use walls of water (a handy device of plastic
that holds water and absorbs and emits heat) that gives the plants what they
need. We have a pretty good crop every
year.
But the thing about a garden is you are rewarded for
constant effort. You can’t just plant
and go. You have to water regularly ~
especially in the Great American Desert where we are ~ or set up a watering timer. You have to weed regularly or they will get
away from you. To get the best results
you have to plant inside early or get large plants from a greenhouse and you
have to replant regularly throughout the season to stagger the output. You really have to be dogged about it. But, you know, every year I think the
garden’s going to be a wash this year, and every year it pulls through and
amazes me with its output. Not that we
could live on it by any stretch, but it’s so satisfying.
Writing a novel is the same.
I’ve written ~ and rewritten ~ two novels and I’m in the middle of the
first draft of my third, and also I’ve done a short story collection. You go
through much of the same convolutions when writing a novel as growing a
garden. You start with such vigor and
high hope, but it doesn’t take long before reality sets in and you’re like,
“This is real work!” But you put your
head down and go and things start to happen and you get excited. You have your first moment of real harvest or
a scene that really pleases you. But
then also you have those moments where it all sucks. You’re sure you’re the worst writer/gardener
in the world and they should revoke your license. You also ignore it at times, and then it gets
away from you. In the case of a garden,
you get lots of weeds and few produce, and in the case of a novel it becomes this
wooden thing and your mind won’t produce either. You’re infinitely rewarded by constant
regular effort. And if you push on you
get this beautiful and wonderful product that you’re very proud of. And it take multiple “revisions” ~ you can’t
just have your first go. You have to go
back and replant ~ i.e., you have to revise and rethink and change course
midstream. If you gave up after the
first planting, you wouldn’t get nearly as much or the quality of product.
Above all else, it’s a dang long slog. You push and push and hit the depths of
despair and want to just give up. And sometimes you do just that, you give
up. But there’s always next year and the
next novel and you engage it with high hopes.
And then when you complete a draft, you’re over the moon! The produce tastes so good and you’re so
proud of what you’ve accomplished!
You just have to have faith in the process. It’ll work out, even when you’re ready to
just give up. Keep after it. It’ll
happen!
Deep Down Things
Tamara Linse
Genre: literary fiction
Publisher: Willow Words
Date of Publication: July 14, 2014
Number of pages: 330
Word Count: 75,000 words
Cover Artist: Tamara Linse
Book Description:
Deep Down Things, Tamara Linse’s debut novel, is the emotionally riveting story of three siblings torn apart by a charismatic bullrider-turned-writer and the love that triumphs despite tragedy.
From the death of her parents at sixteen, Maggie Jordan yearns for lost family, while sister CJ drowns in alcohol and brother Tibs withdraws. When Maggie and an idealistic young writer named Jackdaw fall in love, she is certain that she’s found what she’s looking for. As she helps him write a novel, she gets pregnant, and they marry. But after Maggie gives birth to a darling boy, Jes, she struggles to cope with Jes’s severe birth defect, while Jackdaw struggles to overcome writer’s block brought on by memories of his abusive father.
Ambitious, but never seeming so, Deep Down Things may remind you of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper.
Available at Amazon BN Smashwords Kobo other international ebookstores and through Ingram.
Chapter
1
Maggie
Jackdaw isn’t
going to make it. I can tell by the way the first jump unseats him. The big white
bull lands and then tucks and gathers underneath. Jackdaw curls forward and
whips the air with his left hand, but his butt slides off-center. Thirty yards
away on the metal bleachers, I involuntarily scoot sideways—as if it would do
any good. The bull springs out from under Jackdaw and then arches its back,
flipping its hind end.
Jackdaw is
tossed wide off the bull’s back. In the air he is all red-satin arms and
shaggy-chapped legs but then somehow he grabs his black felt hat. He lands
squarely on both feet, knees bent to catch his weight. Then he straightens with
a grand sweep of his hat. Even from here you can see his smile burst out.
There’s something about the way he opens his body to the crowd, like a dog
rolling over to show its belly, that makes me feel sorry for him but drawn to
him too. With him standing there, holding himself halfway between a relaxed
slouch and head-high pride, I can see why my brother Tibs admires him.
I haven’t
actually met Jackdaw before, but he and Tibs hang out together a lot, and they
have some English classes together. I haven’t run across him on campus.
The crowd on the
bleachers goes wild. It doesn’t matter that Jackdaw didn’t stay on the full
eight seconds. They holler and wolf-whistle and shake their programs. Their
metallic stomping vibrates my body and brings up dust and the smell of old
manure.
With Jackdaw off
its back, the bull leaps into the air. It gyrates its hips and flips its head,
a long ribbon of snot curling off its nostril and arcing over its back. Then it
stops and turns and looks at Jackdaw. It hangs its head low. It shifts its
weight onto its front hooves, butt in the air, and pauses. The clown with the
black face paint and the big white circles around his eyes runs in front of the
bull to distract it, but it shakes its head like it’s saying no to dessert.
The crowd
hushes.
Then, I can’t
believe it, Jackdaw takes a step toward the bull. The crowd yells, but not like
a crowd, like a bunch of kids on a playground. Some holler encouragement.
Others laugh. Some try to warn him. Some egg him on. My heart beats wild in my
chest like when my sister CJ and I watch those slasher movies and Freddy’s
coming after the guy and you know because he’s the best friend that he’s going
to get killed and you want to warn him. “Bastard deserved it,” CJ always says,
“for being stupid.”
It’s like
Jackdaw doesn’t know the bull’s right there. He starts walking, not directly to
the fence but at a slant toward the loudest of the cheers, which takes him
right past the bull.
I turn to Tibs.
“What’s he doing?”
“He knows his
stuff,” Tibs says, his voice lower than normal. The look on his face makes me
want to give him a hug, but we’re not a hugging family, so I nod, even though
Tibs isn’t looking at me.
Tibs is leaning
forward, his eyes focused on Jackdaw, his elbows on his knees, and his
shoulders hunched. Tibs is tall and thin, and he always looks a little fragile,
a couple of sticks propped together. His face is our dad’s, big eyes and not
much of a chin, sort of like an alien or an overgrown boy. He has the habit of
playing with his fingers, which he’s doing now. It’s like he wants to reach out
and grab something but he can’t quite bring himself to. It’s the same when he
talks—he’ll cover his mouth with his hand like he’s holding back his words.
Tibs is the
tallest of us three kids—CJ, he, and I. CJ’s the oldest. I’m the youngest and
the shortest. Grandma Rose, Dad’s mom, always said I got left with the
leftovers. Growing up, it seemed like CJ and Tibs got things and were told
things that I was too young to have or to know. It was good though, too,
because when Dad and Mom got killed when I was sixteen, I didn’t know enough to
worry much about money or things. They had saved up some so we could get by.
But poor CJ. She in particular had to be the parent, but she was used to
babysitting us and she was older anyway—twenty-two, I think.
Like that time
when we were kids when CJ was babysitting and I got so sick. Turned out to be
pneumonia. I don’t know where our parents were. Most likely, they were away on
business, but it could have been something else. Grandma Rose had cracked her
hip—I remember that—so she couldn’t take care of us, but it was only for a
couple of days and CJ was thirteen at the time. In general, CJ had started
ignoring us, claiming she was a teenager now and didn’t want to play with
babies any more, like kids do, which really got Tibs, though he didn’t do much
besides sulk about it. But that day she was playing with us like she was a
little kid too.
We had been
playing in an irrigation ditch making a dam. I pretended to be a beaver, and
Tibs pretended to be an engineer on the Hoover Dam. I don’t remember CJ
pretending to be anything, just helping us arrange sticks and slop mud and then
flopping in the water to cool down. I started feeling pretty bad. Over the
course of the day, I had a cough that got worse and then I got really hot and
then really cold and my body ached. My lungs started wheezing when I breathed.
I remember thinking someone had punched a hole in me, like a balloon, and all
my air was leaking out. CJ felt my head and then felt it again and then grabbed
my arm and dragged me to the house, Tibs trailing behind. All I wanted to do
was lie down, but she bundled me in a blanket and put me in a wagon, and between
them she and Tibs pulled me down the driveway and out onto the highway. We
lived twelve miles from town, in the house where I live now. I don’t know why
CJ didn’t just call 911. But here we were, rattling down the middle of the
highway. A woman in a truck stopped and gave us a ride to the hospital here in
Loveland. Can you imagine it? A skinny muddy thirteen-year-old girl in her
brown bikini and her skinny nine-year-old brother, taller than her but no
bigger around than a stick and wearing red, white, and blue swim trunks,
hauling their six-year-old sister through the sliding doors of the emergency
room in a little red wagon. What those nurses must’ve thought.
On the
bleachers, I glance from Tibs back out to Jackdaw. The bull doesn’t know what’s
going on either. It shakes its lowered head and snorts, blowing up dust from
the ground. Jackdaw bows his head and slips on his hat. Then the bull decides
and launches itself at Jackdaw. Just as the bull charges down on Jackdaw, the
white-eyed clown runs between him and the bull and slaps the bull’s nose.
Jackdaw turns toward them just as the bull plants its front feet, turns, and
charges after the running clown.
Pure foolishness
and bravery. My hands are shaking. I want to go down and take Jackdaw’s hand
and lead him out of the arena. A thought like a little alarm bell—who’d want to
care about somebody who’d walk a nose-length from an angry bull? But something
about the awkward hang of his arms and the flip of his chaps and the way his
hat sets cockeyed on his head makes me want to be with him.
The clown runs
toward a padded barrel in the center of the arena, his white-stockinged calves
flipping the split legs of his suspendered oversized jeans. He jumps into the
barrel feet-first and ducks his head below the rim. The crowd gasps and murmurs
as the charging bull hooks the barrel over onto its side and bats it this way
and that for twenty yards. The bull stops and turns and faces the crowd, head
high, tail cocked and twitching. He tips his snout up once, twice, and snorts.
While the bull
chases the clown, Jackdaw walks to the fence and climbs the boards.
The clown pops
his head out of the sideways barrel where he can see the bull from the rear. He
pushes himself out and then scrambles crabwise around behind. He turns to face
the bull, his hands braced on the barrel. The bull’s anger still bubbling, it
turns back toward the clown and charges. As the bull hooks at the barrel and
butts it forward, the clown scoots backwards, keeping the barrel between him
and the bull, something I’m sure he’s done many times. He keeps scooting as the
bull bats at the barrel. But then something happens—the clown trips and falls
over backwards. The barrel rolls half over him as he turns sideways and tries
to push himself up. The bull stops for a split second, as if to gloat, and then
stomps on the clown’s franticly scrambling body and hooks the horns on its
tilted head into the clown’s side, flipping the clown over onto his back.
Why do rodeo
clowns do it? Put their lives on the line for other people? I don’t understand
it.
The pickup men
on the horses are there, but a second too late. They charge the bull, their
horses shouldering into it. They yell and whip with quirts and kick with
stirrupped boots. Tail still cocked, the reluctant bull is hazed away and into
the gathering pen at the end of the arena. The metal gate clangs shut behind
it.
Head thrown back
and arms splayed, the clown isn’t moving. Men jump off the rails and run toward
him, and the huge doors at the end of the arena open and an ambulance comes in.
It stops beside the clown. The EMTs jump out, pull out a gurney, and then
huddle around the prone body. One goes back to the vehicle and brings some
equipment. There’s frantic activity, and with the help of the other men, they
place him on the gurney and slide him into the ambulance. It pulls out the
doors and disappears, and the siren wails and recedes.
Tibs stands up,
looks at me, and jerks his head, saying come on, let’s go. I stand and follow
him.
About the Author:
Like the characters in Deep Down Things, the author Tamara Linse and her husband have lost babies. They had five miscarriages before their twins were born through the help of a wonderful woman who acted as a gestational carrier. Tamara is also the author of the short story collection How to Be a Man and earned her master’s in English from the University of Wyoming, where she taught writing. Her work appears in the Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, and Talking River, among others, and she was a finalist for Arts & Letters and Glimmer Train contests, as well as the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize for a book of short stories. She works as an editor for a foundation and a freelancer. Find her online at tamaralinse.com and on her blog Writer, Cogitator, Recovering Ranch Girl at www.tamara-linse.blogspot.com
Website http://www.tamaralinse.com
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/tlinse
Twitter https://twitter.com/TamaraLinse
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