Longtime followers of PBW know that I love a good memoir, especially if it’s a memoir about a female comedian. (See my reviews of Yes, Please, and Bossy Pants..)

Once upon a time, I read a book called Rocket Boys. It’s the book that the movie October Sky’s was based on. It’s about a young man named Homer ‘Sonny’ Hickam, who grew up in a West Virginia coal mining town. He wanted to build rockets and work with Werner Von Braun at Nasa. While he never got to meet Von Braun, he did get to work for Nasa, which is the most amazing thing ever. It’s a sad fact, but an unavoidable one, that kids in coal and steel towns don’t always reach their goals. Actually, that’s not true. Kids all over the world usually don’t reach their goals. That’s why it’s such an enduring thing to crave the stories of those who did.

Rocket Boys is inspiring not only because it’s about kids achieving their dreams. It’s also inspiring because it’s about space. Space travel is a consistent universal dream that seems to be shared by the whole world. I think that if you took a member of one of the few remaining tribes untouched by the outside world, taught them to communicate with us and were able to keep them alive against our germs that they’re not immune to, and you told them that mankind had reached the moon, it would answer a deep, unacknowledged need that he didn’t even know he had. Then, we could introduce him to cold brew coffee and really mess with his worldview.

The point is that there is something about space that draws all of our eyes upward. And it should. Space is a great unknown, and we should never lose our fascination with the unknown.

Space made no bigger mark on a generation than the one that was coming of age when Sputnik launched, the baby boomers. That generation looked to the sky and wanted so desperately to make it to the moon. I have an inherent fascination with the generations that came before my own. I think I’m trying to fill a hole in my history. While I have many stories of my family, I have heard little to nothing about what the greater world around them was like before I came along. Part of it is my fault. I don’t talk to my family much, and when I was a child I was never interested in hearing those sorts of stories. I never thought to ask. But I never thought to ask partly because great world events weren’t discussed much in my family. It just wasn’t something we talked about.

Reading Rocket Boys, and the following books show a reader the world through the eyes of a young man. A young man growing up in a town that doesn’t know it’s in its last years. The people of Coalwood are realists. They’re miners, wives of miners, sons, and daughters of miners. The men go off to the mine, the women keep the house, and the children go to school. The daughters know they’ll probably become teachers, nurses or wives. The sons, well the sons know they’re going to either become football players, soldiers, or miners. There isn’t a lot of high dreamers in Coalwood.

Homer ‘Sonny’ Hickam is the second son of a man who loves the mine. Homer all but lives at the mine. He’s taught himself advanced mathematics and physics so that he can do his job. He can’t stay away from the mine. Even though he has two sons.

He’s also the son of a woman who hates the mine, and everything about it. She loves her husband, but the mine comes between them constantly. They battle back and forth about the future of their sons, and their own future as well.

Among all of this, raised by two hard people in the middle of a hard town, Sonny started looking toward the moon. And he started building rockets.

While never clearly expressed in the book, Sonny has more in common with his father than either one of them would like to admit. Homer Sr. is a born leader and so is his son. So when Sonny starts building his rockets, he naturally attracts other young men around him. Together, he and his friends start building rockets and shooting them off. Naturally, in a company covered in coal dust, this is often an issue. Sonny fights with his school to teach him the math he needs. He fights for his parent’s permission to build the rockets. He fights for supplies to build them and a space to launch them. And, when the town sees how hard he’s fighting, the town starts fighting for him.

This book was important to me because I grew up in Western PA. It’s not the same as West Virginia, but there are ties between the two places. Sonny grew up in a coal mining town, I grew up in a steel town. There’s an obvious connection there, and so I feel that there’s a connection between Sonny and me. He had his rockets, I have my stories. We both have the small towns that are more home to us than any one building. Places that will never leave us, even if we leave them. Even, in his case, if the town itself is gone.

If you haven’t read Rocket Boys, I highly advise you check it out. Don’t cheat and just watch the movie, spend some time reading the book. It’s well worth it.

We’re getting close to the launch of Virus now, and I couldn’t be more excited! This is my second major launch of the year, and you’d think I’d be tired of this stuff. But I’m really not.

We have a lot of amazing stuff planned for this launch. All three Station 86 books will be available for 99 cents the whole week of the launch, from July 9^th to the 15^th. That means you’ll be able to have the whole series so far for less than three dollars.

Of course, we’ll also be celebrating on Facebook with a launch party on July 13^th from 6:00 to 9:00. Here’s a list of the awesome writers who will be conducting takeovers.

6:00-Mercedes Prunty

6:30- Me

7:00- Shakyra Dunn

7:30- Richard H. Stephens

8:00- Derek Borne

8:30- Also me.

As always, I couldn’t do what I do without your continued support. I’m so thrilled that Virus has been so popular on the site. I can’t wait until all of you get a chance to read the extended ending.

Stay tuned.

Are you following me on Goodreads? If you’re not, you should be. If only because I bet you’ll be able to predict blog topics ahead of time.

For those of you not following me on Goodreads, I’ve been reading the memoirs of Homer Hickam. I started with Rocket Boys, which inspired the movie October Skies. Now I’m reading The Coalwood Way, book two.

Homer or ‘Sonny’ Hickam is a West Virginian boy who grew up as the son of a mine superintendent. He was a teenager when Sputnik was launched, and it affected him as much as it affected the rest of the country. He decided that he wanted to build rockets to go into space.

Sonny found a hero, as many of us do when we find our passion. He found Werner Von Braun, one of the scientists that sent us into space. One of the scientists that made it possible for one of my personal heroes, Buzz Aldrin, land on the moon.

Werner Von Braun was also a Nazi scientist, brought to America and given amnesty for his crimes as part of Operation Paper Clip along with many other Nazi scientists.

So, he’s a Nazi

But we might not have won the space race without him.

But he worked for Hitler.

But I have him to thank for inspiring America to reach for the stars.

Obviously, he’s a complex person, which brings me to today’s topic. We live every day with the good work of bad men.

Don’t believe me? Here’s another one you might know, but you might not. Do you know anyone who has to take insulin? With diabetes being the epidemic in America that it is, I bet you do. There’s a chance you yourself use insulin.

Did you know that insulin was invented by Nazi scientists? Did you know they horribly tortured people to create it?

I’m not saying this to defend Nazis. Since this has to be said these days, I really hate Nazis. They’re monsters in human form, and the horrors that they committed stagger the imagination. There is no forgiveness in my heart for these people.

But millions of lives have been saved as a direct result, and our whole country was inspired to reach for the stars, and that’s kind of a horrible legacy for two such great things!

This fact, that is inescapable, really bothers me. Do we value the good, no matter how we got it? Do we refuse to use the medical breakthroughs like insulin because of the blood on the hands of the men who created them? Do we spit on Buzz Aldrin’s feet because he rode in a rocket created by a Nazi scientist? (Don’t do that, he’s a great man and he also might punch you.) But, do we say that the ends justified the means, so it’s okay that these horrific things happened?

There’s no good and easy answer in this situation. I know that I’ve puzzled over it for years and I still don’t have a good answer. I honestly don’t think there is a good answer. It’s just an unrefutable fact that we all have to live with.

We live in a world where horrible men and women create good things.

Now, I didn’t tell you all that to make you feel bad. I sure as hell don’t think that anyone who needs insulin or is inspired by the space station should feel guilty about it. I told you this because it’s something we as writers need to understand about the world and the people who dwell within it.

There is no pure evil in this world, just like there is no pure good. These men were not doing what they did to be evil. In fact, Werner Von Braun never really wanted to work for the Nazis. He just wanted to work on rockets. He wanted to go into space and he worked with the people who could make that happen. I’m not saying he was a good man. He just wasn’t a pure evil one.

This is important to understand because if you want to write a realistic world, pure evil shouldn’t exist. If your antagonist is pure evil, you need a rewrite.

Because no one ever thinks they’re the bad guy. Everyone thinks what they’re doing is justified.

Seven pieces of short and flash fiction, showcasing the days of seven very different people. You will find a busy librarian, a lonely man with a guitar and a woman who finds a dream crashing in her brain.

Read it for free now.

Let’s take a break from books today, to talk about something important. This is way more important than most people are acting, actually.

I get it, there’s a lot going on right now. There’s certainly a lot going on in my life right now, and then I’m trying to get involved and help in world issues as well. At least, as much as someone armed with only a blog and a voice can. But if we don’t start paying attention to this, then the world might literally end.

I’m talking of course about the bees. We are losing our bee population rapidly, and no one seems to know why.

Over the last 15 years, we’ve been losing more bees than we can really afford to. Last year, we lost 44% of our bees worldwide. Let me repeat that number loud for the people in the back row.

We lost 44% of bees in the last year!

Now, we normally lose roughly 20% of the bee population every winter. This is considered an acceptable loss because it’s a number that the bees can rebuild when they start making baby bees. 44%, if you’re wondering, isn’t. There just aren’t enough queens making enough babies to recoup that many losses. The worst news is that we’re losing bees in the Summer as well as in the Winter. That’s really not supposed to happen. (All of this information came from the website Bee Informed. Please check it out for more terrifying bee facts.)

So, why is this important? I know a lot of people don’t even like bees. I’m not one of those people, but I get that they’re out there. I guess if you’re allergic, that’s a decent reason to dislike them.

But, here’s the thing, the world might literally not survive if we don’t find a way to save them. Because they are that essential to plants pollination.

I mean all plants. Literally all plants. You’re all grownups, I’m assuming I don’t need to tell you that plants are kind of a big deal to people who want to eat food. Any food.

Now, there are a lot of reasons we’re losing bees. Some of this is due to pesticides, sure. But the biggest issue right now is this nasty little mite called the varroa mite.

For some reason that I don’t understand, because I’m not a beekeeper, we can’t seem to keep these little suckers from spreading. Wouldn’t that be the worst of ironies, if Earth is destroyed not by an Ice Age, not by a meteorite, not by two psychopaths starting WW3 as part of an ever-increasing dick measuring contests, but by some mites killing our bees.

I’m not telling you all of this to scare you. Fear does no good, unless it motivates you to action. I’m telling you this, because there are things we can do to save the bees. And if enough of us pitch in, we can bring them back.

• You can plant bee-friendly plants, assuming you aren’t allergic and around your home is a healthy place for bees to be. Even a window box on an apartment windowsill can help. Make sure that you’re planting flowers that are native to your area. Here’s a website that will help you find some native plants that bees love.
• Don’t use pesticides if you can help it.
• Donate to a worthwhile bee conservation charity. Like this one.
  
• If you’re really down for it, and you’ve got the extra space and time, you can even put a hive in your backyard. Of course, you want to make sure that there are no ordinances against such things in your area. And make sure you have the time to do this. Here are some great articles to get you started. Mind you, I have two dogs and no intention of doing this. But if you can do it, it’s a great way to help.

The important thing here is that we all do our part. Look, I understand that we’re all busy. There’s a lot going on. Sadly, there’s a lot going on that we can’t do anything about.

But we can do something about the bees. And we need to, before it’s too late.

Josey was new in town, working two jobs and reeling from her divorce. She needed a lot of things, but most of all she needed a meeting. She finds one in the basement of her local library. But the meeting that she finds isn’t the one that she’s expecting.

Read it now.

As you read this, it’s June 29^th. So, we’ve got two days left in the second quarter of the year already.

The year is halfway over, already. That’s a hard concept for me to wrap my mind around, honestly. This year has been a real challenge, and I’m really not where I wanted to be when I made my plans for the year.

If that’s where you are too, then I’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling myself. There’s no sense beating yourself up for what didn’t get done. All you can do is learn from the first six months so that you can do better in the next six months. So, as I’m doing my second quarter review, there’s just one thing I’m asking myself.

Why didn’t this get done?

For so many years I would beat myself up for not being as productive as I thought I should be. It took me a long time to grow up and realize that sometimes I can work as hard as I can and still not finish everything. I can do my best, and still not succeed. And it doesn’t do me any good at all to berate myself for something that is just right out of my control. As it turns out, every single one of the following things happened to me in the last six months.

A project took longer than I thought it would.

Good news for you Station 86 fans, I’m currently working on the second draft of book 4, Station Central. Bad news, it’s not half done yet. Sorry. But something happened when I was part way through that derailed my whole work schedule. I had to put it aside to work on the extended ending of Virus. (Have you pre-ordered Virus yet? Don’t forget, the price goes up after it’s published.) And I realized that I have done this every single time I’ve written a Station 86 book. I wait until I’m almost ready to publish it before I even start thinking about the extended ending. I told myself at first that I was doing it to make sure they were an appropriate bridge between books, but that’s no longer an issue. I know what’s happening in the series now. I don’t need to write book 5 to know what I need to bridge to it. So, I decided to write the extended ending for Station Central now, so I can edit and polish it right along with the rest of the book. That meant quite a bit of rough drafting. But those chapters are pretty good, and I think they’re going to sing.

The point is, I was working right along, but now the project is going to take longer. And it’s way better to let the project take the time it needs to take then to rush it and mess it up. The solution to this is pretty simple. Move the deadline, and move on with a light heart.

I had to wait for others to complete part of my project.

This doesn’t often come up with my writing, but sometimes it does. The launch of Starting Chains took a lot longer than I wanted it to because the publisher had other books in line to launch first. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing really to complain about, certainly. But it did mean that my plans had to change dramatically because I needed to wait for Starting Chains to launch before I could set launch dates for the other books I intended to publish this year. It means that I probably won’t be publishing six books this year.

Which is really no big deal. If a launch gets moved to 2019, it’s not the end of the world.

The fix to this is that there is no fix. Sometimes things aren’t in our control. And if you’ve got to wait for someone else to complete their half of a project, you’ve got to wait. Work on something else while you do.

A project wasn’t as important as others.

There’s this one project I’ve had on the back burner for quite a while now. It’s not a big thing, just something I thought would be an easy project to knock out in a month and get out there.

And it would have been an easy project, and it should have taken no time at all. Except that I had other projects that mattered more. So I kept not doing it and not doing it. Because it just wasn’t as much of a priority as other things.

Mind you, I really never intended this to take up a lot of my time. It was just something I thought might be fun. I’m not using this as an excuse to shirk a project that I’ve fallen out of love with. I genuinely don’t care as much about this one as others.

The fix for this one is to put this project in its proper place in my life. It will get done when it gets done. I still think it’s a neat little idea so it gets to stay on my radar.

I planned too many things at one time.

Like, way too many things. I had myself working on three or more projects at a time, and that’s just too much.

The fix for this one is to be more realistic in the second half of the year. When I sit down to complete the second quarter review and third quarter planning from my Lisa Jacobs YBY 2018 planner, I’m going to be more mindful of what’s realistic in six months and what’s not.

Life happened, and my priorities changed.

As I said, 2018 has been hard. I was working too much, and now my life is literally completely different than it was. Different than it has been for the last 14 years, actually. I’m in the middle of moving and figuring out what my life looks like now. That’s hard, and it’s taking a lot of my time.

So not as much time is there to go into my writing projects. When the move is over, I should have more time than ever to write, but that’s still a little ways away. And even then, I’m more aware than ever that life can change in a second, and all my carefully laid plans can be blown away.

The fix for this is to accept it. Life is going to change, no matter how hard you try to keep it the same. When that happens the only thing you can do is regroup, and move along as best you can.

But I want to hear from you? How has your year been so far? Are you where you wanted to be, or do you need to reconsider your course for the rest of the year?

I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that I love comedians and stand up. When asked to list my heroes, there are four women who top my list; Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey in that order. These women were never afraid of being exactly who they are, and who they are is funny as hell. They don’t care about being ladies, getting married or structuring their lives to suit the world around them. They did what they wanted, and they were good at it.

Poehler and Fey both got their start in improv in New York. I went into this in some detail when I talked about Yes, Please, Poehler’s autobiography. Because it was so influential in their lives, I had to learn about it. And, as you might have guessed, I learned that the rules of improv can dramatically improve your free writing and first drafts.

Here’s how.

Rule one, say yes!

The first rule of improv is to say yes! What this means is, if you’re working with a partner and they say, “We’re flying to Jamaica on the back of a trumpeter swan that will only fly if we bang coconuts together,” you have to roll with that scenario. You’re not allowed to say, “Janice, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, and I’m not doing it. Obviously, you’d fly to Jamaica on the back of a swallow.” Even if a swallow would be the obvious Monty Python reference that Janice was obviously going for with her coconut theory.

When writing, sometimes we find that the story wants to go in a different direction than we initially planned. And while I’m a steadfast believer that you should have at least some form of an outline, I also don’t think that it’s a bad idea to defer from that outline. In other words, say yes to your story taking a different turn. It might be terrible, or it might be way better than your original idea. But that’s for the second draft to decide. The first draft should just say yes!

Rule two, say yes, and!

Improve is best done with a group of people who add to the other person’s original idea. If all you do is agree to everything the other person is saying, you’re going to be a bad improv partner. So, whatever setup someone’s just made, it’s your job now to build on it. So, if you have Janice as a partner, you might say, “Yes, and then I drop one of my halves of the coconut into the ocean, so I have to clap with my hand. But the swan knows it’s only half, so it’s only flapping one wing!”

When you have a good idea, you need to build on it. What’s the next step from where you are? What can you add? What would be a logical but unexpected thing to happen next?

Rule three, make statements.

You don’t ask questions in improv, you make statements. You don’t ask, “What should we do next?” You boldly say, “Janice, we’re landing on that random island, like it or not, and I know it’s not Jamaica because this swan is only flapping with one wing.”

I am trying to incorporate this into my everyday life more. I tend to ask people things I should tell them. “Do you mind if I-?” That sort of thing. I shouldn’t be passive in my life, I’m a grown woman.

As far as our writing goes, though, I consider this a deceleration of war on passive voice. Unless I am writing a passive character, I despise the passive voice. How do you know you’re writing in the passive voice? This is one I learned from Rebecca Johnson. “If you can insert ‘by zombies’ after the verb, you have a passive voice.”

Don’t get eaten by zombies. Make statements.

Rule four, there are no mistakes, only opportunities.

Let’s say you’re doing improv, and you trip over an uneven spot on the stage, fall over and crack your knee on the ground. You’re probably going to shout something obscene if you’re anything like me. If you did that under normal settings, you might brush off your pants, apologize, and move on. But in improv, you just roll with it.

If you botch a line or tell a bad joke, it’s not a mistake. It’s an opportunity.

The same is true for our writing, there are no mistakes. Truly, if we are making up our own worlds there are no mistakes. So, if you’re looking back at something you’ve published, and you think you messed something up, keep that in mind. It’s just an opportunity to make something better.

Josey finds an AA meeting.

Josey was new in town, working two jobs and reeling from her divorce. She needed a lot of things, but most of all she needed a meeting. She finds one in the basement of her local library. But the meeting that she finds isn’t the one that she’s expecting.

Summer’s not my favorite season. My favorite season is Fall. Fall is perfection. Everything is Pumpkin Spice flavored, it’s chilly, Halloween rocks, stationery sales abound.

But Summer is my second favorite season. It’s as far from Spring as we can get, for one thing. Kennywood is open, and so is the pool. I can sit out on the back deck, and sip iced coffees. It’s not a living nightmare to walk the dog, in fact, it’s kind of nice. And I can grow things!

I think that Summer will always hold good feelings for us. It’s a reminder of times of freedom from our childhood. For me, that meant days of doing pretty much whatever I wanted around the house.

Every season gives us new opportunities to explore our world. We should take advantage of every season, even if it just means adjusting where it is we’re reading. So, here’s what I have planned for this summer.

• I’m going to have breakfast on the back porch as much as possible. Even if it’s just a cup of coffee.
• As much as I can, I intend to sleep with the window open.
• I also plan to cook out at least once a week. Even if it’s just hot dogs and some store-bought potato salad.
• We are blessed in our town to have an actual drive-in movie theater. I might not be able to see a lot of movies there, but I want to go see at least one.
• Another awesome thing my town is doing this Summer is called ‘Foodie Friday’. A bunch of food trucks take over downtown, and there’s a live band. We’ll be making it to as many of those days as possible.
• My dog has been going crazy wanting to be outside, so I’m giving him what he wants. We’re going for long walks and enjoying the fresh air. Hopefully, it will work some of the crazy as hell energy out of him.
• Summer doesn’t mean that I’m not writing, it just means that I’m writing at different times. The early rising sun encourages me to get up earlier, so I’ve taken to writing in the morning before I go to my day job.
• While I do love my e-reader, I’ve found that I cannot read it outside in the sunshine. But, since I’m loathed to buy all new physical books, I often find myself re-reading books I already have. This is actually a great way to spend a lazy afternoon, in my opinion. Personally, I expect to read my way through Series of Unfortunate Events, 10^th Kingdom, and maybe even Phantom Tollbooth.

So, what are you doing to celebrate the Summer season? Let us know in the comments below!

A dinner out, a trip to the library and a new house. None of these things should result in a living nightmare. But they do. Read twelve tales of terror for free. Click here to download your copy.