Imaginary Friends

On a whim, I searched my own name with Yahoo. I've never done that before, not with Yahoo specifically. But I switched my default search engine from Google a couple months ago, so I thought I'd see what came up. Anyway, one of the top results was a guest post I wrote for The Association for Mormon Letters about The Freezer . It's been over a year since I last read that post, and a wave of emotion hit me quite without warning when I read this passage: And the interesting thing to me is not that [Thane is] trying to do what’s best when it’s not clear what’s best (though that is the case). The thing I like about Thane’s story is how much he must risk in order to follow what he hopes is the best path.  You see, that's exactly the position my wife and I find ourselves in right now.  To be sure, our situation doesn't remotely resemble Thane and Dawn's. We're still physically together, along with all our children. But we're preparing our house to sell and chec...

In the comic sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy , a computer was created specifically to calculate the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. That answer was 42. The problem was, no one knew the question, not even the computer. My novel, The Freezer , had 42 chapters. That's right: had . Now it has 41.  I didn't even realize I'd written a novel in 42 chapters until the day, in a hotel room in Perth, I decided to remove the last chapter. On the final read-through before I turned it back over to my editor and proclaimed that I was finished, I realized that the last chapter wasn't part of the story I'd been telling—it was the beginning of another story. It felt right to remove it. Then I realized what I'd done. That was chapter 42! Did that chapter contain the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Was the question really "which chapter of The Freezer contains the answers we seek?" No, I suppose not. Not in the...

 This is the story of my novel, The Freezer —where it came from, how it evolved, and how it got published. I'll try to be brief, because this story might be more complex than the one told in the novel. It began in the 1990s. A teenage girl had an unusual dream. In the dream, the world was about to explode. To survive, she and her brother climbed into a chest freezer of the sort many people have in their homes or garages. The freezer was thrown into space by the exploding planet, carrying its occupants safely to land on another planet. The inhabitants of this planet were kind and lived in a utopian society.  In late 2000, I met the dreamer of this dream. In 2001, we were married. I don't remember when she first told me about this dream, but sometime after the birth of our first child, maybe even the second, I decided to adapt the basic premise of the dream—the freezer spaceship—into a screenplay for a short film, which I would then shoot. I had an interest in film and a new dig...

UPDATE : This blog post was originally published in June 2011. Now Netflix has adapted Thirteen Reasons Why to film, so I find myself thinking about it again. I don't plan on watching the series; I have better things to do. But I think making the show was a bad idea for the reasons below. And I still recommend keeping this story away from teens you're worried about. Now, not only does Hannah pull off the perfect suicide, but she and everyone involved is super attractive, not just the ordinary teenagers you might imagine while reading. It's not just the Hoosiers of suicide anymore, it's the Avengers of suicide. Read this book instead of watching Thirteen Reasons Why . ------------------- Okay, so I know I've been posting a lot of depressing suicide-related stuff on here, but I'm kind of writing a book about it, you know? Like the thing over there —> says, I write about basically whatever I want. And today I want to talk about Thirteen Reasons Why ...

And I posted it on this very blog back in October of 2011, before I even started writing The Freezer . For some reason, it's better than any of the four (or five?) queries I've written since then. What do you think? (Yes, you.) THE ORIGINAL, PRE-WRITING PITCH, BACK FROM THE DEAD: The world is about to die a violent death at the hands of a rogue planet. The last escape ships have gone, leaving billions of people knowing the exact date and time of their demise. Society is coming apart at the seams. Violence is spreading. Food is disappearing. There's one month left. Thane Ryder turned down a seat on a spaceship to stay with his six-year-old daughter Mandy, and he intends to make her final days happy. He'll stay in his home and refuse protection. He'll feed his enemies and treat them like friends. He'll plant a garden, clean the house, and teach Mandy to ride a bicycle. He won't pick up a gun or show any of the fear gnawing away at his insides. And ...

Thane Ryder would move mountains to keep his daughter happy, but it wouldn’t lengthen Mandy’s six-year life. A rogue planet is on a collision course with Earth. Only a few thousand people will escape on ships destined for a new world. Thane’s wife Dawn piloted one of the first ships. Thane and Mandy were supposed to follow on a later flight. But the Evacuation Authority disqualifies Mandy, dooming her to die with everyone else. Torn between a wife whose distant vessel has mysteriously lost contact, and the daughter who needs him more than ever, Thane decides to stay. If shielding a child from the troubles of a dying world is difficult, keeping her from seeing his despair is impossible—almost as impossible as their dream of seeing Dawn again. But Mandy knows Thane helped build the big interstellar ship that carried Mommy away. Why shouldn’t he be able to build a much smaller ship for only the two of them? Glad for the distraction, Thane plays along with her plans and builds a sp...

It's March 14th. 3.14. Celebrated mostly as another excuse to eat pie. Unlike some novelists , I don't have a degree in math. I did make it through college calculus, though, and I really like numbers in almost any form besides homework. So when I went looking for the number of known digits of Pi, I was astounded and pleased to find that there are 12.1 trillion known digits—and they're all available for download ! Of course, encoded as ASCII text, that would be about 12 terabytes of numbers. I don't have nearly that much disk space. Or time. But the downloads are broken up into nice 100,000,000 digit chunks. I downloaded the first one, used Excel to strip out the line numbers, and used TextEdit to search through it. (Because, while Excel will handle 1,000,000 rows, that's literally all it will handle, and it gets dog slow and uses 2 GBs of RAM.) Of course, I had to make a pie chart. Big surprise, eh? Each of the 10 decimal digits occurs approximatel...

I sent you a query this morning. It's labeled "Query 4" in my Scrivener file, so I must be getting better at writing queries. The previous novel I queried got up to "Query 6" before I dared send it out. I don't like this query process, but I appreciate that I'm one of many thousands of aspiring writers, and this is an efficient way for you to sort through our manuscripts. Writing novels and writing queries are very different things. I'm better at writing novels. But the query I sent isn't bad. Now I'd like to say what's not in the query. The Freezer  is my fourth novel. It took me two years to write and revise, far longer than the previous two novels. This one was really difficult, and I'm not quite sure why. But I do know that I put my heart into it. I let my voice come through. I put every writing skill and piece of advice to use at one time or another, including killing my darlings. The result is something multi-layered and m...

The Freezer is finally ready to go. A few lucky literary agents have already been queried. While I was working on this manuscript, my family lived through pregnancy and childbirth, kids with weird diseases, a mom with a ruptured tendon, surgery to repair it, another surgery to fix the results of the first surgery, a dad going on many more business trips than usual, a drive to Ohio, a construction project, a month of houseguests, and for the last week or two, the baby's been teething. That's my excuse for why it took so long. I've probably forgotten a few things. But our baby is lots of fun, even when he's grumpy. Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of being a dad. Now for the next novel... p.s. I didn't write "The End" at the end of The Freezer . It didn't seem appropriate. It rarely does.

I've been thinking about three things that are important to me: hope, trust, and love. They go together like peanut butter and honey, bread and butter, or bread and peanut butter and honey (and butter, for some people.) Why? Well, here's what I've learned: Hope needs an accompanying preposition— for . We hope  for  something specific. Without that, it's a feeling of optimism, not real hope. Likewise, trust must always be in someone or something. To do any good, trust must also be strong enough to allow action. Without trust, there can't be hope. Without hope, trust is useless. For example, if I have trust in a medical treatment and hope for a cure, I'll complete the treatment even if it's unpleasant. If I lack either trust or hope, I'm not likely to endure the discomfort. Things don't always go as planned. You can have trust in someone and hope for something, but the selfish choices, conflicting desires, mistakes, and offenses of oth...

Like, I know this writer who just sold a novel to a major publisher. Her name's Krista Van Dolzer. She has a ridiculously popular blog . And she's a fantastic writer. You might think that's why she just sold a novel. Being a fantastic writer, I mean. I like to think it's because of me. Yep. I critiqued  that novel she just sold. Like, two years ago. I read what you might call an early draft, though it certainly wasn't the first draft. I offered vague direction about what didn't seem quite right and helpful suggestions like, "Gee, I've got nothing to say about this chapter. It's really good." Since then, Krista's written two more novels, and each one makes me feel less useful as a critique partner. But here's what I get to brag about: I got to read this book several  years  before the rest of you will. Also, you'll never read the version I read. Sure, what comes out in print will be even better, but still. It's li...

Still busy at work, but not having to work extra. Ann Marie has her hand back. The little finger is kind of bound up with scar tissue, but it seems to be getting better, slowly. I finally figured out the right way to end the book on which I'm working. I just have to write that ending. I'm going to do it right now. And I have another excuse for not blogging: snow. It just begs to be played in.

That's what I am: completely post title. Like, titles were so three months ago. You know, the last time I posted to my blog. Was that three months ago? That's what it feels like without checking the dates. But I'm not going to apologize for not posting. It's not like I ever promised to post. It's not like you paid to read this blog. And it's not like you've been sitting there thinking, "I wish Ben would post something. He always has the most helpful, funny, and heartwarming things to say." Yes, instead of apologizing, I'm going to offer excuses, in no particular order: 1.  I went to Pennsylvania on a business trip for two weeks. I ate in nice restaurants and seedy little holes, and they all had great food. I managed not to gain any weight, so congratulations to me. Lancaster county is a nice place, and I got to pop over to my sister's house in New Jersey and help clean up after the storm. Still, the trip started right after... 2.  M...

You've read Prince Caspian , right? If you haven't, go read it. (Or at least watch the movie.) Then come back and finish. Ready? Okay. There's a scene where Lucy sees Aslan, the giant talking lion, and he beckons for her to follow him on a course that doesn't seem to make sense. No one else in the group sees him, and they basically don't trust Lucy enough to do what she says. She's the youngest, etc. etc. So they go the other way, run into all sorts of trouble, waste all kinds of time, and Lucy sees Aslan again—and no one else does. Even though he's right there!  Eventually, they come around and everyone sees him. You, the reader, never doubt that Lucy actually saw Aslan. You know they should follow him as surely as she does. Are you simply more trusting of young girls who see things you don't? No. You know she saw Aslan, because you saw him too. A few reasons for this: The book's in third person, and the narrator never leads you astray...

Today, I gave a presentation to all my coworkers. The weird thing is that I actually volunteered to do it. We have weekly lunch meetings, and once a quarter or so, an employee gives a presentation on a book they've read or something they've learned that might benefit everyone else. There were about thirty people listening. I had twenty minutes. The book I read was  Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking  by Susan Cain. (If I were ambitious or responsible or something, I'd put in footnotes with references to pages in the book. But since no one ever reads footnotes—heck, no one even reads my blog—I'll just put in an asterisk (*) where I use info from the book. If you really want the page number to one of them, just ask and I'll look it up for you.) This quiz is from Susan Cain's book. (Actually, the one in the book has twenty questions. I typed it up and handed it out for people to look at.) The more questions you answer as t...

That's a reference to a post I wrote long, long ago called " Why YA? " At the time, I was working on what I thought was a YA novel. But the words Young Adult infer a range greater than the genre actually encompasses. Notice I called it a genre instead of a category. This is based in part on the sense I've gotten from reading blogs, reviews, articles and other flotsam on the internet. It's also based on responses I got from an #askagent question on Twitter. (Okay, so I only got three responses from agents, but two of them said genre. One said age group. The non-agent responses were evenly split.) The expectations for YA fiction have less to do with age group and more to do with the type of story you might expect to find in that corner of the bookstore. If it were strictly an age grouping, it would include a broad range of fully-fledged genres. Instead, it includes sub-genres that resemble their non-YA counterparts, but also have certain hallmarks qualifying the...

...like an alien entity. So, I had a novel idea. (Meaning it was an idea for a novel, not a unique idea. Though it may be that, too. I don't know.) It was about a kid who pretends to be possessed by an alien intelligence as a way of overcoming the deficiencies in his own personality. It was going to be a good, straight book with no actual aliens or possessions, only nice normal things like middle school and social pressure and how hard it is to be an introvert. You know, what they've taken to calling contemporary because everything has to have some sort of genre label. Ahem. Did you notice I said was ? That's because no matter how I tried to put together a plot, I couldn't get excited about it. I mean, it's a great premise. A premise with promise, you might say. (But probably wouldn't.) Also, I actually did pretend be an alien when I was a kid. I have a journal entry to prove it. It only lasted a day, but you might say I have some personal experience w...

So, my favorite author died. I don't know when Ray Bradbury became my favorite. Fittingly, it was the public library that introduced me to his writing. There was Bradbury and Asimov, shelved next to each other, and their writing was so different and yet so wonderful. Isaac Asimov defined science fiction for me. I devoured the robot stories and novels, the Foundation series, and almost died with delight when he tied it all together into one cohesive timeline of awesome. Asimov wrote so clearly. He took mind-blowing concepts like psychohistory and gathered them into tidy conclusions. He made telepathy and seeing the future plausible. I reveled in the depth and breadth of his stories. Ray Bradbury was almost the opposite. He excelled at short stories. Even some of his novels are merely collections of short stories connected by setting and characters, or sometimes just setting. What he wrote wasn't really science fiction. (I think it still defies categorization. There should ...

It's time for another cheerful post about suicide, kids! Seriously, I hope my kids never find this blog. It's not like they don't know what Drivers  is about. They're too curious not to ask, especially the oldest. And I've certainly discussed the topic with my wife in front of them plenty of times. But you know what I think? This is just off the top of my head, but suicide as a conversational topic is kind of like lice. (Ha!) If you've had lice, no one wants to hear about it. They don't want to know how you got rid of them or where you got them. They'd just as soon not have to think about tiny blood-sucking bugs laying eggs on hairs. Heck, just writing this makes my scalp itch! People are usually more open to discussing the topic if they've had lice, treated lice, OR if they're not old enough to be aware of the social stigma. Case in point, my oldest daughter caught lice at school a few years ago. We saw it pretty quickly, treated it, and...

Go Team Krista! I was a pawn participant ;) in a competition (The Writer's Voice) between four writers to see who could pick and coach the most other writers into successfully grabbing a literary agent's attention. Except it was more organized than I just made it sound. See here for a complete explanation. Anyway, Krista Van Dolzer picked me to be on her team, and we won! She did a great job helping me improve my query and did the same for the other ten on the team as well. It was a huge time investment for all the coaches. Thank you, ladies! And what else did I get? Votes from two agents, which translates to a request for more material. I also got a whole lot of nice comments from other people in the contest. Take a look at my original entry here (if you haven't already) on my blog, and then read the new and improved version here on Krista's blog. Full results are here .