The Long Way Home

by Scott, Jessica

  The Submissions Suspense Is Killing Me

  November 12, 2010

  A WHILE BACK (AND mind you this may mean it was last year) I was reading a post by agent turned author Nathan Bransford about being a nervous wreck regarding the submission of his book to editors. This was an agent who understood the process and he woke up in a cold sweat, terrified that he wasn’t going to sell.

  Now a week may seem like a long time not to hear any updates but in publishing a week is like a nanosecond. Publishing is a painfully slooooow process. So the fact that I haven’t had The Call in a week (don’t laugh my fellow authors) is in no way surprising.

  That does not mean, however, that the obsessive checking of the email or the voice mail or the phone in general has not occurred. In the brief moments of clarity that occurred over my hell week at work, I checked my email hoping for a note from Richard.

  The other thing that’s been going on, in addition to complete exhaustion from the Army is that I haven’t written anything. I jotted off a quick idea for a second book after Angels Before Me but that was the extent of it. I’m staring at the blank page and ...nothing.

  Which is okay. I’m not freaking out about the lack of writing but I do miss that kick of a new idea burning through my fingertips. There is one there, I’m just waiting for it to hit me full force. It’ll probably happen in the middle of command and staff meetings where I have to actually pay attention but hey, at least it’ll happen.

  Anyway, it’s been a week. I have no idea if any editors have even asked for it and I’m trying so hard not to be a neurotic douche bag and email my agent and beg for any information at all. I promised him I wouldn’t (which for me is huge, trust me). So I’m here, as usual, using my blog as therapy.

  Thoughts on Censorship

  November 16, 2010

  LAST WEEK, I WATCHED in horror as A Pedophile’s Guide to Sex with Children (or whatever horrific name that guy created for his book) created a firestorm on Twitter. The ensuing debate, however, is what’s caught my attention.

  A couple of weeks ago, I got into a very interesting discussion on Twitter about authors and censorship. It was interesting because, while we didn’t necessarily agree, I went and did more research and guess what? I changed my mind.

  Sort of.

  My argument was that some content should be censored, whereas the other author's point was that no matter what the content, it should not be and authors should never stand for another being censored (I hope I’m paraphrasing that correctly). My position was that some is so objectionable—take that pedophile’s book for instance—that it should never be sold.

  But I saw a comment in one of the ensuing Twitter debates last night that caught my attention. It was something to the effect of “Good, at least we’ve got this guy out in the open where we can shine the light of day on it rather that push him into some dark internet chat room where we might never catch him.”

  So I’m looking at where I stand on censorship from an officer’s point of view and from an author’s point of view. One of the things we learn as commanders in today’s fight is that you have to influence the media. The constant bad news coming out of Iraq was enough to turn the opinions of the American public against the war. The constant drum beat of rape and sexual assault of women in the military is enough to have every non-serving citizen thinking that every woman in uniform has been pinned behind a jersey barrier. So failure to engage the media results in failure to win the campaign, regardless of the truth on the ground. Is that censorship? Maybe. I definitely feel underpinnings of Brave New World and 1984 in that paragraph.

  On the other hand, as an author of a potentially controversial young adult novel, I can honestly say I don’t want it to be censored. I want parents to know what their kids are reading. I want people to read it for themselves and decide if they want their children reading it. But Angels Before Me takes the issue of parental readjustment after coming home from war and looks at it from a kid’s point of view, examining how that kid deals with his father’s war crimes, and, given that, I can understand how folks might be uncomfortable with it. But putting a lid on it only allows us to pretend that these things aren’t happening and it’s better to discuss in the light of day rather than ignore the issue.

  So I think pulling that scumbag’s book might have been a bad thing. If Amazon allows the FBI to look at people who are buying the Turner Diaries and the Anarchist Cookbook, then maybe allowing the cops to look at who is buying this book would help us catch some of these monsters before they do more harm. It’s shining the light of day on a problem rather than hiding it in the dark.

  That said, I’m still not comfortable with the idea that anyone would want to do anything to encourage sex with children. So I’m not going to protest Amazon’s decision to pull the book. As a parent, I’ll sleep better. But, I also know that these dirtbags are back in those dark corners of the internet, masquerading as twelve year old girls in chat rooms, where we can only hope to catch them.

  Starting the Next Book

  November 18, 2010

  SO MY BOOK IS out on submissions to editors. Honestly, I keep obsessively checking my email but realistically, I know the best thing I can do is start on the next book in my “free” time.

  I’ve got a synopsis already that my agent loves. It actually covers three books. He’s thrilled with the idea. And to be perfectly frank, this is the book that I initially wanted to write way back when I picked up a pen and said, “Yep, I’m going to be an author when I grow up.”

  This is that book, only now it’s morphed into more than a book. It’s three books. Same characters but three books. It’s kind of fun looking back at 2001 and trying to remember where I was or what I was doing. I mean, what was Army life like before the 9/11? Do any of us really remember or has that Army faded into the good old days?

  The problem isn’t getting into the head of a character who is nineteen years old or writing about life in the Army before the wars started. The problem is getting into this book entirely. I love it. Hell, I’ve written these characters so many different times in so many different ways, I feel like the book should already be written. I really want to write book two. And it’s like pulling teeth.

  That’s incredibly painful for me to admit. I want to write this book. I want so badly to write this book and sell this story.

  So why the heck am I sitting here blogging instead of working on a chapter that’s just about killing me? I’m not sure. Because it’s not like this is the second book I’ve ever written. I’ve started tons of projects before this one. I’ve got a half dozen manuscripts beneath my bed that will never see the light of day.

  So why is this one so damn hard?

  iPad Mental Health

  December 23, 2010

  SO HERE I SIT, typing this post on my snazzy new iPad. Kind of a neat gadget, really. And the potential use for work is absolutely astonishing.

  I can see myself in the future in the Motorpool working on command and staff slides so that I can submit them to the S3 and get them uploaded to the portal on time.

  I have to say that typing on this thing is pretty easy. It’s not really that hard and the spelling mistakes that I would make hitting the wrong keys on my iPhone are a thing of the past. But what’s really cool is that I finally got the Kindle app to update and this might be the thing that puts me over to the ebook reading I’ve been meaning to do but has been such a pain on the iPhone. Not that I didn’t read books on my iPhone but it was just kind of difficult on a small screen and this one is perfect.

  Okay, so enough glowing over my cool gadget. There’s this stuff I need to do and the reality is that if I can figure out how to edit documents in Track Changes, this thing will be the ultimate portable writing tool. I can sync it with Scrivener through Simplenote (still have to figure out how to do this) and I can revise in pages. So we’ll see how it goes but I’m pretty excited about it.

  Life has been pretty hectic around here. I’m a terrible Grinch a
nd I barely got anything done for Christmas. I didn’t even send out Christmas cards. I took yesterday and went to Barnes & Noble to get some writing done. I didn’t feel guilty about leaving the kids at daycare or about not meeting my husband for a movie. It was a productive couple of hours that I worked through another twenty pages and am now officially a third of the way through my book. If I’m able to drive through it in the coming days, I may end up making my agent happy with a revised novel by the first of the year.

  No, that doesn’t mean I’m spending the entire holiday working on my book but I did come to the realization that writing truly is something that relaxes me, and given all the stress I’ve been coping with lately (we won’t talk about the potential heart attack I thought I was having), I realize that I truly need to take some time to myself and write.

  So as I reflect everything that I’ve learned over the last couple of months as a commander, I realize that if I don’t take time for myself, I really won’t be able to make it through this experience. And if my iPad gives me a little bit of sanity by letting me get some writing done throughout the day, then this little device might be just the thing I needed.

  Thanks, honey!

  But I shouldn’t have to...

  December 28, 2010

  FILL IN YOUR DESIRED activity. Or in this case, undesired activity. In the last three years since I commissioned as an officer in the US Army and since deciding to seek publication as an author at the same time, I’ve learned a lot of lessons, some of them the hard way.

  “I shouldn’t have to” is one of the hardest lessons for anyone to learn and one that I think is the most important one I’ve learned to date.

  On the writing front, I hear a lot of writers, both published and unpublished, talk about the things they shouldn’t have to do. They shouldn’t have to blog. They shouldn’t have to spend all the time and effort in promoting their own work. They shouldn’t have to spend time tracking pirate websites to take down illegal copies of their books. Or for the unpublished, they shouldn’t have to know the market or what agents represent the work they’re pitching. They shouldn’t have to know where their book fits at certain houses or keep abreast of changes in publishing.

  For Army life, I hear from fellow captains and field grade officers all the time the things they shouldn’t have to do or the things that I “should” already know. I spent months spinning my wheels as a lieutenant about all the things I had to tell my platoon sergeant to do. I shouldn’t have had to tell him about basic accountability. I shouldn’t have to tell a sergeant today that they need to know where their soldiers live and what their spouses do for a living.

  Shouldn’t or in many cases, should, needs to be expunged from daily life. Shouldn’t to me spells out a mind-set that focuses on the way things “should be” instead of dealing with how things are and trust me, I still struggle with this almost daily. And there is a huge difference between the two. Writers may not want to spend time blogging or on social networks but there is no single better way to reach out to current fans and new readers. Army leaders can talk all day long about the way things should be, the leaders who should be more fair or more understanding but that doesn’t address what the issues really are.

  At the end of it all, I’m resolving this year to take the word “should” in all its forms out of my vocabulary. As a writer, I’m going to focus on where I am, not where I think I should be (for the record, I’m pretty happy with the state of my career as an author. Someday, that will involve a book, too). As an officer and as a commander, I’m not going to focus on what should or shouldn’t be but what the real assessment is and how can I impact change on the current situation.

  Focusing on anything else is simply wasting energy and time, two things I don’t have nearly enough of.

  The New Year Brings...

  December 30, 2010

  NEW YEARS IS A time for resolutions. Honestly, I’m not big on them. There’s just something futile in telling myself this will be the year that I do X. I make them, as many people probably do but then I promptly forget about them as the daily grind gets back into routine and the newness of the year passes by.

  But like so many new years before this one, an old routine is back, looming large in my life no matter how much I want to ignore it.

  Deployment.

  It feels like my husband and I just got back from Iraq. It was one short year ago that I was sitting in my living room, my house devoid of kids, a husband, or the myriad of animals, quietly panicking about how quiet it was. The silence freaked me out. I didn’t want to go to the store. The thing that felt the most normal was the next day when I met my unit for reverse-SRP at the old Sports Dome. We stood outside that building and waited to be scanned by metal detectors and searched by military police because less than a month earlier, Hassan decided to murder some of my brothers and sisters. But even that did not take away the rightness of being around the guys I’d spent the last year with up in Mosul.

  This time, once more I’ll be left behind as my husband deploys for his fourth combat tour to Iraq. Don’t let the media fool you. Just because we changed the name does not mean that combat isn’t still a reality over in Iraq. He’s going to combat and once more, I’m not.

  We made this choice deliberately. After the trauma of both of us leaving the girls in ’09, we knew we could not both deploy at the same time again. Still, part of me wishes I was going back. It’s what I do. And I’ll tell you honestly that the thought of staying back and dealing with both girls, who are old enough to know that Daddy is not only gone, but gone to war, scares the hell out of me.

  We’ve tried to keep life stable for our kids. We came home to the same house they’d left a year earlier. We brought back the pets they grew up with and added a few more. My husband’s NTC rotation was made easier because we kept to the routine. I talked with my oldest’s teacher all the time and the fear of her reaction to missing Daddy was not realized.

  So far.

  Staying busy is the easiest way to pass the time on a deployment, whether you are the spouse at home or deployed yourself. Having sat in the gym and watched other kids cry as their fathers drove away, I will not do that to my husband this time. But I’ll sit with him. At least for a while. And then I’ll kiss him goodbye and tell him the same thing I’ve told him each time before: I don’t care what you have to do; just come home to me.

  And God willing, this war will come to an end so that no one else must kiss their loved one goodbye and wait for the year to end. Again.

  Looking Back on 2010

  January 1, 2011

  I’M NOT BIG ON New Year’s Resolutions but I am big on looking back on history to see how far I’ve come.

  2010 was quite the year.

  The Life of an Army Mom: First, I came home from Iraq. Technically, this happened at the end of 2009, but since I didn’t actually settle my family back in Texas until after the new year, we’ll count it. The transition from being deployed to coming home was so much harder than I ever imagined. There were many, many days when I thought that life was easier in Iraq: no laundry, no dogs to clean up after, no screaming kids melting down about not eating.

  There were many, many days when I stood in my shower and cried. It should not have been this hard to become a mom again. It was brutal, worse than I ever expected or prepared for. There was no one to take the strain off my husband and me, no one we could pawn the kids off on for a little while just to catch our breaths. And when our oldest had a terrible time getting used to her new school, we both considered getting out of the Army right then and there. I’m eternally grateful I had a company commander who gave me flexibility to adjust. There were several instances where I went into his office and said, “Sir, I need to go home and clean my house before I go insane.” He said, “Take all the time you need.”

  I don’t know that I would have made it through this had I not worked for him.

  We made it through though. I reconnected with an old high school friend who, oddly e
nough, was getting ready to go through Officer Candidate School and who worked with troubled kids. There were so many nights where I said, “She’s screaming, now what?” And though it might seem obvious, sometimes, you just need to be told to walk away. The girls are doing much better now. We stuck to a routine and hired a new after school babysitter and the girls barely blinked when Daddy went to the National Training Center for a month.

  I’m not sure how the upcoming deployment will affect them, but I’m much more optimistic than I was six months ago. We’ll get through and, hopefully, without my kids requiring hours of therapy. There are still Mommy Fail days where I’m certain I’m the worst mom in the world, but we get through them together.

  Army Life: I never expected to become a company commander. Honestly, I’m older than most of my peers by at least six years but I interviewed anyway when I heard a position was opening up across post in the signal battalion. When I was selected for the job, a whole new world of pressure settled around my shoulders. Since taking the guidon in October, stress has been a constant companion. There’s never enough time in the day to do everything I have to get done. I’ve got a great company though and my support structure that I depend on is incredibly motivated. I worry about my soldiers and the choices they make, and I worry that I won’t have enough time to train them for everything we need to train on before we deploy back to combat.

  I’m lucky, though, to have fantastic mentors. Ones who get the full dose of my crazy and give me a healthy kick in the fourth point of contact when I need it. Never, ever take for a mentor the person who tells you you’re doing everything brilliantly, no matter what the field. You need someone to give it to you straight, to include tough love and when you find those mentors, hold on to them and thank them (though not too much that they accuse you of writing hallmark cards instead of emails.)