You Won't Believe What Happened When I Was Writing Casey Grimes #5
Not even I saw this coming
We’ve got a couple things to get to today. Let’s move from quite important to even more important.
First, I’m surprised and a little disappointed no one told me about Goat Toads. Is it possible I’m the only one on this secret message ring who has encountered these things? It started when I was on the back porch being stalked by chiggers as I worked on my writing quota for the day. I was sitting in a shady spot, making steady progress, when I became aware of a very annoying noise that repeated itself like clockwork once a minute.
Have you ever had one of those electronic toys that make a mooing sound when you press the Cow button? Well, if you did, you probably don’t remember since you would’ve been two feet tall, eating graham crackers and driving your parents crazy. Us parents remember though.
But it sounded a little like one of those. Except for the Cow button, someone was pressing the Goat button. That’s what it sounded like. Not easy to put into writing, but mah-ah-ah is the general idea, only louder. MAH-AH-AH. [A minute of silence.] MAH-AH-AH. [Silence.] MAH-AH-AH! And so on. And it wasn’t far away.
My next thought, as I got more and more irritated, was that someone had bought a new solar powered deer deterrent thing and set it up without telling me. For about six months now we’ve lived on a wooded mountainside outside Fayetteville, Arkansas. It’s gorgeous, with lots to explore, and at the same time, ever since we got here, life has had a choppy, unpredictable feel. There have been a lot of adjustments.
One of those adjustments is deer. Every night when the sun goes down, they come out of the woods and eat everything we put in the ground: Flowers, vegetables, fruit trees, shrubs, you name it. We’re waging an ongoing war to keep them away with lights, sounds, smells, and human hair—yeah, it’s kind of gross—at least until hunting season starts, at which point I expect the tide of battle to turn in our favor.
Maybe deer hate goats, I thought. But it turns out I hate them even more, at least when they are bleating every 60 seconds on endless loop. And I stopped writing and walked around the yard, looking for a new deer thingy I was prepared to smash on the driveway.
But I found nothing. By the time I finished my 500 words for the day, I was pretty ticked off. Writing is hard enough at the best of times, all the more when your office is full of boxes and you are forced to write on the back porch, covered in bug spray. Add an aggressive invisible goat, MAH-AH-AH! MAH-AH-AH! and it requires an extra dose of self control.
Well, even though I was the only one in my family writing a full length novel on the back porch—why do I always find myself in these weird situations no one else can relate to? I asked myself—others eventually noticed the rude, unseeable goat. They too found it despicable.
Which led us to the unpleasant discovery of the Goat Toad. Here is a picture of the little beast.
Look at those snobby eyes. That smug little snout. That flabby gut it seems so proud of. This is the kind of creature kids in Sylvan Woods would catch in the marsh and hide in each other’s houses for a practical joke. Technically, it’s called the Eastern Small-Mouthed Toad, but someone missed a real obvious naming opportunity with this one.
The worst part of the story is we never did find it. With multiple kids on the job, we eventually tracked it down to the corner of a small, non-functional pond in the backyard which I will someday fix. But the little creep evaded us. He was very good at hiding under rocks. For a while he was in the front yard somewhere, mocking us. Then he moved to the rear of the house again. Finally, he got tired of assaulting our ears and moved off into the woods to bother someone else. From time to time we hear him, ruining the birdsong on the hillside behind our house. All we can do is pray he doesn’t return.
I just feel I should’ve been warned.
Last time, I wrote about having a goal for your writing, and it was cool to hear from some of you about the goals you are setting for yourselves. Keep after it. While I probably won’t have time to read your rough drafts, since I’m trying to finish my own book, I definitely have time to cheer you on, and of course answer your questions. So feel free to be in touch.
And now…I’m happy to announce the manuscript for Casey Grimes #5 is done.
Yeah, it’s finished.
I’m not sure what pushed me over the edge. I was chugging along at 500 words a day, and then my productivity took a big step forward. Maybe it was writing that post about goals and quotas that gave me some extra motivation. Maybe it was that creepy toad that made me mad so I tried harder.
Whatever it was, the rough draft is done at about 55,000 words. Now I have to go back and fix some things so it’s good enough to read out loud to my wife and kids. After that it will be time for a serious edit, and then cover design and sending it to my printer. So we have a ways to go. But the hardest part is over.
Whew. And woo!
There has been some celebrating.
This book took some unexpected twists and turns, and it doesn’t have a working title at the moment, but that will be coming. I’ll keep you posted, naturally, and in the days ahead I probably won’t be able to resist sending along some teasers. In fact, I think I’ll drop one now.
Casey Grimes #5—and book #7 overall since we’ve got those .5s—will not be the last Casey Grimes. Unless things really fall apart here at Lion & Co Press, the story is not over. More is on the way…and then more after that.
Now, the life of an indie author is not what you’d call safe and predictable. So I’m not so much promising a book eight as saying the adventure ought to continue and I’ll do my best to make it happen, despite the dizzying life we lead around here full of belligerent toads, shoestring budgets, and the uncharted future.
Maybe that’s what it means to be on an adventure.
Keep in up! Congrats!
The goat toads are just looking for their mates. Just wait, it will get worse.