I was recently asked by my friends at LGBTQ Reads to write a guest post on their site.

WHEN AN OLD FRIEND COMES BACK TO HAUNT YOU: A GUEST POST BY THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE AND LOSS AUTHOR BART YATES

 I wrote a list of book recommendations for Shepherd.com that was just published recently.

The best books with funny, wiseass narrators and ridiculously dysfunctional families

As more videos come in, this blog will be updated with new links. This blog will also be accessible through the Events menu at the top.

Between The Chapters Book Club

Content Bookstore in Northfield, MN

Don’t eat in the dark.  The remote control for the soundbar to my television is NOT a chocolate bar, no matter how much it may feel like one.

Book I just finished reading:  The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez.

Blood pressure today: 125/84.

Supper tonight:  Cuban black bean soup.

Best music of the week: Bach’s French Suites, played by Glenn Gould.

Current toothpaste: Trader Joe’s Peppermint.

Guilty pleasures to binge-watch on HULU: Teen Wolf and Kyle XY.

Thoughts that kept me awake last night:  

Why is the name ‘David’ pronounced with a long ‘a’ instead of a short one, as in ‘gravid?’  I need to remember to water the plants after I get up.  If Yeats is right about love entering through the eyes, then how did Hugo fall in love with Terry, since Hugo’s blind?  I should have Hugo talk about this in Chapter Two.  Someone else said men fall in love through the eyes, and women through the ears—Why can’t I remember who said that?  I swear to God I’m getting dementia.  I need to pee again.  Where’d the cat go?  She used to sleep by my legs every night, but now she sleeps in the living room—I wonder if I accidentally kicked her off the bed sometime and now she doesn’t trust me?  Don’t forget to take the pork shoulder out of the freezer and put it in the fridge so it will thaw enough to cook on Friday.  Oh, shit, that freaking earworm of a song is back again: “Have another Nutter Butter peanut butter sandwich cookie…” Gaaaaa, MAKE IT STOP!!! I haven’t written a blog in a while.  Why does my right knee hurt?  That noise in the basement better not be a mouse.  Why did I have that fourth glass of wine?  I really need to pee.

Thoughts having nothing to do with anything:

My heart is Klingon.

Aside from a minuscule fracture in the fourth toe of my right foot, I’ve never broken a bone.  Given that I’m a sixty-year-old klutz who regularly slips, trips, falls, bangs into walls, drinks immoderately, and pays little attention to my surroundings, I find this miraculous.  Possible explanations for my relatively undamaged skeleton are:

1. Dumb luck.
2. A guardian angel with too much time on her hands.
3. Wolverine DNA.
4. Fate setting me up for an epic pratfall, like Wile E. Coyote vs. the steamroller.
5. A magical force field surrounding my body, generated by nonstop navel-gazing.

All of the above are perfectly viable possibilities, of course, yet I believe the real credit lies elsewhere: I simply don’t have time to break bones because I’m having too much fun stomping the living shit out of my heart.  Want a tough, scrappy, indomitable heart?  Make it your bitch.  

How does one do that, you ask?

1. Feed it a steady diet of unrequited love.  
2. Never let it fall for someone who might actually treat it well.  
3. Confuse it with a barrage of one-night stands and awkward post-coital conversations.  
4. Give it enough affection to make it think happiness is possible, but never enough to make it feel secure.
5. Force it to watch sappy romantic movies, thereby ensuring a sense of failure in its own relationships.   

Basically, think of yourself as a Marine drill sergeant, and your heart as a promising-but-dopey recruit.  Once you’ve broken its spirit you can rebuild.  

Thought for the day: 

Don’t put off doing laundry until the only clean outfit left is a t-shirt with underarm stains and a pair of sweatpants with a hole in the ass.

Rules For Writing A Novel:

1. There are no rules.

Best Advice About Writing A Novel:

1. Don’t.

Possibly Useful Suggestions For Masochists Who Still Want To Write A Novel, Though If I Were You I Wouldn’t Pay Any Attention To Me Since Every Writer Has To Figure Out Their Own Process And Mine Is No Fun At All:

1. Write a little bit every day, even if it’s all crap.
2. Start each day by cleaning up your previous day’s crap, then add some new crap to the pile.
3. Try not to get discouraged.  Crap makes excellent fertilizer.
4. One day—when you’re cleaning up your previous day’s crap—you may find a gorgeous flower or two growing in your big stinky pile.  Rejoice, then write more crap.
5. In a month, or a year, or five years, you’ll notice that your crap pile is slowly transforming into a garden.  Rejoice, then write more crap.
6. Try not to drink yourself to death on the bad days.
7. Finish the first draft of your novel, no matter how rough.  Most people who want to write a novel never complete a draft.  Rejoice for making it this far.
8. Clean up the crap.  Write another draft, or ten, or however many it takes to make it good.  Never submit it to an agent or an editor until you don’t know what else to do with the damn thing.

Cautionary Remarks About What Comes Next:

1. Even if you’ve written a great book, be prepared for people to tell you it’s crap.  
2. Never let the bastards see you cry.  
3. Finding an agent is hard.  Remove all sharp objects from your home.
4. Finding an editor who wants to buy your book is even harder, especially if you don’t have an agent.  Put the bottle of sleeping pills down and back away from your medicine cabinet.
5. Your book will sell, or it won’t.  If it does, the reviewers may shred it to pieces, along with what’s left of your heart.  If it doesn’t, well, that’s worse.  Either way, avoid high bridges and scenic cliff walks. 
6. In the meantime, start a new book.
7. Write a little bit every day, even if it’s all crap.

Spiders with body hair.  Alarm clocks.  February in Iowa.  Grapefruit.  Poets that go out of their way to be incomprehensible.  Laugh tracks in old movies and sitcoms.  Rubbery shrimp.  Reality TV.  Internet trolls.  Indigestion. 

Websites that offer illegal copies of books.  Expensive technology that doesn’t work unless you first paint a pentagram on the floor and sacrifice a virgin.  People who overuse the phrase “at the end of the day.”  Mealy apples.  Cold feet—both metaphorical and corporeal.  Mold and mildew.  Expensive restaurants with crappy food.

Rightwing lunatics armed with assault rifles.  Leftwing Orwellian nutjobs armed with a Twitter account.  Smoke detectors that think humidity from my shower is a valid reason to get hysterical.  Corked wine.  Clogged public toilets.  Mosquitos.  Writer’s block.  Cold fries and lukewarm tea.  Harpsichords.  Loud motorcycles.  Aggressively-friendly telemarketers.  Phlegm. 

Wasps.  Hangovers.  Faculty meetings.  Incorrect spelling.  People who ban books.  Spam in my email inbox.  Litterbugs.  Cancer.  Fruitcake.  Funerals.  Electronic devices with lights that don’t turn off unless you unplug them.  Neighbors who blast their music louder than I’m blasting mine.  Bad news.  People who are cruel to kids or animals.  

Neck labels on t-shirts.  Athlete’s foot.  Inguinal hernias.  Hemorrhoids.  Pimples.  Cold sores.  Warts.  Skin tags.  Faulty condoms.  Overcooked asparagus.  Nightmares.  Chronic anxiety.  Poverty.  Sleepless nights.  Losing friends.  The death of love.  Reminders of my own mortality.  

Relentlessly positive people who refuse to admit they hate anything.

The series takes place during the Napoleonic wars, as seen through the eyes of a British sea captain and his ship’s surgeon, both serving in Nelson’s navy.

Reasons why some people hate these books:  

1. No overt sex scenes.
2. People talk funny.
3. Extended, meandering passages about history, philosophy, animal biology, shipbuilding, land management, whale hunting, classical chamber music, etc.—all having nothing whatsoever to do with the plot.  

Reasons why many, many people love these books:

1. All of the above.
2. The superb characters, relationships, and dialogue.
3. Inventive plot twists and stunning visual imagery.
4. Epic naval battles and their bloody aftermath.
5. The utterly believable and fascinating depiction of a man-of-war’s crew, crowded together for months at a time and having no contact whatsoever with the rest of humanity.
6. The jaw-dropping, evocative, and vibrant recreation of a world two centuries dead.                                                                                  

Reasons why I’d very much like to knee dear Patrick in the balls, if he were still alive:

1. He was a far, far better novelist than I will ever be.
2. He not only wrote this series, but a bazillion other things.  Did the bastard never sleep?
3. He was an absurdly gifted linguist, at home in half a dozen languages.  I still mangle English nearly every day of my life.
4. He knew everything about everything—Google probably removed his brain from his skull after he died and put it to use for their search engine—and he makes me feel stupid and lazy.

Reasons why I’d very much like to kiss the old show-off right on top of his shiny bald head:

1. He’s given me more joy than any other writer I’ve ever read.
2. He makes me laugh and cry every time I read him.

Thank you, Patrick.  I hope you’re still writing books, wherever you are, and someday I’ll get a chance to read them.  Bitch.

1. What’s your writing process? 
2. Where do you get your ideas for your books?
3. When was the last time you showered?  

Let’s tackle these one at a time.

What’s your writing process?  

When I first start a novel, I spend a few weeks picking my nose and staring at the blinking cursor on my laptop screen.  Meanwhile, I drink a few gallons of tea, stare at the wall, worry about how I’m going to pay my mortgage, speak French to my cat (she’s the only one who understands me), and think about what wine would go well with dinner. 

And that’s just my warmup.

After those first weeks have passed, I nap a lot while pretending to write, wake up and drink more tea, daydream about the beautiful man I spoke to at the grocery store last November, and obsess about the little red bump in my hairline that’s probably just a pimple but could be TERMINAL CANCER or a BROWN RECLUSE SPIDER BITE or even a freaking MICROCHIP IMPLANTED BY BILL GATES TO CONTROL MY BRAIN AND MAKE ME VOTE FOR DEMOCRATS!!

Then one fine day I write a first sentence, followed by another, and eventually—over the course of a year or two—a book happens.

Everybody’s writing process is different.  For me, sadly, writing doesn’t come easily, and often feels like I’m just grinding out one damn sentence after another, day after day, until a book finally happens.  Some days, if I’m lucky, I write a sentence that doesn’t make me wince when I’m writing it.  And once in a blue moon—or when hell freezes over, or when pigs fly—a miracle sometimes happens: I actually LIKE what I’ve written, and think “That’s pretty good.”

I don’t recommend writing for a living, but those blue moon days are almost worth it.

Where do you get your ideas for your books?  

I hate this question, because the answer is so convoluted and every time I try to answer it I end up babbling like someone afflicted with glossolalia at a tent revival meeting.  

Let me give you an example.  For my fourth novel, THE THIRD HILL NORTH OF TOWN (written under my pen name, Noah Bly), I started with a phone book, randomly flipping pages to find a name for my main character.  Once I found a name that resonated with me—Julianna Dapper—I came up with her backstory, made her look like Virginia Woolf, and stuck her in a mental hospital in Bangor, Maine in 1962.  (She had to be crazy, of course, because my mother was just then wrestling with a harrowing case of dementia and was very much on my mind.)  At the time, I didn’t really know why I had to get Julianna from Maine to Missouri—to a small town called Pawnee that no longer existed, where my grandmother was born—but once she was on the road I decided she had to kidnap two sensitive, troubled boys on the way—one black, one white, from completely different backgrounds—and put them through hell on earth for a few days because watching them interact with each other and their lunatic captor in one absurd situation after another made me laugh—but I also needed to figure out what happened to make Julianna go nuts in the first place, so half of the book takes place in 1923, a time period I knew next to nothing about and thought would be easy to write about because I’m a moron, basically.  

My hometown of Lamoni, Iowa, puts in an appearance, as does a beach in Massachusetts that I used to live next to, as does a sheriff’s office in Leon, Iowa, where my brother used to work, as does an Edsel, which was a car that fascinated me, as does…

Anyway, I’m sure you get the point.  Whatever I write never starts with anything as useful as a clearcut idea.  It’s more like blind instinct, based on a weird combination of personal history, imagination, and my twisted sense of humor—and one thing always leads to another, and another, and another.  I don’t really understand how it works myself, but if I find myself smiling at something—like a random name in a phone book—that’s usually a promising sign.

When was the last time you showered?

Uh, next question. 

You’re probably thinking I must be fairly fluent by now, right?  Well, judge for yourself.  Below is an English translation of a conversation I recently had with a native French speaker.

Simon: Good morning, Bart, how are you today?

Bart: Good morning, Simon, not bad.

Simon: Did you sleep well last night?

Bart: Yes, thank you, the sky is very pleasant yesterday.

Simon: You mean today, right?  You said yesterday.

Bart: Shit, that’s not what I meant.  Yesterday my car was raining.  Today the sun is greasy.

Simon: Uh, ok, how about we switch to English?

Bart: It was nice to have you, too.  Bye!

Seriously, my French is horrifying.  If you don’t believe me, just ask Simon why he immediately reached for the wine bottle when I started speaking.  The only reason I don’t give up is because I’m a masochist and I derive great satisfaction from feeling like an idiot.

But I love the language.  I love the way it sounds.  I love its weird fixation with gender, and how it makes no sense whatsoever to English speakers.  Tables and doors are feminine, couches and sinks are masculine.  Arms, hands, and feet are masculine, but legs and teeth are feminine.  Beards are feminine.  Vaginas are masculine.  Go figure.

And don’t even get me started on sentence structure.  The literal translation of “Are you going to get up soon?” Is “Going you soon you to get up?”

Moral of the story: Don’t learn French unless you enjoy pain and humiliation.

Copulation vs. Cuban black bean soup served over rice?  No contest, pass the hot sauce.

Fellatio vs. seafood gumbo with okra and Creole cornbread?  Not even close.

Any other sexual act known to humanity vs. baked rigatoni with blue cheese and figs?  Don’t make me laugh.

Food doesn’t snuffle in your ear like a wild boar looking for truffles, nor does it accidentally break furniture when it gets excited.  Food doesn’t expect you to orgasm at every meal, nor is it concerned with its own pleasure.  Food doesn’t scream “Oh God Oh God Oh God” when the windows are open and your elderly next-door neighbors are having a garden party.  Food’s feelings don’t get hurt if you reject it for another dish, nor does it care how many meals you’ve had in the past.  Food is perfectly fine with either monogamy or an open relationship, and food never complains if you forget to shower or brush your teeth before hooking up.

When the house is cold, food doesn’t expect you to be naked while you’re eating.  Food never asks you to talk dirty if you’re not in the mood.  Food doesn’t have scary fantasies involving bike chains and dental drills, but it also doesn’t mind a bit if you want to spice things up.  Food never plays head games, nor does it gloat and preen when it makes you swoon with sensual delight.  And food never falls asleep in the middle of dinner, even when you do.

Sex has never made me ready to commit to a serious relationship, but food?  I, Bart Yates, take thee, Ham Hock, to be my lawfully wedded spouse…