Category: Review

• August 15, 2022

  The First Great Pandemic Novel

  

  

  Within a few weeks of the worldwide shutdown that followed the outbreak of COVID-19, I remember reading a slew of think-pieces about how someone, somewhere was using their quarantine to write a great pandemic novel. I rolled my eyes at these headlines. I certainly didn’t have the mental or emotional capacity to write coherently about what was unfolding and I doubted that any writer could pen a book about the epidemic that would be worth reading—at least not until many years had passed.

  Fast forward two years, when my copy of Sea of Tranquility arrived in the mail. I was cautiously optimistic. If anyone could do justice to the COVID era, it was Emily St. John Mandel.

  Mandel comes to the topic of deadly diseases with more experience than most authors. Her breakout hit, Station Eleven, centers around a modern plague that has wiped out most of humanity. That book is a favorite of mine and it should be no surprise that it experienced a resurgence in 2020, six years after it was first published. Enthusiastic readers pointed to Mandel as a literary prophet who predicted the outbreak, even though her fictional Georgia flu is very different than the real coronavirus.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mandel was flooded with interview and speaking requests. As the literary and the real collided, she started scribbling some notes about a 23rd century writer from the Moon who’s on a book tour on Earth when another pandemic strikes. That experiment in autofiction eventually became Sea of Tranquility.

  Having lived through two years of an actual, ongoing global pandemic, I wasn’t sure I was ready to read a novel about a fictional pandemic. Thankfully, Emily St. John Mandel handles the subject matter with delicacy and humanity. Sea of Tranquility is a fast-paced and beautifully written book. The book jumps across four time periods and Mandel wisely doesn’t linger too long in the present, choosing instead to draw parallels between today and epidemics in the past and the future. A time-travel plot ties the whole thing together, but the temporal mystery is secondary to how each character responds when their respective worlds come crashing down.

  But even in the book’s darker moments, there is an acknowledgement that history is never ending, even when it seems as though all hope is lost and the human race could never possibly go on. As the author character says in a virtual lecture in the middle of lockdown, “What if it is always the end of the world? Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world as a continuous and never ending process.”

  Fans of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel will be happy to see a few familiar faces from the ever-expanding ESJM multiverse, but anyone can jump in without having read either previous book, though it adds an extra layer of depth if you’re able to pick up on the references and recurring characters woven through the plot.

  In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel has written the first great pandemic novel of the 21st century. Rather than feeling weighed down or pessimistic, the book is overwhelmingly hopeful. We have been through worse, she reminds us, we will survive this moment of history, and humanity will survive into the future. At a time when our society often feels like it’s on the brink of collapse, that’s a reminder we can all use right now. I know I needed it.

  Buy Sea of Tranquility on Bookshop.org

  Book: Sea of Tranquility (2022)

  Author: Emily St. John Mandel

  Length: 272 pages

  Genre: Literary/science fiction.

  Rating: 5/5

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and podcaster in Tacoma, WA. His work has appeared in Creative Colloquy, Grit City Magazine, and All Worlds Wayfarer. You can follow him on Twitter, join his mailing list, and listen to his audio drama, The Adventures of Captain Radio, wherever you enjoy podcasts.

  I’m a Bookshop.org affiliate, so I may earn a small commission on purchases made using links from my website. Bookshop.org is an alternative to Amazon that supports independent bookstores, which is awesome. You can find more recommendations here.
• December 10, 2019

  Top 10 Reads of the 2010s

  The end of a decade is a time for reflection and, even more importantly, it’s a time for top 10 lists from your favorite blogs. Over the last 10 years, I’ve done a lot of reading, so as 2019 winds down, I thought I would look back at my favorite books of the 2010s:

  

  10. The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries by Marilyn Johnson

  Yes, you read that right. I really did enjoy a book about obituaries. I loved every page of this darkly funny, deeply human exploration of the underappreciated art form of commemorating our lives in the pages of a newspaper (remember those?).

  

  9. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

  I first picked up Ernest Hemingway when I was in high school. I was instantly captivated by his terse, staccato style of writing and exciting themes. His early work is all about war and manly, suppressed emotions, but The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway’s last major work before his death, is his most mature work. In this short fable, he immerses the reader into the timeless struggle between humanity and nature.

  

  8. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild

  This unique history of the Great War contrasts pacificists and soldiers on both sides of the conflict to detail the moral complexity of the war that shattered Europe. Hochschild’s research and use of journal entries and personal letters serve to illustrate the conflict in strikingly human terms and make the issues of a hundred years ago feel as urgent as if it was happening today.

  

  7. Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett

  In this mile-a-minute pageturner, Follett takes a known historical event — WWII’s D-Day landings —  and imbues it with suspense. This novel revolves around a strong cast of characters, each with their own secrets, struggling against their personal demons and each other, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.

  

  6. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

  Station Eleven is a rare post-apocalyptic novel that gives me hope for the future. Despite the loss of life and leads to the collapse of modern society, the characters in St. John Mandel’s vision of a future years after a catastrophic plague find purpose in beauty, art, and human connection.

  

  5. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

  This short novel about censorship and losing touch with both our past and each other foreshadows so much of our present-day issues. It’s a book I find myself coming back to every few years and one that continues to remind me of the power of science fiction to warn us away from our darkest impulses as a species.

  

  4. All the Old Knives by Olen Steinhauer

  All the Old Knives is a slow burn, told primarily in flashbacks as two spies circle each other in a deadly game of cat and mouse in the idyllic setting of a sleepy Northern California town. Steinhauer is masterful in continually raising the stakes. It’s as tense as dinner with an old friend could possibly be and it’s wonderful.

  

  3. Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón

  Alarcón is one of my favorite writers I’ve discovered over the past decade. I highly recommend his short story collections, but Lost City Radio is a beautiful introduction to his incredible sense of place. In Lost City Radio, individual tragedies are set against the backdrop of an endless war in a nameless country that feels so real it hurts.

  

  2. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

  As a writer, I’m a sucker for books about writing, but this one is not your average writing book. Unlike the more popular choices like Bird by Bird or On Writing (which are both excellent), Klinkenborg examines the building blocks of all writing — sentences themselves — and deconstructs the process of writing in a stream of consciousness style which makes it hard to put down and really changed my thinking about my own process.

  

  1. The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

  Okay, it’s technically cheating to have my last pick be three books, but the Broken Earth series blew my mind. Jemisin is a game-changing voice in science fiction today and to say anything more about her epic three-part story about converging factions in the land of the Stillness would be giving away too much. Close your browser and read it now. It’s amazing.

  In the 2020s, I hope to make more time for amazing books like these. I also hope to add new voices to my bookshelf and more diverse voices in the coming years. What are your favorite books from the past 10 years? I’d love to hear your recommendations in the comments!

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. He’s (slowly) working on a novel manuscript and seeking publication for a pretty cool time travel short story. His previous fiction has appeared in the pages of Creative Colloquy and Grit City Magazine.

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• December 29, 2016

  A Lonely Kid’s Best Friend

  

  I think most writers start out as lonely kids whose best friends are books.

  Not long ago, my wife and I were packing to visit family for Thanksgiving. All of my clothes were shoved in a suitcase and I was frantically searching our bookshelves for some light airplane reading. Reading an engaging book on a plane is one of my favorite parts of air travel, and I wanted something good, something exciting and thoughtful. My index finger came to rest on a small paperback with a cracked spine and a torn cover; a book I hadn’t thought about in a very, very long time.

  When I was eleven years old, my family moved out of state. I changed schools and, in that cruel pre-social media world, lost touch with nearly all of my friends. I went to a small charter school in our new town, where there were just 15 students in my entire grade. I struggled to fit in and when I couldn’t seem to make any friends, I turned inward.

  There was a small, white bookcase in my classroom and students were encouraged to borrow books. Being in middle school and being lonely, I naturally gravitated to escapist fiction and picked up a slight book with a dragon on the cover — A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin.

  The novel opens with this haunting epigraph from the creation story of LeGuin’s fictional Archipelago:

  Only in silence the word,
  only in dark the light,
  only in dying life:
  bright the hawk’s flight
  on the empty sky

  From those first words, I was hooked.

  Originally published in 1968 when very few women were writing in speculative genres, A Wizard of Earthsea came to me at the perfect time, as great books often do. Set in a fantastic world of islands and magic, the story follows the journey of Sparrowhawk, an arrogant young sorcerer who inadvertently breaks the barrier between life and death and unleashes a murderous shadow into the world. As he seeks to defeat it, he comes to understand the balance between light and dark — and his own place in that balance.

  A Wizard of Earthsea completely captivated me. It wasn’t an epic fantasy, like The Lord of the Rings, but a personal fantasy; a coming-of-age story about one man learning to master his demons (both figurative and literal).

  

  Of even more interest to me as a budding writer was the nature of magic in LeGuin’s imagined world. Her wizards practiced word magic. In Earthsea, the key to magical power lies in names. To know the true name of a person, an animal, or a force of nature gives you power over it. In my own life, I was also learning that words were powerful.

  A Wizard of Earthsea was my gateway drug. In addition to the book’s four sequels, each growing in depth and complexity, LeGuin’s saga led me to other works of fantasy and science fiction. It also inspired me to write my own stories. If writing were a superpower, those books of fantasy would feature prominently in my origin story. Throughout middle school (and especially during the two years before I transferred to a larger public school), I started to write consistently for the first time in my life, building my own fictional worlds.

  I had nearly forgotten about A Wizard of Earthsea until I happened upon it while packing my bag. I had nearly forgotten why it was so important to my development as a writer and how it had kept me company when I was a lonely kid in a new town. I don’t intend to forget again.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. He can be found on Twitter or on his couch rereading the books that he loved when he was younger. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to his mailing list for monthly book recommendations and exclusive content. What books inspired you when you were young? Sound off in the comments!

  Join the mailing list.
• March 30, 2015

  The Value of a Truly Terrible Book

  

  I have a lot of books crammed into my little office at home and I’d estimate that I’ve only read about two-thirds of them. The rest are books that I just haven’t gotten around to yet. I’ve spent years collecting these books and dragging them halfway across the country on the off chance that on some rainy day, I’ll pull one off the shelf. This is the story of one of those books.

  Ten years ago, I saw the film Sahara. It was an action-adventure about Dirk Pitt, a marine engineer and adventurer who saves the day and discovers a missing Civil War ironclad in the sands of Africa. It was thrilling stuff and despite being universally panned by critics, I liked it. So, I went down to Bookman’s and picked up a copy of one of novels the move was based on, Valhalla Rising.

  And it sat on my shelf for the next ten years. Unread.

  Then, about a month ago, I picked it up. I remembered liking the film and I liked that there was a viking ship on the cover, so I started to read. And it was awful. What the movie version of Dirk Pitt glossed over, the book revealed in agonizing detail. Pitt in the novel can do no wrong. Everyone around him worships him. Women fling themselves at him and he refuses their advances with long, sexist soliloquies about how he likes to have women cook and clean for him.

  The plot is worse: full of impossible twists and turns, leaping from one world-ending crisis to the next (along with some unfortunate villainous plans that are eerily reminiscent of 9/11 — the book was published in August 2001 and features both planes crashing in Manhattan and a separate plot to destroy the World Trade Center). It is completely ridiculous from beginning to end. It’s also not about vikings.

  I really didn’t like Valhalla Rising. I didn’t like the characters, the plot or the dialogue. Even the descriptions were poorly written, spending paragraphs explaining the horsepower of a WWII transport plane’s engine or the exact chiseling of Pitt’s face.

  Still, I think there is something to be learned from this book. As a writer, I am often tempted to read the greats. When I read the masters of literature, I am struck by the complexity of their masterpieces. It can be hard to deconstruct an excellent work, because all the pieces are so carefully laid into place that I can’t see how they fit together.

  On the other hand, when I read a really bad book, I can see the gaps. I see where the author tried something that didn’t quite work; where a line of dialogue fell flat; where a plot line was left dangling. Sometimes, I learn more from failure than from success.

  Every writer should read a truly terrible book from time to time. It’s a good gut check of your own sense. You can critique as you go and you will be amazed by how many lessons you learn.

  So, go ahead, grab that trashy paperback. You’ll probably learn a few things about the craft. Even if you don’t, let it motivate you. If that person can write a crappy manuscript and get it published, you can, too.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and avid reader of books both good and bad. You can follow him on Twitter. Apologies to Clive Cussler (even though he did appear as a fictionalized version of himself in his own book, which is weird).
• February 11, 2015

  Harper Lee’s Second Novel Will Change Everything

  

  “People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
  – Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

  Fifty-five years is a long time to wait for a second novel, but more than half a century after her debut, it appears that Harper Lee is publishing a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. Go Set a Watchman is set in the 1950s and follows Scout, now grown, as she returns to the tired old town of Maycomb, Alabama. After mulling the news over for the better part of a week, I still don’t know whether to be excited or nervous.

  Most of us grew up reading Harper Lee’s seminal first novel. It is a masterpiece; a cornerstone of American literature. It’s no surprise to me that Harper Lee was unable to follow it up. Lightning rarely strikes twice.

  So, I find it strange that this second book (or, more accurately, first book, as it was written before Mockingbird) is coming to light now. Now, I don’t know if Lee is being taken advantage of in her old age. I don’t know if the book will even be any good. But no matter what this new book is or isn’t, its publication will forever change the world of To Kill a Mockingbird that we all know and love. Its very existence will change the way future generations will read about the little girl watching her father defend a black man in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s. It will offer a different lens through which to understand the characters and events of Lee’s first book and that worries me.

  At the heart of my concern is a question — at what point does a work of art cease to be the property of its creator? When a book becomes one of the greatest works of literature of an entire century, does the author retain the right to add or take away from it? At what point does it become part of our culture? Something bigger than anyone, even its author? Of course it’s Lee’s legacy, but it also belongs to all of us who have read the book and loved it. At what point should a great monument be left alone to be what it is?

  A new book will hit the shelves this summer and it will change something. Wherever you are, stand up. To Kill a Mockingbird is passing.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and reader in Tacoma, WA. You can leave your comments below or find him on Twitter.
• August 7, 2014

  Apocalypse Train Through Denmark

  

  This week, I watched two wildly different films. One was the closing night film at the First Annual Destiny City Film Festival. The other was a thriller/allegory with lots of violence and action. One was a carefully-crafted, low-key story about a man who goes searching for his grandfather and the other was a high-intensity rollercoaster ride about class warfare on a train circumnavigating a frozen, lifeless Earth.

  On the surface, these two movies have absolutely nothing in common, but when I started to dig deeper and thought about it, the more I realized that they are telling a story that is fundamentally the same. For all their differences, Copenhagen and Snowpiercer use the same storytelling tools.

  [This is your only warning: Here be spoilers, matey.]

  

  Mark Raso’s Copenhagen starts with a man on a mission to return to the homeland of his father and track down his grandfather. He is looking for insights into a man he never knew and ultimately, looking for answers about himself. What William finds, however, is a forbidden love and is faced with responsibility for the first time in his life. It’s classic indie fare — long sequences of riding bikes through the cobblestone streets of Denmark’s capital, Europop, muted colors, an unlikeable protagonist who grows into a mature man and a barrel of twentysomething angst simmering just below the surface.

  

  Our second movie is, um, a little different. Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer is a South Korean scifi action film that opens with a dispirited group of refugees from a now-frozen planet riding in the back of a train that circles the world once a year and never stops. It is Titanic on a locomotive, with the rich people in the front and the poor people in the back, but without all the mushy love and romance. Early on, our protagonist shuns the role of the leader even as he prepares to lead a revolution to take over the train and free his people from a life of servitude and mashed-up cockroach food.

  This film has all the tropes of apocalyptic science fiction —authoritarianism masquerading as capitalism, a closed world (the train could just as easily have been a spaceship), lots of blood, futuristic drugs, muted colors, bad dialogue, a man who refuses a position of leadership who grows into a mature man and a boxcar of 21st century end-of-the-world angst boiling over.

  Completely different.

  

  And yet, at the heart of each film is a coming of age story. In Copenhagen, William can’t grow up until a younger woman shows him a new way of looking at the world. At the climax of this story, William must face a moral choice that will define him. In Snowpiercer, Curtis can’t grow into a wise and just leader until he atones for his part in a slaughter in the desperate early days of the global apocalypse. In the end, Curtis must choose between the role of ruler or martyr.

  

  There are so many ways to tell a story. That’s what I love most about being a writer. There are infinite possibilities. With a few changes in setting and tone, I can go from William standing on the Danish coast where the Baltic Sea and the North Sea meet to a speeding luxury train carrying the last members of humanity. With a few flicks of a pen, I can transform hedonistic, nihilistic William into Captain American killing people with an axe.

  Despite their differences, I really enjoyed both films (although, I’ll admit that I had trouble taking Snowpiercer very seriously). From each, I gained a new perspective on a well-worn tale. That’s the versatility of a story.

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer and filmmaker in Tacoma, WA. Comment below or follow him on Twitter. Thanks for reading!
• July 10, 2014

  Rewriting Hemingway

  

  Last week, news broke of a new release of Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 debut novel The Sun Also Rises. The new edition “restores” the original first chapter of the novel, replacing the iconic opening scenes setting up the protagonist, Robert Cohn, with an introduction to the female lead, the fiery Brett Ashley. Hemingway fans are practically drooling over the chance to see “new” material from the author, who committed suicide in 1961. He’s one of my personal favorite authors, but something about the publishing of these previously discarded pages feels wrong.

  If Hemingway deleted his original chapter, it was with good reason. That’s how writing works. You may keep a word, a phrase, a sentence or a dozen pages right up to the end as a placeholder, or simply because your subconscious hasn’t figured out how to improve upon it. The replacement comes to you either in a flash of inspiration or after slow and methodical revision.

  I suspect that’s what Papa was up to when he threw out his original opening line, “This is a novel about a lady” and substituted the more nuanced “Richard Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” See the difference? The first line sets up the romantic interest that does drive much of the story, but the second line gives us so much more. It gives us the sense that this character is past his peak. He was once a champion, but no more. Later, that line will resonate with the themes of disillusionment, detachment and malaise that characterizes this cast of characters and reflects the post-WWI disenchantment of his generation. That’s a hook written by someone who has had time to mull over his story.

  Much of the excitement over this new edition is the opportunity to see the writer at work, in the midst of developing one of those rare Great American Novels. There is value in opening up the creative process, but it could also undermine our appreciation for the finished work. Would we be so in awe of Shakespeare’s dramatic talent if we discovered his crude, rough outline of Hamlet’s “To Be Or Not To Be” soliloquy?

  I think most writers, myself included, would be mortified if their first drafts were made available to the public. The early drafts are where we privately struggle with the plot and characters. Those pages are never meant to be read. They are the sandbox of clumsy ideas and half-baked prose, which is carefully shaped into a final form that is ready for the limelight.

  When we posthumously publish unfinished works or early drafts of classic books, are we doing the writers a disservice by lifting the curtain on their solitary process? Should we be dragging deleted words out of dusty desks and hard drives? Or should writers take it upon themselves to destroy anything that might one day expose their plot holes and tangents to the world? What do you think?

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. You can comment below, share this story with your friends or follow him on Twitter. If you’re feeling especially daring, you can do all three.
• April 1, 2014

  9 Things “How I Met Your Mother” Taught Me About Storytelling

  After nine seasons, my favorite TV sitcom came to an end last night. After years of twists and turns, Ted Mosby finally met the love of his life and his couch-bound children found out how their father met their mother. For my generation, the CBS comedy has become is cultural touchstone. With its intricate web of puzzle pieces, flashbacks within flashbacks, callbacks and catchphrases, “How I Met Your Mother” chronicled the ups and downs of dating, friendship and twenty-somethinghood in the 21st century.

  It also hooked us for one of the longest stories in television. Every episode of its nine-year run brought us one step closer to the ultimate goal: discovering how Ted would meet his future wife, the mysterious Girl With the Yellow Umbrella. While I disagree with the way the writers ultimately chose to end it, the final episode got me thinking about all the clever storytelling devices HIMYM used to spin the tale of one man’s quest for marital bliss.

  So, in honor of the finale of the show, here are 9 Things “How I Met Your Mother” taught me about storytelling. Warning: May Contain Spoilers.

  9) Kids, I’m going to tell you an incredible story…

  When it comes to narration, first person is hard to pull off, but this show did it right. Most episodes of HIMYM are narrated for us by Future Ted. What could’ve been a boring voice that simply related events as they were happening was instead used to great effect to highten the emotion of a scene, provide transitions, draw parallels, provide punchlines and provide a counterpoint to the action. HIMYM’s narrator can see the arc of events to remind us where we’re headed. But he is also an unreliable narrator, mixing up the order of stories, clashing with reality and being biased toward his red cowboy boots, which provided another layer or humor and depth.

  8) Haaave you met Ted?

  Snappy dialogue is one of the hallmarks of HIMYM. The character’s exchanges are lighning quick and loaded with profound meaning and razor sharp wit. The great writing is what really set the show apart from everything else on at 8 pm on a Monday night. Your dialogue should sizzle. Have fun with it and let your characters play with language. If your descriptions are beautiful, but your dialogue feels stale, canned or otherwise uninteresting, you need to rewrite. Great dialogue can carry much of the plot.

  7) Blue French Horn

  Part of the fun of HIMYM is in the way the show recalls things that have happened in the past. Audience members paying attention will remember the reference and understand the joke. Some things come back again and again to pay off. Calling back to something that happened waaaay back in chapter two is a good way to keep readers engaged and clue them in that everything is important to the bigger picture. Those little things should be a part of your ending, forming a neat little bookend to your story. When you’re wrapping up your story, look for clues to the eventual resolution in the seeds that you planted back at the beginning; it will feel more satisfying than a resolution that comes out of nowhere.

  6) Come again for Big Fudge?

  Sure, the story is about Ted, but the writers of HIMYM also fleshed out the supporting characters. They provided backstories, motivations and asides for Marshall, Lily, Robin and Barney that made them feel like real people. They had hopes and dreams beyond being stock characters or one-liner delivering stereotypes. Even Barney, the player of the group, changed over the years and eventually settled down. You have to allow all of your characters to be three-dimensional, not just your protagonist. Giving your minor characters room to grow and change over the course of the narrative gives your story more realism.

  5) The Bro Code

  In the show, Barney lives his life by the Bro Code, a set of rules that govern the behavior of men. Barney had a rule to cover any situation from how a wingman must conduct himself (ie. “A bro shall always say ‘yes’”) to complicated dating prcedures (ie. “the mom of a bro is always off-limits”). Similarly, the universe your story builds should have a set of guiding principles. Clear rules about what can and cannot happen in your tale will help you fashion an internally-consistent world.

  4) The Mother

  Throughout the show, we have always known where we would eventually wind up. From the outset, we knew that Ted would be successful in his search for true love. We knew the goal, but we didn’t know how we would get there or who the unnammed Mother was until the very end. All we had were hints scattered along the way like breadcrumbs. When you’re writing, you should know the end and leave hints to help your reader connect the dots.

  3)The Slap of a Thousand Exploding Suns

  Even the best storytellers get off track now and then. HIMYM was a great television sitcom. It broke new ground with a bold format, but sometimes it got a little too confident. In later seasons, elaborate fantasy sequences (many of them either musical or parodying famous movies) and out-of-character moments weighed heavily on the show. Barney became the star of the show, which started to rely too heavily on its gimmicks and once starry-eyed romantic Ted slumped into pity-party jerk Ted. Far too many episodes went by without the merest hint of the elusive Mother.

  Some of the later season outings are hard to watch because the show wandered too far from what it did well. Watch your step as your write your story, to make sure you stay true to what you’ve promised your readers. It’s all too easy to jump the shark. As for throwing in a surprise twist ending? Probably best to avoid it.

  2) Wait for it…

  The writers of HIMYM understood that suspense keeps your audience coming back. By raising the stakes, dropping a tantilyzing clue or stopping just short of a big reveal, they kept us returning every week for nine years. Thoughtfully crafted suspense and mystery is the key to writing a pageturner, no matter what your genre is. By withholding information and releasing it strategically, your readers won’t be able to put your story down. They’ll care about what happens and want to know how what happens to the characters you’ve created.

  1) Love the Journey

  In all honesty, Ted probably could’ve told the short version of how he met his wife (involving a yellow umbrella and a series of missed connections) in about ten minutes. But the longform nature of the story, with its tangents and embellishments along the way, is infinitely more satisfying.

  By taking our time and letting the story go where it leads, we got to learn about Marshall and Lily starting a family, Barney letting go of his bachelor lifestyle and Robin struggling to balance her personal life with her demanding career. By taking the slow path instead of the fast lane, we were treated to intimate moments and great laughs shared by a close group of friends. The McLaren’s gang feels like family because of how the story was told. We didn’t skip to the end. We lived with the conflict and experienced the setback.

  The story itself took on a life of its own. That’s why it isn’t just another show about a group of friends who hang out in a bar. The writers made sure that the journey was just as worthwhile as the destination. They made us care about the characters and not just about the solution to the premise. That’s what makes it so hard to say goodbye. And it’s something we should all remember when, like Ted, we sit down to tell our own story.

  

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA. When he isn’t wondering how he will fill the Monday night void in his life, you can find him on Twitter. Thanks for reading!
• November 20, 2013

  An Open Letter to the Doctor

  Dear Doctor,

  You are a man of many faces who has lived many lifetimes. For over a thousand years, you’ve been traveling through time and space in a ship disguised as a blue police box. But I’ve only been following your exploits for the past year or so. I first met you in your Ninth incarnation, when you were guilt-stricken with blood on your hands. It was clear to me that you were a great man, even if you didn’t know it yourself.

  You are unlike any hero I have ever known. In our early travels through space and time, you were a guilty man who doubted himself. You saved entire worlds, but preferred to live in the shadows. You brought out the best qualities of your companions. In your eyes, there were no insignificant people. You reminded me to have a brave heart, even when all looked lost.

  You are quick on your feet, eccentric, brilliant and unlike so many of the figures of your genre, you’re quick to show mercy. In a violent universe, you refuse to carry a weapon. You face armies with only your wits and a screwdriver. You were exactly the kind of hero I would’ve idolized in my youth.

  

  You and I have something in common — we’ve both been running our entire lives. What you’re on the run from is a mystery, as you madly dash (allons-y!) from adventure to adventure, saving planets from the Daleks or the Cybermen or the Weeping Angels. Like me, you are plagued by demons and tempted by the darker side of your soul, but you refuse to give in. It gives me courage to fight my own darkness.

  I don’t know who you are. You are a Time Lord whose name and past are shrouded in the veil of the time vortex and the ancient history of a forsaken world. You are a madman with a box, but you are also me. You are the highest hopes of what humanity could be. You are hope personified, Doctor. And as you and the TARDIS fly off to face the greatest dangers in the universe, that’s something I’ll keep with me, across all of space and time.

  Yours truly,
  Jonny Eberle

  — 30 —

  Jonny Eberle is a writer, Doctor Who fan and all around Anglophile living in Tacoma, WA. When he isn’t dreaming about the stars, he’s writing about going to them or on Twitter. Thanks for reading!
• February 24, 2013

  What Langston Hughes Taught Me About The Music of Language

  

  I’ll never forget the first time I read a poem written by Langston Hughes. I was 16, taking a creative writing class at my high school and struggling to make it through the poetry unit of the course. I couldn’t write a decent poem to save my grade and every poem I read seemed more boring and contrived than the last. We had to spend 20 minutes of every period reading poems and it was torture.

  And then there was Langston Hughes, peeking out from the bookshelf in an unassuming paperback. The cover promised he was a “master of American verse.” I’d never heard of the guy.

  I flipped to a random page and found a poem called “The Weary Blues.” It was beautiful.

  Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
  Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
       I heard a Negro play.
  Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
  By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
       He did a lazy sway . . .
       He did a lazy sway . . .
  To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
  With his ebony hands on each ivory key
  He made that poor piano moan with melody.
       O Blues!
  Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
  He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
       Sweet Blues!
  Coming from a black man’s soul.
       O Blues!
  In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
  I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
       “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
         Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
         I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
         And put ma troubles on the shelf.”
  Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
  He played a few chords then he sang some more—
       “I got the Weary Blues
         And I can’t be satisfied.
         Got the Weary Blues
         And can’t be satisfied—
         I ain’t happy no mo’
         And I wish that I had died.”
  And far into the night he crooned that tune.
  The stars went out and so did the moon.
  The singer stopped playing and went to bed
  While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
  He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

  This poem had life; movement. For the first time, I could hear a voice in the words. The ink on the page swayed. The lines tapped out the beat. It was jazz. I could almost hear that old piano moan — the music was there, preserved on the page for 80 years before reaching my ears. I had no idea language could do that.

  Langston Hughes was long dead when I picked up his work, but I could hear him speaking to me. Our experiences were far removed — he was a black poet who escaped the Jim Crow South to become one of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s; I was a 21st century white teenager in a little Arizona mountain town. But despite the gulf of time and place, I couldn’t shake the sense that Hughes was talked directly to me.

  As I sat down to write my own work, both poetry and fiction, I like to think that I’m having a conversation with Hughes. I answer his cadence with my own rhythm; my song answers his.

  Writing shouldn’t be so polished that you lose the human voice. Language is dynamic, emotional, musical and I try to capture that music in everything I write, so that you can hear me across what time and space separated us. Langston Hughes taught me that.

  

  Sweat in the Street
  By J.W. Eberle
  After A. Van Jordan

  Sweat pours off the shoulders of the night
  in greasy drops that stick to the sidewalk.
  puddle around my feet,
  soak my socks.

  Soul-heavy air clings to my fingertips,
  trailing in the gutter
  with the other restless perfectionists,
  missed deadlines,
  abandoned desires.

  Sweat pours off the shoulders of the thick, gray hour
  between night and day.
  The city is hot and foul in the back alleys
  with the passed-out homeless and last call vagrants.
  The street is a mirror where the artists drown.

  — 30 —

  My name is Jonny Eberle and I’m a writer, photographer and jazz aficionado in Flagstaff, AZ. Who’s your favorite poet and how did they inspire you? Please comment, share or follow me on Twitter: @jonnyeberle. Thanks for reading.

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