There’s nothing quite like a good Christmas story. Perhaps you have your own memories of being read “The Night Before Christmas” as a kid and swearing you could hear footsteps on the roof. Or maybe your family sat down to watch Charlie Brown choose a scraggly pine to be the center of the Christmas pageant. Personally, I always looked forward to seeing the claymation TV specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In any case, storytelling is a large part of the Christmas mythology in western traditions, blending old and new beliefs to create something a little more magical than our day-to-day experiences.
Back in 2016, Creative Colloquy put out a call for Christmas-themed stories, poems, and essays. I thought it would be a fun challenge to add my own twist to the generations of Yuletide fiction that’s come before. Set in the North Pole in the days before Christmas, “The Evidence for Coal” shows what happens when jolly old St. Nick and Big Data collide. It’s a bit of a satire of our data-driven culture and a bit of a reflection on why the idea of a man in a red suit delivering gifts to children around the world is so strangely compelling in the first place — nothing groundbreaking, just some good old fashioned Christmas fare.
This year, I decided to revisit this story, sprucing it up for my podcast on writing and the creative process, Dispatches with Jonny Eberle. I asked my friend William McDonald to narrate it and I think his acting chops really serve to bring the story to life. I can almost smell the hot cocoa wafting through the corporate halls of Santa’s workshop.
Ready to give it a listen? You can find the episode below or check it out wherever you find your podcasts. I hope you enjoy it and happy holidays!
This Labor Day weekend, my family took a road trip through North Cascades National Park. Along the way, we stopped in the small town of Winthrop, WA, to grab a snack and stretch our legs after a long drive. Things went downhill almost as soon as we got out of the car.
Winthrop, it turned out, was under siege by bees. Bees were everywhere, dive-bombing us when we tried to enjoy an iced chai at an outdoor cafe, popping up unexpectedly from under the boards of the wood-plank sidewalks, and swarming us when we dared to stop in a creekside park for lunch. In the end, we gave up, packed up, and drove an hour farther into the mountains to eat in peace.
Our experience wasn’t all that unusual, but it left me wondering what would happen if a town really did get taken over by bees. How would the residents react? How would tourists rate their visit if they were constantly under threat of being stung by oversized and increasingly organized honeybees?
I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. So, I started writing. The end result was a weird, experimental little story in the form of a series of online reviews — to say anymore would be spoiling it.
I’m pleased that the editors of Creative Colloquy enjoyed it enough to publish it on their site. You can read “Reviews of Sanctuary Creek Honey Farm” now:
If you like the story, let me know by leaving a comment below. If you’re a writer in the South Sound with a story or poem that’s ready for publication, check out Creative Colloquy. They’re always looking for local scribes to feature. Thanks for reading!
P.S. If you’re reading this before October 30, 2022, there’s still time to help my audio drama The Adventures of Captain Radio win an Audio Verse Award! Learn more here.
Don’t get me wrong, I love to write. Creative projects fill my proverbial cup. But sometimes, I just don’t have the time to devote to the practice of writing, or when I do have the time, I can’t muster up the energy to actually put my fingers to the keyboard. Am I a bad writer because I can’t get the words to flow?
I’m not a machine. I can’t flip a switch and suddenly be in production mode. That isn’t how creativity works. When the baby hasn’t been sleeping well or when I’ve spent all of my creative energy at work or when the dishes are overflowing the sink, it’s hard to even want to write.
And yet.
There is a voice in my head that says, “You’re not a real writer if you avoid writing. You’ll never publish your novel, finish your podcast script, send this short story out, etc.” Maybe you’ve heard this voice, too. It’s persistent, gnawing. It’s also dead wrong.
I don’t know anybody who can write like clockwork every single day without a break. We all feel exhausted or overwhelmed sometimes. I often take long hiatuses from my creative writing, which makes me feel guilty, but it shouldn’t. Because there are days when the news is bad and the chores can’t be ignored and after all that, I just need to shut my brain off for 30 minutes with some TV. Or simply go to bed early.
I would love to be one of those highly disciplined artists who stick to a rigid schedule, churning out masterpiece after masterpiece. Maybe I’ll be a full-time writer someday and have the privilege to spend my days like that. But right now, I have so many other things that need my attention.
I don’t think that makes me a bad writer or somehow not a “real” artist. I’m human—and most of us humans need to rest when we’re tired, so we can come back refreshed, inspired, and excited to put words on the page. After all, if you’re not enjoying the act of writing, then what’s the point?
How do you write when you don’t have the time or the energy to write? 1) Aim small. Instead of writing for an hour, write for 10 minutes, or write even one sentence. It feels good to make progress on a project, no matter how small it is. 2) Maybe you don’t worry about it today. Your Word doc with its incessantly blinking cursor will still be there tomorrow. It is good to give yourself a break. Rest when your mind and body need it. Give yourself permission to focus on your to-do list and don’t feel bad about dedicating time to other parts of your life. Stephen King has to fold and put away his laundry just like the rest of us.
It’s okay not to write. You’re still a writer, even if it’s been days, weeks, or months since you actually wrote a word. If the desire to tell a story is still in you, then you’re the real deal.
So here’s to the working parent writers. The full-time job writers. The juggling-multiple-jobs writers. The caregiver writers. The chronic health condition writers. The gotta-focus-on-my-mental-health writers. The burned-out writers. I’m with you. And when we’re ready to get back to our manuscripts, it’s going to be amazing. Until then, be kind to yourself.
I’m pleased to share that I have a new short story published this month on Creative Colloquy’s website. It’s a piece of flash fiction written in response to artist Steve LaBerge’s installation “Touching Down in Tacoma,” which was a part of the Tacoma Light Trail, an exhibition of light art in downtown Tacoma. For a few weeks this winter, LaBerge transformed the lobby of the historic Pantages Theatre into an alien landscape with a lone illuminated figure sitting beside a suit of some kind and a board of multicolored squares. Also included was an ethereal song provided by the Puget Sound Revels.
Looking at LaBerge’s piece, I was struck by the whimsy and the melancholy in the scene. With that in mind, I set out to write a short story incorporating the various elements of the installation and trying to imagine who the lone figure was and what they were doing there in this bizarre, otherworldly place. The resulting story is “Victorious,” about the last survivor of a devastating future war in the final moments of a world about to end. It appears in this month’s fiction and poetry published by Creative Colloquy, alongside a poem by Erik Carlsen.
Before reading the story, I invite you to look at “Touching Down in Tacoma” and listen to the music. Then, head over to Creative Colloquy to read the story. I hope you enjoy it!
Cover image from All Worlds Wayfarer Issue VII. Artwork by Tithi Luadthong.
It’s publication day for my newest short story! All Worlds Wayfarer is publishing my story “Firemaker” in their December 2020 issue, now available to read online for free or available as an ebook from Amazon. I’m beyond excited that this story has finally found a home. I sincerely hope you enjoy reading it.
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t read the story yet, I hope you will before reading much further, because this is the point of no return if you wish to avoid spoilers. I love a good time travel tale. It’s a familiar trope for good reason — it allows us to imagine our reality in surprising ways. If we had a machine like the one my protagonist has at his disposal, I think we’d all be tempted to see what tomorrow had in store for us, or long to correct what once went wrong. But what happens once you’ve seen and done it all? Where would a weary time travel go to escape the sweeping currents of history? That’s the question at the heart of “Firemaker.”
I started tinkering with this idea about three years ago, when I fell down a rabbit hole of information about linguistics. I remember reading about linguists searching for an ancient “mother tongue,” a lost language theorized to be the ancestor of today’s Indo-European language family. This missing language, dubbed “Proto Indo-European” can be extrapolated by looking for common words that may indicate a common root in the distant past. According to some theories, scraps of this language embedded in our modern lexicon may be the only surviving evidence of a hunter-gatherer society that existed more than 15,000 years ago. From that starting place, I began to imagine this society as a small band that did not survive the Ice Age, leaving behind nothing but their language. A dead-end civilization, cut off from us by a climactic disaster.
Some time later, this idea merged with another one that was rolling around in my mind. I was thinking about time travel as a plot device, about the nature of time, and where a time traveler who’s tired of roaming might go. How might such a traveler retire after untold decades exploring every corner of history from the dawn of the dinosaurs to the destruction of the Earth? Where would I go if I wanted to avoid making disruptive changes to the timeline and simply be? In that position, I might want to find a quiet corner of time where I knew I couldn’t alter the flow of history, among people who would eventually disappear from the historical record. Perhaps an Ice Age civilization destined to die out.
These two threads came together in an early draft of a story titled “Amber.” In that first version, the Traveler goes into the distant past to escape from the responsibility of knowing how everything would turn out. In that story, the Traveler came across as cold and detached, weighing the impact of his every action before committing to anything. In the story, he saves a boy from drowning, but only after deciding that doing so will have no adverse affect on history. It was an interesting thought experiment, but it lacked emotional stakes.
So, I made some changes, put it away for a year or two, and then pulled it out again to fine-tune it. In the final story, the Traveler is much more impulsive and driven not by a sense of duty not to screw up time, but love for a woman with the potential to ensure her people’s survival as ice sheets bear down on their valley. “Firemaker” is a lot more fun than its earlier incarnation because of the protagonist’s willingness to throw away his whole life in order to get himself to Immaru ahead of schedule. But it also incorporates an undercurrent of uncertainty about whether or not we can ever understand or manipulate time. In the end, I honestly don’t know if the Traveler’s actions constitute a paradox or if that’s how it was always supposed to be and free will is an illusion. And I don’t know if the Traveler made it back to the tavern to order the drinks or if he ever existed at all. That’s the fun of time travel, and I hope you enjoyed the trip.
“Firemaker” is now available to read on the All Worlds Wayfarer website. All Worlds Wayfarer publishes quarterly on the solstice and equinox, so you have until March 20, 2021 to read my short fiction there before the next issue is published. If you’d like a copy you can keep forever, please consider supporting the lit journal by purchasing the Kindle version on Amazon. Thanks for reading!
Earlier this week, on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, I was flipping through a stack of old National Geographic magazines, looking for something to symbolize my goals for the new year. A friend was hosting a vision board party at a bar in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood. Now, I’m not entirely sure I understand what a vision board is, so I’m sure I was doing it wrong, but as a former elementary school student, I felt pretty confident when I saw the magazines, scissors and glue sticks spread out on the table.
I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just words and images that inspired me. I slowly amassed an admirably random pile of clippings. Grabbing a poster board and a glue stick, I realized there was an unintentional, perhaps subconscious, theme in the images I’d chosen. From an advertisement, I’d lifted a man in a jet pack. An article on the redwoods yielded two scientists scaling a monolithic tree too tall to fit on the page. A feature on birds of prey offered up the image of a screaming hawk, its tawny wings spread wide.
Liftoff.
Reaching new heights.
Flight.
For most, if not all, of human history, we’ve yearned to emulate birds and soar among the clouds. However, despite our lofty aspirations, but it wasn’t until one hundred years ago that the Wright Brothers built a flying machine that could actually sustain flight. Reaching a difficult goal takes determination, repeated failure, and time. Orville and Wilbur Wright could never have achieved the world’s first powered flight without their fair share of crash landings. I think life is a lot like that.
Which brings me to my yearly tradition of making birthday resolutions instead of new year’s resolutions. No, I’m not getting my pilot’s license or going skydiving. Last year, I was not able to realize most of my resolutions. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but life took a couple of unexpected turns, as life has a tendency to do. As I set out on this new year, this new decade, and my thirtieth year of life, I’m aware that failure is the best teacher. I’ve learned a lot from what I tried and was unable to accomplish last year, and I have better ideas for how to improve my process in 2020.
This year, for my birthday resolutions, I have my sights set on taking flight — metaphorically, of course — while also taking to heart the lessons of failure. So, without further ado, here’s what I have my sights set on this year:
1. Pursue a Healthy Balance
Last year, I set myself a challenge of running a 5K. It didn’t happen. This year, I’m still focused on taking better care of myself, but I’m not limiting myself to running. I want to go for long walks, hike through the woods, kayak around Puget Sound, break a sweat working on our ongoing remodel and exercise on a regular schedule. If I do some running along the way, that would be excellent. Overall, though, I’m more interested in striking a healthier balance in my life — more physical activity, less laying on the couch — in whatever way works for me.
2. Write and Publish
Three years ago, I declared I would complete a draft of a novel by the time I turned thirty. Well, I’m thirty now and the novel isn’t done; however, I am halfway through and the story is starting to take wing. I didn’t make my arbitrary deadline, but that’s okay. I’m not giving up and will continue to chip away at my manuscript until it’s ready for its debut.
In addition to my novel, I have an itch to write more short fiction, which has taken a back seat recently. I love short stories and flash fiction and I have several ideas burning a hole in my notebook that I can’t wait to get to work on.
Finally, I’m refocusing on getting more of my work published in 2020. I have an opportunity in the next couple of months to submit to a local publication I really admire, and I hope it’s the start of getting more of my words into print (or pixels) for the world to see.
3. Indulge My Curiosity
Last fall, I embarked on a journey I could not have foreseen when I started an online program to earn a certificate in strategic communication and public relations. Going back to school, even in an incredibly limited fashion, reminded me that I don’t miss homework, but I do enjoy learning. The program is short (I’ll be finished in March), but I plan to continue stretching my brain, seeking out books, articles, podcasts, and documentaries to help me widen my worldview and challenge my preconceived ideas. The world is huge and complex and there is so much to know. As I enter my third decade, it’s obvious to me that I’m just scratching the surface.
Will I spread my wings and take flight this year? Only time will tell, and I’ll be sure to share highlights here on the blog. Thanks for reading!
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Jonny Eberle is a writer, storyteller, and hawk fledgling nesting in Tacoma, WA. You can follow him on Twitter and join the mailing list to get exclusive content delivered straight to your inbox each month.
I don’t know about you, but I’m always writing stories in my head. A snippet of interesting conversation, an observation on the street, a song on the radio — my brain will wheel off on a creative tangent. I hear dialogue in restaurants. I imagine plot twists on my drive to and from the office. I don’t know what causes it, but I have always been wired for story.
I’ve heard that sculptors can see the finished piece in a hunk of raw marble and that composers can hear melodies that don’t yet exist. I think a writer’s brain must work the same way, because whether I have time to address the thought or not (more often not), these stories ricochet around in the echo chamber of my mind all day, every day. I can’t help it and even if I could turn it off, I wouldn’t want to.
It’s like having second sight. For everything that crosses my path, I can invent a backstory, a character or an entire fictional world from out of nowhere. I carry around a notebook in a vain attempt to capture it, but 99% of the stories that flicker, unbidden, into existence escape me a moment later. Those that I do manage to hold onto for any length of time are often difficult to transcribe without losing some of their organic sheen. When I’m lucky, a story that I thought I’d lost will return and stay long enough to become tangible words on a page. Those are the ones worth waiting for.
I don’t tell you this to make myself seem like I have a special ability. I don’t. I might pay more attention to it, but I think we’re all wired this way. It’s what sets humanity apart — our imagination. We all have the power to see or hear things that never were and make them real. But you do have to slow down to give it time to work. What are the moments that cause you to ask, “What if?” What would happen if you allowed yourself room to answer that question? That’s all that writers do differently. Anyone can do it.
— 30 —
Jonny Eberle is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker in Tacoma, WA who has more stories whirling around his head than he knows what to do with.Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his monthly newsletter for exclusive content and recommended reads.
I have heard rumors in my travels of creative people who are entirely self-motivated. They get up early, awakened by an innate drive to create, go to their computers, ignore Facebook and Google, and complete their work in a timely manner with no exterior motivator. I am not one of those people. I’m not even sure they exist.
Don’t get me wrong — I love to write. I’m bursting with stories to tell and would happily write all the time if given the chance. But after a long day at work, there’s dinner to make, chores to conquer, Netflix to be watched, and it’s hard to give up that precious downtime to the task of writing. While I’m passionate about writing, it requires a lot of energy, which is one thing I do not generally have in abundance. And so, weeks will go by without putting words to the page.
Unless, of course, there’s a deadline to meet.
Deadlines are magical things. As a writer and serial procrastinator, I honestly don’t know how I would complete anything without the pressure of a firm deadline to keep me going. It’s easy to put a story off to the next day or the next when I’m on my own timeline, but when I have to submit something for publication by a certain date, something clicks.
I have always thrived under a deadline. Some of my best work gets done with only minutes to spare. There’s no time for scrolling through Facebook, debating the exact phrasing of a passage, or starting all over again when you’re under the gun. There’s a clarity and an insanity in rushing to finish. It may not make for the most lyrical prose, but I’ve found that the immediacy of my work is heightened and the tempo of the action rises when I’m a little bit rushed.
I’m trying to teach myself to write on a set schedule, but I’ve never been that kind of person. I create in flashes and then go silent until the next unexpected strike of inspiration and inclination.
This week, I realized that I was in danger of missing the deadline for a local print anthology that I’ve appeared in twice. I didn’t want to miss out, so I dusted off a story that had been languishing in rewrite hell for years. I wrote the rough draft of this story way back in 2012 and tinkered with it off and on for five years. But it was only in the last week that I got serious about getting it ready for public view. The pressure of the deadline approaching gave me the energy to make drastic cuts and bold changes to the plot, characters, and setting. The looming deadline was perfect for a suspenseful tale that needed an infusion of new life. I’m proud of the way it turned out and thankful for the countdown that forced me to rethink a stale narrative.
Now, if only I could figure out how to get the same effect with self-imposed deadlines.
— 30 —
Jonny Eberle is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker in Tacoma, WA. Be careful what you say around him, because it’s all going in his novel.
One hundred years ago today, millions of men in Europe were fighting and dying in trenches in a war that not only unleashed the terror of modern warfare on the world, but set the stage for nearly every conflict that would follow in the 20th century. I’m referring, of course, to the Great War, which today we know as World War I.
My fascination with WWI began in high school in a military history class, where we would reenact famous battles. It was in a shallow trench next to the football field, armed with a Super Soaker as water balloon mortars fell around me that I first gained an appreciation for what those who lived through the real thing must have faced.
Then, last year, I picked up a book called To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild. In Hochschild’s careful unwrapping of the war and its complexity, I started to understand the messiness of the war and its similarity to today’s global and regional conflicts. This was the war that introduced the tank and the airplane to the arsenal of death, but it also heralded the first time women entered the workforce en mass, the collapse of two major world powers, and the rise of socialism and communism in Europe. Above all, the stories of human suffering and human triumph were deeply affecting and fired my imagination (I was also inspired by my friend, Keene Short’s blog, which frequently focuses on the events of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution). I was scarcely a chapter into Hochschild’s book when I knew I was reading the source material for a new story.
Tonight, I’ll be reading that story, which I’ve titled The Night Watch, at Creative Colloquy. This is my first serious dive into historical fiction, which is hard to do period, let alone in short story form. But I hope I’ve captured some of the nuance of the men and women who lived through the Great War. I hope to see you there.
Jonny Eberle is a writer and history junkie in Tacoma, WA. You can find more of his wit and writing on Twitter or subscribe to the email newsletter to receive exclusive content and zero spam.
It was a dark winter’s night when I drove onto the ferry from Point Defiance to Tahlequah. I was off to nearby Vashon Island for a day-and-a-half solo writing retreat to start my novel. On the short trip from Tacoma to Vashon, I tried not to think too much about the enormous task I was about to undertake and instead focus on the surreal sight of the ferry dock disappearing into the mist.
It may only be a fifteen-minute ferry ride away, but Vashon feels far away and remote. In contrast to the cities surrounding it, it is home to only a few thousand people, spread out over a densely wooded area about the size of Manhattan. After I told her about my goal of finally finishing a novel over the next three years, my amazing spouse bought me two nights at an Airbnb for my birthday. So, I packed up my laptop, a few books on writing, and a bag of snacks and hoped inspiration would follow.
I have often found that I need to leave behind familiar spaces to start something new. Working at home, it’s easy to get distracted by thoughts of laundry that needs washing or what to make for dinner or a thousand other domestic considerations. Even though I was only a few miles away from my house, the process of packing up, of traveling, of arriving on an isolated island, sparked my subconscious to get to work.
I woke at daybreak (not a spectacular feat at these northern latitudes), made a cup of tea and setup my laptop. My retreat was a small Frank Lloyd Wright-style cabin with wood-paneled walls and a clean, modern aesthetic. A desk was built into a wall of windows overlooking Puget Sound to the north. Nearby, I discovered a turntable and a collection of LPs. I put on a Crosby, Stills and Nash album, gently lowered the needle onto the record to set it spinning and opened a new Word document.
I’m not sure if it was the view, the curl of steam coming off my tea, the crackle of vinyl or the fact that my brain had been secretly preparing for this trip for three weeks, but for some reason, the words started flowing. I wrote twenty pages that day — my entire first chapter — which is far more productive than I’ve been in months. To be fair, I didn’t dream up the premise then and there. This is my fourth attempt (or is it the sixth?) at a novel idea I’ve been playing with for years. But this time, my fingers moved at the speed of my ideas and the ideas themselves were significantly better. I left on the twelve o’clock ferry the next day with a good start on my manuscript, a few pages of character notes, and a severely depleted snack bag.
Retreats are amazing like that. They give you uninterrupted time to focus and the time leading up to your departure gets the gears turning in advance so that you can be creative right out of the gate. But the retreat is not what’s important. What’s important is what happens after the retreat. One day of productivity and inspired writing does not a novel make. You have to sustain it the next day, the next week, and for months on end. The retreat is the beginning, but once you arrive back home and realize that the laundry still needs to be done, the challenge is keeping the momentum and not succumbing to the inertia of the everyday.
I’ve never managed to keep up that momentum after a solo retreat. It has always evaporated. But this year will be different. Because this year, I have a deadline. My retreat was only one day, but I have 328 more days until I need to have a completed first draft. The retreat is over, but the work is just starting.
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Jonny Eberle is a writer in Tacoma, WA working on his first novel. You can get first dibs on excerpts from his novel-in-progress by subscribing to his monthly email newsletter. You can also follow him on Twitter. Thanks for reading!
J.W. Eberle 