There is an unopened letter from a convicted murderer on my kitchen table. That’s how far behind I am in my writing. The letter might tell me the convict is willing to talk to me, it might tell me to go to hell. The suspense isn’t getting to me the way it should, that’s how weird a place I’m in right now.

Over the last several weeks, when I sat down to write to you, I started stories that turned out to be too long, or rather, that would take too much time to get right. I’ve been trying to get away from just knocking things out since I started the Bagel Manifesto podcast (returning tomorrow).

If you haven’t listened yet, the idea behind the show was to revisit and record some of my short essays. Going through them every other week, I ended up doing a bunch of rewrites. It wasn’t that they were typo-laden, but I could see so many missed opportunities with the benefit of distance, weak points that could be strengthened or cut, unnecessarily muddled points, things like that.

In a fit of disappointment, I wrote a note and stuck it on my desktop. It said this: “You don’t have to publish everything immediately.”

I’ve always known that leaving something aside for even two days will let it marinate enough that you can see missed opportunities. Leaving it a month works even better, but there’s a dangerous flipside where you become the person constantly tinkering with the same damn story until you kill it.

Finding the middle ground has been a challenge.

I’m telling you this because the main point of this newsletter was to flesh out these ideas, but while I hem and haw and struggle there are so many more things I want to tell you.

Rather than let another week go and not send you one (proper) email, I’ve decided to make this more casual. So much is happening that I want to talk about. It was unfair to bring up the murder letter and not talk about it, but when you get a sentence like that in your head, you have to write it down.

I’ve been working on two books simultaneously. The first is a war memoir I’m co-writing with a retired Army Ranger medic. The pitch for the book is that he was with the team that captured Saddam Hussein and it is one of the least interesting things about him.

After (Jesus!) three years of interviews and transcriptions and writing, we finally got on track this week and started the organization process. My working plan is to have chapters to pitch by the fall, but now that the book is properly underway it should be smooth(er) sailing from here.

The other book is about kids who grew up in a cult. The larger picture will consider how we treat children whose parents claim that they are religious people. At least it isn’t a Christian cult this time. I have 80 percent of the research done, but the last 20 percent is make-or-break critical.

In the meanwhile, I’m cobbling together a living, which means I spend almost as much time pitching stories or looking for work as I do writing. This is always the balance that’s hardest to strike.

I’m also not going to lie: it is a little daunting to undertake writing another book. The first two were easy enough to write. They were beer books that were so rah-rah they were beyond scrutiny. Dragged Into the Light was a lot harder. It was an intellectual and emotional slog. Although I didn’t think it would be a massive hit, I was underprepared for the overwhelming indifference.

Getting back on the horse was harder than I thought. I’m back on it now and I have some idea how things are going to go from here. I promise that when I open the letter I’ll give you a sense of what it says and keep you posted.

I’ve also published a bunch of stuff notwithstanding. Read on if you wanna see it.

Keep the Faith,

Tony

Letters to Trolls

I saw this great story in the Washington Post that reminded me that there is a cost to not being good at anything. It dovetailed nicely with my own recent internet tiff.

In my case, I baited trolls (more out of short-sightedness than out of spite) and lost a lot of time trying to moderate my Facebook page. The Perspective story above mostly appealed to me because I realized that I was devoting time I should be spending writing to bickering with people who didn’t have anything better to do.

Here’s that story:

Another focus

I’ve recently been contributing to a bookstore site called BookShopBlog.com. I’m interested in how independent bookstores have weathered the pandemic. I also had the chance to review a movie called “Hello, Bookstore,” that I can’t recommend highly enough.

It’s a documentary about a bookshop that started filming before Covid and ended up being a documentary about how a person who thrived on hand-selling books coped with alienation. It’s an uplifting story, but it was hard to watch sometimes realizing what we lost.

I also wrote about the indie bookstores in Frostburg, Md. and Berlin, Md.

A Bagel Manifesto

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