I’m supposed to have first round edits of this beast to them by the weekend (as in three days from now). A final edit is due by October 11. Hopefully some illustrations happen along the way (haven’t heard about that yet). Galleys by December. Then lots and lots of rounds of proofreading, line edits, etc. The book will finally come out in September of 2011.

I’m pretty excited and a bit overwhelmed at the moment. The basic story and characters will remain the same, but going from blog-friendly version to print-friendly version means some pretty drastic changes–nearly all for the better, I think.

Stay tuned!

Tom

Here’s the announcement:

Author Tom Llewellyn will lead a panel of speakers to address a variety of questions about the future of books. How, physically, will people read books in the future? Will technology “unbind” books, as it has unbundled other media, such as music albums? Will reading habits change as a result? What happens when books are interlinked? And what is a book anyway?

Panelists

Tom Llewellyn, moderator and author

sweet pea Flaherty, bookseller

Neel Parikh, Executive Director of the Pierce County Library System

Kate Rogers, Editor-in-chief of The Mountaineers Books/Skipstone

Sheryn Hana, Book Publishers Network

Thanks to Ann Gosch and Jan Karroll for coordinating this program.

Dinner Program Details: Wednesday, Sept. 1; wine and cheese social begins at 6pm followed by buffet and program, which concludes at 8pm; University of Puget Sound Wheelock Rotunda.

Register before noon on Monday, August 30, to reserve for this dinner program: $25 members; $30 guests of members; $35 general public. Prepayment is required and no-shows will be billed. Email office@cityclubtacoma.org to register. (Please be sure your credit card on file is up to date. If we do not have your credit card on file, please register by phone: 253-353-2489.)

Wheelock Rotunda, University of Puget Sound

Photo from Flickr user goXunuReviews, used under a CreativeCommons license

In the meantime, I’m plowing ahead on rewrites, promoting my first novel, The Tilting House, and biting my fingernails.

Stay tuned.

Tom

Letter Off Dead, in its blog format, is officially done. Started on Trevor’s first day of seventh grade. Ended on his last day, as planned.

If you’re new to the site, you can go to this page and scroll to the bottom for Trevor’s first post.

It’s been a remarkable experience, not least because of the community of readers that followed this project and the challenging and encouraging feedback you all provided via facebook and blog comments. I only missed a few days of posts throughout the year. I’m tired but exhilarated.

Nothing is final yet (is anything ever final?), but I’m in discussions with the folks at Tricycle Press, a children and young adult imprint of Random House. The plan is to turn Letter Off Dead into a book.

I’ve always thought of this blog as a very rough, very live first draft. There’s power in the immediacy and roughness of its current form, but there are plenty of aspects about the current state that drive me a bit crazy. I long to give this thing a good scrubbing. It will almost certainly shrink a bit in the process. Apologies in advance if some of your favorite posts disappear in the process. I’m confident it will be a better final product.

The soonest possible release date is still more than a year away. In the meantime, I encourage you to (shameless sales pitch alert) buy The Tilting House, my first book, also published by Tricycle Press. And follow me on Twitter. I’ll post updates there and try hard not to be boring.

Thanks for playing along.

Tom

 Yesterday I had to go back to school. I had to go early and walk by myself from class to class, apologizing to every teacher who ate one of the tainted cookies. I started with Mrs. Fletcher, the math troll. It was weird and made me feel pretty rotten, because Mrs. Fletcher said that I’d hurt her feelings. She clutched her projection monitor in both hands and said, “I thought we were friends, Trevor.” Boy, did that ever surprise me.  

 Mr. Schick was easier, because we don’t like each other and we’re clear on that. He just glowered at me the whole time, then nodded in a kind of military way. I thought he’d say how disappointed he was in me, but I think he only says that kind of stuff in front of a group. Come to think of it, I’ve never spoken to him alone before.

 The hard part was apologizing to Mrs. Henry. Is it bad of me for only feeling sorry about hurting the teachers I like? I knocked on Mrs. Henry’s door and she told me to come in. I walked in and stood by her desk where I confessed my crime and asked her to forgive me. She was quiet for a good ten seconds.

 “I’ll have to think about it, Trevor. You’ve just made a very serious request. And like any good bargain hunter, I don’t want to give in too easily. You wronged me. You’ve made no recompense, other than your confession. And now you want my pardon.” Then she started giggling. “Did you—did you hear about Mrs. Fletcher? She couldn’t stop eating your cookies. Oh, I bet she lost three pounds that day. Oh, what the heck. I forgive you.”

 The giggles took back over. I started laughing with her—the first time I really laughed about this thing that was supposed to be a joke. Mrs. Henry wouldn’t let me leave her class until I could get a serious look to stay on my face. “We can’t let anyone know we think this is funny, can we?”

 Anyway, Dad, I’ve been thinking that this is what you need. Forgiveness. Not the easy kind like Mom or Mrs. Henry gives out. The serious kind. The kind of forgiveness that costs something, you know? More like the way Stephan made Keith’s head pain go away by stomping on his toes. Not quite sure how to do that. I could ask Mrs. Henry. Or maybe you should ask your new guy.

 I’m thinking maybe I could help. Maybe I could take on this burden of yours, Dad, like the way you took on my fear of Mudgett. Maybe you could cash in your I.O.U.

 Your son,

 Trevor

Dear Dad,

Yeah, I went to the doctor this morning. Dr. Bruell said I have a “nervous stomach.” He gave me a prescription for the world’s largest pills. They’re pink. I have no idea how I’m supposed to swallow them.

He asked me what I felt like. You know, like “where does it hurt and all that.” I said I just felt generally nauseous and sometimes I threw up. He asked me if I had a test at school today. I said no, but I knew what he meant. He meant that there was something making me feel sick—something that didn’t have anything to do with my body.

He’s a pretty smart guy. I thought he was going to start lecturing me about being a man, but instead he wrote out a prescription and said, “These pills will help. Take them whenever you feel queasy.” Except when he said it, it sounded like, “Take zem venevah you veel qveezy.” He’s got a really strong accent. He sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s grandfather.

I’m about to take one right now. Hold on.

OK, I figured out why they’re so big. I’m supposed to chew them. Duh. They kind of taste like Pepto Bismal. Kind of minty and chalky. It’s funny, because I actually feel a little bit better already, which is good, because Mom says I have to start going to school everyday, unless I’m really barfing up a storm.

These pills are the only help I’ve gotten so far that’s made a lick of difference. No offense, Dad.

So I guess that means tomorrow I’ll see Will Mudgett. Any advice would be appreciated. Or anything you can do to take my mind off it. I’ll take what I can get.

Your son,

Trevor

Oh, poor Will Mudgett. I’ve been on the end of one of those smiles. What I’m wondering is how you know what it meant.

Are there creatures other than girls who smile like that? Maybe crocodiles, but when they rip your heart out, they don’t hand it back in that gentle, bloody way. I’m not saying that boys—or men—are any better. We’re all just as cruel. But men, I think, are more direct in their cruelty. Women are more polite. More sweet, as they murder you.

When Frances Wilkson kissed me, I thought that meant we were in love. I figured she was my girl and pictured her decorating my side when I walked into a room. The next weekend, I asked her to go with me to our school baseball game. I didn’t so much as ask, as tell her that was what I’d scheduled for us. I pictured myself walking into the bleachers with that velvety-dressed girl at my side. She’d be there, just as sure as shoes would be on my feet or a collar would be on my shirt. It was an inevitability.

But she didn’t come with me. When I asked her, she gave me one of those smiles. Actually, she worked her way up to that smile, first with a downward glance, a wringing of her hands, a tucking of her red hair behind one ear. Then she looked up from beneath her bangs and stabbed me with that smile, right in the eyes.

“I’m sorry, Hugh,” she said to me, through her upturned lips, “but I can’t go with you. Howard Castle asked me to go with him and I’m afraid I’ve already said yes.” Then, when she saw the look on my face, she went in for the kill. “I hope you didn’t think I was your girlfriend, just because I kissed you.” I think she said some other words after that, but by then all I heard was ringing.

I didn’t go to that game. In fact, I don’t think I went to a single baseball game for the rest of that year. I knew if I went, I’d see Frances sitting next to some boy who wasn’t me. And I knew she’d smile at me as if I was there. That smile would tear open the wound.

But here I am, making you afraid of girls. And I don’t want that. I want you to be one of those rare people who is not petrified by the opposite sex. I want you to be one of those people who can walk up to anyone–stranger, girl, president, king—and strike up a conversation without fear. There are such people, or so it appears.

My secret belief is that they are just as afraid as the rest of us. Fear is a universal experience, I think. Perhaps fear is even a friend. Perhaps we just have to get to know it better.

Dad

As for watching, I fear that I was a watcher too much of my life.

As I read your letters about this Will and Misty, I’m not sure who is the villain and who is the hero. I guess from my point of view, as the third-hand reader of your second-hand narrative, that Will is the obvious villain—the one you’d expect to be the bad guy in a movie. But I think Misty Lee may be the real villain.

The trick is, she’s only the villain in this little chapter. In the next chapter—and that turn of the page from one chapter to another happens second by second—she may be the hero or the damsel in distress. One moment, she may be playing one boy against another like a kid poking ants with a pin. The next moment, she may be in the class of that teacher of yours, Mr. Schick, where he’s shaming her for some harmless part of her nature.

When I got out of the service and went to school, I was sure as could be that I wanted to be a writer or an English teacher. That’s what I was meant to do, I’m pretty certain. I’d saved enough in the service to go to college and I made it three-and-a-half years through Seattle U before my uncle talked me into going into the real estate business with him. So I did that. Opened up the office, started signing papers and scratching out a little money one weathered house at a time.

I spent as little of the money I made as I could. Like your mother says, I am naturally thrifty. But I always managed to take a little money to the bookstore and buy books. It drove your mom crazy when we’d go weeks at a time without stepping into a restaurant, but books would show up in the mail. Faulkner, Stegner, Greene, Roth, Vonnegut, Bellow. I would cut off my left arm for a little case of their books right now, where short, sharp sentences nearly set the book paper on fire.

My own rambling writing in these letters here always works shyly around the corners, taking these four paragraphs to get to the point. Here it is: Those men—certainly greater men than me—they did what I wanted to do. They put pen to paper and made their living at it. I only dreamed about it. I only watched them do it. The only writing I did was real estate closing documents and believe me, no one ever reads more than a few words of those.

I’m still a watcher. I sit here in this seaside village of watchers. I watch others come in and go out. They go on. I stay.

Let me know what happens with Will Mudgett. If I was there, I’d be watching, too.

Dad

The poor postman only just met me yesterday and by the way he frowns when I come in the door, he is already tired of me. I pestered him all day today, waiting for the mail to come. He never says a word—just shakes his head and scowls. But now I sit writing on the little bench right outside his door, with your letter tucked safely away in my hip pocket. It is such a treasure to me.

I will try my best to answer your questions about this place, but I first must say that I hope you do not wait at home for letters from me. You should go back to school. You should kiss the girl. You should fight the boy, if it comes to that. Do not spend your life waiting for things. Go to school, even if the things there fill you with so much worry they make you sick. As soon as you get this letter from me, take a vow to go back to school and face your fears.

OK, that’s enough fatherly advice for one day. I don’t know if I have earned the right to advise you at all, having only known you for five brief years before I left. And I fear that I spent far too little time with you during those years. The memories I have are some of my most cherished, but they are fading. I hope you can help me recall them.

Where am I? Not hell, certainly, but likely not heaven, either. Some of my neighbors disagree with me and claim it is one or the other. I’ll sit over a plate of fish and chips at the Laughing Gull with my two neighbors. Martin, who was a city councilman, will claim we’re in heaven. Carl, who was a realtor like me, is sure we’re in hell. My vote is neither. Meanwhile we’re all in the same place and all eating the same food.

It’s not a bad place, I suppose. We’re on the water—either a sound or a bay. There are a couple of shops—two restaurants, a general store, a small library and a post office. There’s a fishing pier that juts out over the water, but no one fishes there, so I’m suspicious of its real purpose.

I stay in a small cabin set about a quarter mile back from the shore. When I arrived here, the cabin lay empty and no one stopped me from moving in, so I did. The cabin has a single large room and a bathroom with a toilet and a shower. It has a covered porch with a porch swing, which is where I spend most of my day. From the swing, I can look out over the center of town and over the water. It’s very foggy here much of the time and you have to keep an eye out if you want a view of anything. So that’s what I do most of the time. I swing in my swing and look out toward the water. It probably sounds very boring to you, but it gets me from morning to night.

And no, I can’t see you from up here. I can’t see much of anything, except the tide coming in and going out, twice a day if it’s not too foggy. I suppose it goes in and out even if it is foggy, but then I can’t see it. I wish I could see you. I think about you and your sister and your brothers and your mother more than anything else, worrying about how you all are doing without me. I have so many questions that I want to ask you.

The first time I went into the post office, the postman looked at me suspiciously when he handed me your batch of letters. I’m guessing he doesn’t get many letters from your side of things. But he didn’t say anything. Matter of fact, I’ve never heard him say a single word. I don’t know if he can even speak.

I can tell you more about this place. Not a lot. But I’ll save that for another day.

Dad

We won our first game 3-2. I played at the end of the first half and the end of the second half. It was pretty cool. I felt like I did OK. No one scored when I was on the field, so I guess I didn’t screw up too bad. Mr. Schick didn’t say anything to me one way or another.

Keith had all sorts of advice for me. I should attack the ball more. I should stay between the ball and the goal. I should dribble with my head up. I should talk more. I kind of wish he’d just lie and tell me I was good, but he’s always coaching me. He probably figures you would do the same thing if you were here and he needs to be a father figure for me. He’s nice, though. He takes me to Denny’s for ice cream sundaes, because his girlfriend works there and can give us ice cream for free if her manager’s not paying attention. Talk about real boobs. She’s got them big time.

I found out why Will Mudgett was so freaked out. He asked Misty Lee to go out with him and she said no, because she liked someone else. He asked who, but Misty wouldn’t tell him. Then Misty told Sharon King the story and Sharon King told Will Mudgett that Misty liked me. And now Will Mudgett wants to kill me. I don’t mean he is mad at me. I mean he literally wants to murder me. Murder. I heard all this from Rick Jarvis.

Then Rick Jarvis says, “Are you going to?” Am I going to what? “Are you going to ask Misty Lee to go out with you? Go out where? “Go out! You know, go out.”

I don’t know. I don’t know if I even like Misty Lee. But now if I don’t ask her to go out, everyone will think I’m scared of that crazy punk, Will Mudgett. Maybe I am.

What would you do?

Rick Jarvis said that tomorrow, Misty Lee was going to sit by me at lunch. “That is the perfect time,” he said. I didn’t ask him to explain, because I know what he expects me to do. And I definitely know what Misty Lee expects me to do. Misty Lee is really popular. I can’t figure out why. And I sure can’t figure out why she likes me so much.

I bet I’m six inches taller than Will Mudgett. I bet if it came down to a real fight, I would slaughter him. Unless he stabbed me or something. He probably wouldn’t do that. He probably doesn’t even have a knife.

I have a math test on Monday. I haven’t studied for it at all. I know I should, but I haven’t. I hate the homework. I haven’t done it for the last two days and now I don’t really know what Mrs. Fletcher is talking about in class.

I’m assuming you haven’t got any of these letters. I don’t really expect you to, being that you’re dead and all. But if you got a letter from me, you’d write back, wouldn’t you? I mean, if you could. If God allowed you to and if you had a body and a pen and envelopes and stamps.

I suppose it would also require there to be a post office in the afterlife. I don’t know if there is one.

Your son,

Trevor

Today at school, Will Mudgett told me he was going to fight me if I asked Misty Lee to be my girlfriend. I have no idea why he would say such a stupid thing to me. What do I care about Misty Lee? She’s not that cute. She doesn’t have buck teeth like Mrs. Edsel the music teacher, but her front teeth still stick out. And her hair is frizzy.

I don’t understand why someone like Mrs. Edsel doesn’t get her teeth fixed. She’s kind of pretty, except she looks like she cuts her own hair, and not very well. And she’s icy. Do you know what I mean by icy? She looks like she’d be cold to touch, although I can’t imagine touching her. OK, so maybe I can imagine touching her, but I still bet she’d be cold. She has dark hair and pale skin and doesn’t smile, even if she thinks something is funny. She smirks. I’ve never heard her laugh. She’s married, but it’s hard to imagine her ever being snuggly with her husband. Maybe they just have serious discussions and never really snuggle with each other.

Tomorrow is our first soccer game. I’ve never played in an actual game on a real team before. Mr. Schick has me playing right fullback. Mom said she won’t be able to come to the game, because it’s right after school, so she’s still at work. Keith is home from college. He said he’d come and then give me a ride home.

You know what I’d really like to do with Will Mudgett? I’d like to take him up to the top of the old marina and dare him to jump. I bet he’d be so scared he’d piss himself. I bet he’d wet his pants, just like Lee Reel. I’d pay money to see that.

That’s all I got today.

Your son,

Trevor

Dear Dad,

I realized another big difference between grade school and junior high school. In junior high school, the girls have breasts. They seem to have grown magically over the summer.

Misty Lee has little ones and you can’t tell if they’re real. Definitely no bouncing. For all I know, they could just be wads of Kleenex stuffed into her bra. I wouldn’t put it past her. Daisy Reel, who Rick Jarvis says is a skank and who I carpool with three mornings a week, has serious breasts. They bounce when she walks, so I know they’re real. Daisy is the girl who tells dirtier jokes than all the boys and who Rick says has actually done it with Gabe McAllister. She talks about penises like she’s seen a few.

By the way, Daisy Reel’s mom’s car smells like pee. Daisy has a brother’s named Lee and he has some kind of bladder problem that makes him wet his pants every now and then. He’s in ninth grade and in Rhonda’s class. He’s a fat kid. Rhonda said she was sitting behind him once and actually saw a puddle form on his chair. I have no idea if that is true, but if it is, it is so gross. She says they call him Leak Reel. I’m pretty sure he’s let loose in the car a few times, because it really stinks in there. The mom is nice, though. And Lee is actually a nice guy, for a pants-wetter.

I’m hoping you don’t think I’m some kind of a perv for talking about breasts. I figure that the only advantage of writing to a dad who is dead is that I can say whatever I want, right? I mean, if you were here, I would have a hard time walking up to you and saying, “Hey Dad, how about you and me talk about breasts for a while?”

I would never in a million years ever talk to Mom about this sort of thing, for which she’s probably grateful. I don’t think she wants to talk to me about it, either.

Your son,

Trevor

I officially do not love Junior High School.

Big surprise there, I know. I didn’t expect it to be like Disneyland or anything, but you know, I thought it would be cool to hang out with only teenagers. Now all I do is school. School has taken over my life. I don’t think school should be that much of a priority. It seems to me that the whole school system is a bad way to learn. I mean, personally, I am much more excited about summer vacation than I am about school. And so is every other kid. So doesn’t it make sense to make school more like vacation and do away with all this annoying crap like teachers and classrooms and stupid posters on the wall about dental hygiene like the one in our homeroom with the worm coming out of the apple?

Now that vacation is over, I get up, get ready for school, get driven to school, then go from homeroom to P.E. to social studies to Bible to English to lunch to math to science and then to soccer practice (the school team!) and then home to do homework (from school!) and then to bed. Tell me one person who thinks that is a good way to live? No kids, for sure. And you know all the teachers would rather be on vacation, too. So why do we do it?

My math teacher’s name is Mrs. Fletcher and she looks like a troll. She’s about five feet tall with short, red hair cut like a boy, a red nose and tons of wrinkles and she talks like a troll, too, like she’s smoked too much or got punched in the throat. It wouldn’t really surprise me if she did get punched in the throat, because she is an evil woman and there are probably 10,000 kids who wouldn’t mind taking a swing at that saggy, wrinkly throat of hers.

Mrs. Fletcher doesn’t look interesting enough to be a smoker. When I think of smokers, I think of people like Aunty Iola, who holds the cigarette in one hand and the whiskey glass in the other. Aunty Iola is still around, by the way, meaning that she hasn’t died. She’s still really cool and actually really smart, too. I like how you can smell the smoke and whiskey on her breath when she kisses you. Man, she’s got an awful cough, though.

I can’t imagine Mrs. Fletcher drinking whiskey. I guess I can imagine her drinking something else, though. Something really awful. Milk that’s gone bad. Or maybe just plain old human blood. She so clearly doesn’t like kids. She said that anyone who got less than a C on the take-home test last night was what she likes to call a “math idiot.” A C? I swear, Mrs. Rommel didn’t teach us half that stuff last year, so I’ll probably be in that group, but at least I’m not a troll. She’s a math troll.

Why do people who don’t like kids become teachers? It makes no sense. Mrs. Fletcher should have got a job in a laboratory or the city morgue or some place where she wouldn’t have to talk to people. She’d get along great with dead bodies. Or she should be a guard in a woman’s prison. Then she could get punched in the throat every day.

You probably don’t know this, but there was this guy in grade school named Brian Haase. We used to fight all the time. His best friend from last year, Max Baxter, left to go to another school. Brian and Max were the biggest bullies of grade school. He is in almost all my classes and comes up and talks to me all the time. He actually seems pretty cool. Since Donnie is now always having lunch with his “girlfriend,” I’ve been eating my lunch with Brian. We talk about all the fights we were in over the years. I won most of them, by the way, even if he says he won his share. I don’t blame him for lying. I’d lie too if I lost fights. I don’t think I lost any. Maybe a couple. Anyway, Brian is a lot nicer this year.

I guess that’s another thing that’s different about junior high school. Everyone changes.

Your son,

Trevor

You’re invited to begin following along on Trevor’s first day of junior high school. Trevor’s just entered hell on earth and he needs to vent. He needs to write to someone with whom he can be as honest as possible. He chooses his father, who died seven years earlier. In his letters to his dead dad, Trevor comes clean on all his fears–girls, sex, math and death.

Somewhere along the way, Dad starts writing back. He’s got his own problems.

I hope you’ll come and eavesdrop as Trevor and his dad discuss heaven, hell and junior high. And I hope you’ll pass this message along to your friends.

See you soon.

Tom Llewellyn

www.letteroffdead.com