Tag: fiction

We Have Covered This

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 2 Comments

Who are the biggest influences in your life?

I laughed to myself when I wrote that title, because everyone I write about is a big influence. I can’t think of anyone that has affected me more in both good ways and bad than going back over my years and seeing what happened.

Zac is my biggest influence right now, because for Christmas he got me a box of cards with fiction challenges on them. I may start a different blog for that, at his suggestion for his own site, because it would look disjointed to have fiction and non together. I will wait and see whether I’m actually prone to publishing the results first.

Speaking of Mr. Wood, I had no idea that a comment and a blog entry about me was written by him, because I absolutely didn’t see the play on words with “Mr. Would.” I was reading too fast and I saw “Mr. World.” But even if I had read it correctly, it wouldn’t have helped me, because Zac didn’t mention that he was a blogger. I am looking forward to another blogger in the house, because I need to know how it feels to be written about, and I can’t think of a person that sees more of my range of emotion.

That doesn’t make it not funny that I didn’t know that Mr. Would was actually my boyfriend. This is because I thought I was going to meet someone new in the area, and was surprised to see t hat we’d already met. We’ve been dating for a YEAR and I didn’t know he had a blog. A YEAR. YEAR, people. A YEAR.

Now I’m really laughing.

He was probably gathering intelligence to see how good an idea it was to tell me he was a blogger, and that just makes me laugh harder because of course I’m kidding. I have the same philosophy as Bryn. “Write what you want, we’ll work it out.” He actually took me to the mat over traveling, and that’s what made me think I had a superfan on my hands. He said that I didn’t include places I’d said I’d wanted to go before, and was surprised I didn’t mention them again. So, I have this entire ass blog entry written about me by MY BOYFRIEND, and all I got was a pingback.

No, it is AS IF he listens to me, and I could cry when I think about that intensity. I know I am valued because when I say something, he remembers it. I have never been in a relationship with someone so much like me, with the possible exception of Dana. The thing is, though, she would adore Zac as well because he’s like both of us. Neurodivergent and also in the military. Neither Dana nor I have served, but her dad was a Marine and she speaks acronym. I definitely have a type, and it doesn’t have to do with looks. It has to do with the way someone thinks.

So I’m sitting there reading like, “does he memorize my shit?!”

The only reason I didn’t think of Zac at all is that this has happened before. I know I’ve mentioned it, but for new readers there was Stephanie (at least, I think that was her name, it was years ago). Stephanie invited me for coffee through a dating site (the miracle is that I said yes). I sent her my URL because I separate the children from the adults fast. If you can’t handle that I’m a writer, we’re not going to have much in coommon.

Stephanie proceeded to read back four years’ worth of entries, and then pretended like my blog was law and I couldn’t change. It was an hour’s worth of “now you’re saying this, but four years ago, you said….”

I’d gotten divorced, moved to DC, and my mother died in relatively quick procession. But of course no one changes because of anything as simple as that.

But right now, I can’t dwell on anything in my real life, because tonight is not about me. Jesus is one of the biggest influences in my life, and it’s almost time. Mary can sense it. Her water is about to break. Right now? This very moment? I’m just waiting for the baby.

Tonight Luke will come out in his scrubs, and announce that he’s here. The baby that will one day change the world. Tonight is the night that the membrane between heaven and earth stretches so thin, we can touch the face of God.

The miracle is not that Jesus was a virgin birth, but that he survived at all. Can you really imagine being a baby and lying that close to cow shit? Can you imagine delivering your son in a barn? It was so long ago that they didn’t know about germs, so it probably wasn’t as scary for Mary because she didn’t know what could happen, but we do.

If your baby got that close to death, don’t you think they’re divine?

On this Christmas Eve, know that it doesn’t take a miracle to make someone a child of God. We were all born innocent, and we make the decision to resurrect ourselves all the time. It’s the message we’re missing in the middle of the mess.

Whether or not tonight means that The Messiah is being born is irrelevant to me, because this is not a story about magic. This is a story about mystery.

Jesus survived, and the odds were stacked against him. So, in remembrance, I’m mentally gathering the layette. I’m buying everyone blue bubble gum cigars. I’m writing the announcement for the newspaper. It’s all I can do, this waiting.

My area is by the Pepsi machine.

Oh, The Places I Would Go…

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ 4 Comments

What cities do you want to visit?

I don’t have one top favorite, so I’ll give a few of them. I’m not a huge traveler, so I would rather get an AirBnB for several weeks than try to flip body clocks twice in three or four days. Just not my style anymore. “I’m older and I have more insurance.” But if money were no object, I would love to see:

  • Paris
    • I have been to Paris once, but only for a few days. I definitely hit all the highlights with my dad, but I don’t know what it is to sit at a cafe and people watch. I don’t know what it’s like to go to Paris and do nothing, and that’s why it’s valuable. You don’t go there to find things to do. You go there to walk around in its culture and see what sticks. Then, you either commit yourself to finding out what coffee shop David Sedaris frequents- or perhaps going to Pere Lachaisse for inspiration. Oscar Wilde and I had a marvelous time. Just because I am living and he is not doesn’t mean we weren’t both entertained. I told him that Stephen Fry played him in a movie once. He said it was perfect casting.
  • New York
    • I have never spent more than 24 hours in New York, so it’s the same idea there as in Paris. I’d like to go there for a little bit and then get back out. There’s a rhythm, and it’s intimidating to me. It’s sort of like Las Vegas in that the culture is different but the level of sensory input you receive when you get there is just as heightened. In 2003, I wanted to retire in New York, and I have absolutely no idea what I meant by that. I do remember past trips there to be fun, but not in a way I’d like to live there- except maybe someone I liked wanted to live there, so I did, too. Now, I just want to find hidden treasures on out of the way side streets.
  • Ho Chi Minh City
    • I have to do a lot of research on the Vietnam War, rightfully called “The American War” there. I’m writing a novel about it, and I don’t think I could do setting justice if I just made it up. I mean, I can and I will,if I have to, but there’s a lot to be said about putting effort into understanding something fully. I have studied political science since I got to college- the news junkie in me drove me to poli sci and it hasn’t given up. With political science comes lots and lots on international relations as well. So, I know the story from the American side fairly well, but I don’t like to write from the perspective of only trumpeting American interests. The military and C/DIA had many faults and failures during this time, and since most things more recent than Vietnam are still classified, I don’t know that either organization has really wrestled with our actions in that theater in a way that processes out institutional pain. Vietnam was the first war in which it was clear that we might not lose, but we don’t have enough money or resources to outright win, either. The Vietnamese have the right to call us out on that, because American soldiers were responsible for a lot of atrocities. We have the reputation of being feared, and not in a healthy way. It’s why we’ll never win a land war in Asia……. and death is on the line.
  • Seoul
    • Before I started watching both Josh & Olly, I’d never wanted to visit Korea before. They’re responsible for making a lot of people feel that way on their YouTube channel, Jolly. Josh met Olly in college (I think- British system), then went to university in Seoul. I think. I haven’t done all the math. Anyway, when Josh and Olly were both done with uni, they decided to start making videos about what Koreans think of English people. Hilarity ensues. I’m not sure how often Josh and Olly get back to Korea, but one of the fun things they do is “red carpet” style interviews while they entice celebrities to talk using Korean food. It worked very well on Ryan Reynolds. 🙂
  • Enseñada, Mexico
    • I have been to Enseñada once. It’s a small enough city that I could picture myself living there. I don’t speak much Spanish, but I took two years in school and have spent time in both Texas and Mexico speaking Spanish. My language skills aren’t as good now as they were in high school, because I was going to Mexico regularly (Reynosa and Progreso, both on mission trips). I could not land in San Diego and drive across the border without incident, but within a month or so I’d be all right. Within three or four years, I’d be fluent. It’s amazing what you can do when you have no choice. The water is gorgeous. La Buffadora (Buffalo Snort) is magnificent, a geyser that makes me feel the power of nature unlike anything else. I’m sure Papas & Beer is still there, it’s an institution. I don’t know about Habana Banana, which used to be my favorite Mexican clothing brand. I bought a ton while I was there, and at the time, they didn’t offer online ordering or international shipping. So, part of it is to find another clothing brand I like just as much…….. the rest of it is to sit outside with a Coke (we’re in Mexico, after all) and see what nature is saying around me. I live my life like the sound track is 4’33. I think it would kick things up a notch to perform it outside. My past performances have all gone very well. No one even knew I was “conducting it all while I sleep…. to light up my yard.”
  • Vancouver
    • I didn’t live in DC very long before I went to visit Meagan in Ottawa. However, I lived in Portland for 12 years and never made it to British Columbia. I have heard I would love it, now I need to go see it for myself. I will admit, though, that there is some truth to only the Canadian provinces with her in them being interesting. It wasn’t a draw while I lived there, but now I’m just curious. I sort of know what life is like on the East Coast of Canada because Meag has lived in Alberta, Ontario, and New Brunswick….. maybe more, but I’ve slept since then. But West Coast Canada is completely different, it seems. They don’t have bagged milk there. 🙄 Now that I’ve had time to reflect, I regret not going when it was only a five hour car ride. It would be a much bigger deal now.
  • Washington, DC
    • I live in Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s a suburb that has everything I could possibly want within walking distance. As a result, I can go as long as a year without needing anything from downtown…… and most of it is that the bands I like don’t play in Silver Spring- some of them do, though. If I want to see something relatively big, it’s at The Kennedy Center, not The Fillmore. I also haven’t been to Wolf Trap in 20-odd years, mostly because it’s such a hassle that I think about going to Wolf Trap and back out. I feel about Wolf Trap the same way people feel about Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion. It’s going to be a long concert, there’s no easy way in or out, and there’s a thousand people all screaming at once. I much prefer smaller venues, and wish Indigo Girls would play The Fillmore once in a while. 😛
  • Helsinki
    • My love of Finnish Independence Day led me to believe that one day I’d make it to watch the celebrations live- I watch them every year on YouTube from here. It’s not just that, though. I’ve said before and I’ll say it again that the palate for that part of the world is completely different- they don’t even have the same flora. Learning to cook there would be a whole new experience, and Anthony Bourdain introduced them to me through the magic of television. Why yes, I do want a large reindeer pizza. I also want to fly into HEL and drive up to Kilpisjaarvi so I can sleep under the aurora borealis in a clear-top tent. I also want to dress up really warm and sleep outside, just to see if I could do it. 😛

Under the Whispering Door, with Apologies to TJ Klune

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

TW: Child Death

I wrote a beautiful entry for all of you on the train. It was the best thing I’d ever written, or so I’m choosing to tell you….. because I accidentally exited out of AndrOffice before I saved the document. I had hoped there was a way to recover it, but unfortunately….. no. This is the entry in which I’m back at my house after having stopped at McDonald’s on the way home. I got a Happy Meal hoping it would rub off….. KIDDING. I was coming back from Zac’s after a very lovely time. I’m convinced we should write something together, but I don’t know what. I told him an idea in which I said, “I also thought you’d hate this idea, which makes you the best person to do it.” He said, “Rude.” I still can’t believe I got away with “peek a boo, bitch.” It has been my experience that few women talk like 15-year-old boys despite being ancient. I am filling a void filled by few others, and that does not suck. It makes me feel completely unique and also alone. But not. Alone together.

Basically, I realized I’d opened a door to poly by talking about it and not explaining my view on it… giving an example in action and not words. Zac already has partners, I don’t except for Bryn and she’s across the country. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that, I just know that no matter what we rely on each other because the boyfriends can all go away and we still need emotional support. It also fills my need to have someone to write to outside of dating Zac, most of the reason for my being poly in the first place because I crave so much more intellectual stimulation than I ever do contact comfort. It helps that Bryn understands why I call her my partner and I’m guessing that Supergrover doesn’t because I’ve never told her why I say that. I didn’t marry her, and if she thinks so, she’s not reading between the right lines. I also don’t care that she’s pissed off I’m a writer, because she knew that before she got close to me. She knew it was going to be a hard row to hoe and she went there. So I did, too.

I need friendship with her husband like I need air, and I would have gotten it if I hadn’t been such a dick. The flip side of the coin is “what could I have possibly done that would make you this avoidant for 10 years?” So, everything I did is bad and everything she did was justified. That’s not how that works, beautiful girl. What she cannot justify is isolating me from everything that would have made me feel better about our situation. She ramped up my anxiety, so I came up big. I don’t have the right to blame her, but I do have the right not to sign up for seconds.

It’s why I require so much of her now. I don’t need her time, I need her feelings. She thinks I’m not entitled to that. If that is true, I need to step away for my own mental health. She told me I couldn’t let other friends into our bubble, so I didn’t. Now, I’m in the posiiton of needing someone to talk to about my feelings without being able to make others understand why I feel the way I feel.

But nothing about this situation makes me regret it. What I regret is her not giving me a single second of relief by hearing me out and responding to it.

So, my reaction is to stand apart from other partners and just absorb. I can’t share everything, so I don’t.

Plus, now I’m not looking for a relationship, and if I was, I’d have to be with someone who understood why I didn’t want to break up with Zac and just be okay with that, whether they choose to be with others or not. Even marriage isn’t a contract where one of you owns the other, and if there’s anything positive that Will & Jada have done for the zeitgeist is show everyone how that is possible. Everyone has to be able to look at themselves in the mirror. Poly is more emotional work than being monogamous, not less, beacause you’re having to be that vulnerable with more than one person and practice makes permanent. If you don’t practice how to negotiate boundaries, you won’t learn all of a sudden.

I believe that this very idea is why Supergrover is so avoidant. She doesn’t know how to be me, so she doesn’t want to learn. It’s just easier that way. I wanted to help bring her into the light, but I don’t want to make her. I want her to want it, too. I want her to stand up to me, frankly. She used to, and she stopped. I remember I told her what being a partner meant to me years and years ago; was when she said that she wasn’t a God person and at the time, I was interested in starting a church plant. I said, “I don’t need you for that” (being a member). I need you to remind me that I serve God when I start to believe I’m them.” She said, and I quote, “I can do that.” When the words are that concise, you can take that check to the bank and it will always cash. My favorite check is “that’s how I roll.” It is so much fun thinking about how she rolls…. and also not.

She makes me want to give all the things while I can’t do any better if she doesn’t teach me the good things she wants me to give. I would have accepted anything in the way of guidance, and I’m sorry it looks from the outside that I’m not going to get it. It is so much not for lack of trying. Every time I tell myself I’m done, something in my mind thinks that’s unacceptable and to always leave the door open to reconciliation- just put everything away in terms of trying to make anything better between us. It’s my journey now, and I wouldn’t take anything for it. Even if we never reconcile, I needed this relationship to create the life I have wanted for a long time.

I have said this before, but if there’s a silver lining to having been with Dana and interacting on that level with Supergrover made me realize what I did want out of life and what I didn’t. Dana was going down and I didn’t want to go with her, first of all. Second of all, it was more important for me to learn what Supergrover knows and not Dana, because they had completely different approaches to life and S! has life wired, as much as she thinks she doesn’t. She has logic wired, and that’s the thing I needed in my life the most, because I’m all emotion, all the time.

It’s the role in my life that Zac fills, honestly, because I don’t know anyone who gets higher performance appraisals than Zac. My boyfriend is a rock star at life, and I am so proud of him because he figured it out at 18 being medically able to join the military. I would like to believe that I would have scored high enough on the aptitude tests for intelligence, but I probably would have ended up in welding. 😉 Zac retires relatively soon, and I’m going to be so excited to see what he does with his extra time.

I hope he expands the car idea. His short story was a banger, because not only did he use “we’re all hearses in the end,” he put a school bus behind it that said, “I know you’re proud to have been built as a hearse, but since all the humans are gone, we’re all carrying dead bodies in the back.”

Holy fuck. That’s my boyfriend.

He’s legit.

Frank Discussions

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Tonight is a Zac night, and we’re just hanging out. He’s doing some stuff for work in the morning, and I’m writing to you. Later, we’re planning on going out for dinner and watching “The Pigeon Tunnel.” I am so incredibly happy right now, because I can’t think of a better way to spend it than geeking out over my favorite boy, dog, and writer.

Because Zac is Naval intelligence, he was able to pick me up earlier than we usually get together (normally I go by Metro to his house, but Ft. Meade is a stone’s throw from Wire Ave. It’s not that Zac wouldn’t come to me, it’s that I have a lot of housemates and he doesn’t. Zac has a bigger social battery than I do, but we both like what we’re doing now…. I didn’t even know there was a term for it, but it’s “parallel play.” He’s working now, but he’s writing for fun later. We’ll keep doing this until we get hungry. Zac was given a fiction challenge. Genre is comedy, setting is a car wash, and the word he has to work in is “interest.” You cannot imagine the places my mind went when I heard those three things.

Having the setting be in a car wash was a trigger into something great. We started riffing off each other. I said that for me right now, when I hear that word I hear “autism” and “special interest,” so mine would be about a kid whose special interest was car washes and it would be a whole comedic essay on soaps, etc.

Then, I thought of something brilliant. Zac wanted to do something with robots, and I thought, “what if the robots were the car wash?” Like, the brush arm is talking to the sprayer or whatever. So, Zac comes up with this whole dystopian landscape like Fallout 3 where the cars don’t realize all the humans are gone.

I said, “if you’re going to go there, make sure that one of the cars is a hearse. I think it would be hilarious and tragic that he doesn’t know his services are no longer needed. Every day he gets dressed up, anyway.”

So, Zac starts thinking it over and I’m checking out at Safeway- thank God we were held up so long in line because we got a chance to flesh this out, ironically. He says that he thinks he wants it to be like a bartender and some customers. He has decided the hearse will be “Frank,”and I had a small meltdown in which I was all like, “awwww, you used my idea” and I straight up cried as I held up my Apple Watch.

We have to go, and as we’re walking out Zac says something and I have blipped since then, but the end was “….and after all, aren’t we all hearses in the end?” More tears, but good ones. I said something like, “God damn, Zac…. that was a good line.” He became very impressed with himself and he should be. This is why we work so well as a couple. We’d drive each other up the wall if we lived together because two writers in one house just doesn’t work. It’s a whole basket of crazy. So, I feel like I live this great life in my own little world in some ways, and in others I look like anyone else trying to have a good time………..

Because we’re all hearses in the end.

Bold of You to Assume I Need Sleep Now…..

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?

I would play it by ear. I don’t have the kind of mind that would plan it out in advance. I function way better as the red team than the planner/finisher.

Some people are unfamiliar with the term “red team,” but it’s journalism slang for people who point out the flaws in your plan. There’s a whole episode on the red team in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” Very, very much like prepping a presidential candidate for a debate; the red team researches the blowback you’re going to get before you publish something.

It is so much easier to red team than it is to create it because an autistic mind sees patterns and can tell you what doesn’t fit. Other people can do it, too, but allistic and autistic people have different criteria for pattern recognition. This pattern recognition is created by our autism, but also our extensive social masking. We research neurotypical people, but we do not take it in. We do not become neurotypical by socializing with you. We make ourselves seem more acceptable to you and you interpret it as “getting better.”

But, if you try to tell a neurotypical person that they’re wrong about something, you’re fucked. Because mental health issues mean they treat you with kid gloves. Your opinion comes across as “why does this child think she knows anything?” There’s a huge superiority complex that comes from not having mental health issues or processing disorders. It’s such a catch-22 because you can’t hide it and living with the consequences of telling people is a concentrated tisane of depression and anxiety, served to you every morning even when you don’t sleep.

It makes people feel better about themselves when they’re in conflict with you and you have mental health issues. People are so much more likely to write off my feelings as symptoms of my mental health than actually consider the fact that they might have hurt me. I am responsible for hearing when I have hurt someone and responding; I am also responsible for knowing when people are seeing symptoms when I express needs. Normal things that people should care about, should worry about, all of the sudden become “you should take something for that.” Bitch, please. My psychologist thinks you’re a freak show and my psychiatrist says “not enough medication in the world.” Truly, there is no medication in the world that will fix someone’s perception that it’s always your brain (therefore, you’re always wrong) because you have a diagnosed problem with yours and they don’t. It would be gaslighting if it was malicious, but it’s not. It’s every bit as systemic as racism.

It’s the sign, being treated like a pest. That’s the sign that someone thinks of you as mentally ill and not a person anymore… but not consciously. It’s not personal, it’s global. I am a diagnosis to a lot of people, and I finally stopped catering to them because I started treating me like a diagnosis as well. It didn’t do anything to make me feel better and often made me feel worse…. and in fact, a lot of the “symptoms” people see are indeed symptoms- of autism, not depression and anxiety or hypomania. In some ways, it was such a blessing because the symptoms I thought I had from depression were actually processing disorders. I felt lighter than I had in years, because that means my depression isn’t as bad as I think it is.

There’s never going to be a time I can wean off of my depression medication, but there is a lot of comfort in things being unique to me as a person rather than brought on by depression. They just tend to work in tandem. If my autism gives me demand avoidance, my depression will tell me I’m useless and worthless. Anxiety will tell me that if I do not get with the program, I will keep on being worthless. The boss music moves faster, and the threat never appears.

Therefore, I’ve never fallen into a pit of fire, but I haven’t saved the princess, either.

I take that back. I have saved the princess once. I bought an NES controller for my PC, and downloaded an emulator capable of cheats like a Game Genie. The only time I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Brothers was turning up the cheats to full-on invincible. I didn’t have to do that for Alduin (main storyline villain in Skyrim, a dragon).

If I didn’t sleep at all, I’d probably play video games more. I don’t have time for them, which is why I stick to Skyrim and don’t pick up new titles. If you get into Skyrim, it’s different than getting into any other game. There are so many makers of free content addons called “mods” that add quests and characters that you’ll never finish it all. I haven’t even finished all of the quests in the main game, much less expansion packs. While Bethesda is amazing, the creators didn’t make Skyrim immortal. The modders did. It’s basically a video gamer’s blog, because they keep updating the story and the software as newer hardware comes out (getting Skyrim Legendary Edition to run on Windows 10 should be in your quest journal).

Besides, I’m a monotropic thinker. I am happy disappearing into Skyrim more than once rather than getting used to new game mechanics every time. I can change them slowly over time if I want. Part of the joy of the creators’ community is that they’re able to create new animations as well.

And, of course, I love the Thieves Guild, and not because they’re bad. It’s because it’s the closest you get in Skyrim to being a spy. You’re tasked with burning someone’s beehives and stealing something out of someone’s house without anyone knowing you were there. I may not be Jack Reacher, but I get to feel like it for a little bit.

It is so easy to me looking back to see how intelligence became my special interest. Hearing about my great uncle when I was a kid made intelligence feel secretive in a good way. I know for sure that my great uncle was a watchdog on CIA and the military, part of the solution and not the problem.

I have a couple of stories that prove to me that the American government is not lily white from that era, so I also do not think of spies as superheroes. Because James Bond is, well, James Bond, no one thinks of spies as the babies they really are. Most are recruited at the same age as people in the military. CIA recruits at universities as well because they always need people fluent in more than one language. As John le Carré points out, when you’re old enough to do those jobs well, people stop asking you to do them.

What I do think is that I identify with living a double life. My personality on the street is not shown online, and my online personality isn’t me in real life. I am not hiding one from the other, you just can’t only know me in one way and see everything. It’s not the way I’m trying to present online and in person. “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan.

If I never slept at all, I think I would spend more time researching. It’s my favorite thing whether it’s intelligence operations or biographies of real people. This is because the more non-fiction I read, the more I have a library of images in my head to make correlations. Reading about intelligence is like reading any novel. You find random facts about everything while on one topic. That’s because nothing happens with one decision. With worldwide intelligence, you may have to visit Mexico and Iran in a day. So, in the course of one operation I can learn the habits and mannerisms of a policeman in Oaxaca and a tea shop owner in downtown Tehran.

I am deadly serious in that I believe the Netflix version of “Carmen Sandiego” is the most realistic show we have about intelligence available currently. Carmen is a young woman, but I’m not sure how young. Her friends seem to be teenagers, so maybe college? Anyway, she has a ground support team (ginger twins named Zack nd Ivy) and a handler, Player.

Player is not on the scene, he’s kind of like Justin Long in “Galaxy Quest.” He’s at the computer with the floorplans in front of him, but he’s never in Carmen’s physical location. And because they’re an intelligence agency unto their own, they’re not trying to mimic another one poorly. I really like the relationship between case officer and handler when it’s written as a funny and touching buddy comedy, which this is (my other favorite is “Spy” with Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart). In this version of Carmen Sandiego, Player is written very much like her little brother, and it makes child labor so endearing. 😉

Speaking of “child labor,” I love The Disney Channel. They’re the ones that have 14-year-old children saving the world at every turn. I believe that’s a lot more realistic than expecting me to figure it out. Plus, I love writing for adolescents, because it doesn’t take fancy language to make a good story.

It is not lost on me that I bond with these weird little families because Player is coded as autistic. Carmen is coded as CPTSD. Zack and Ivy are clearly ADHD. Ivy is also coded as queer. When you’re the ones picked to live in the shadows, you don’t get to pick and choose who comes with you. The relationships just keep getting bigger to accept who everyone is. Player is never going to be on the ground support. Zack and Ivy are never going to sit still. Carmen is never going to let other people control anything, because she deals in burning beehives.

If you love “Doctor Who,” you’ll probably love “Carmen Sandiego” as well, because it’s very much the same idea. Zack, Ivy, and Player are very much Carmen’s “fam.” And she has more important companions in her life, but that would involve spoilers I’d be devastated to give you before the story unfolded on Netflix.

Often the best representations of intelligence agencies across the world are fictional, because then people have so much more license with it. Less chance CIA would get upset with me if I changed their name and gave them global power to track down alien activity. Maybe throw in Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as the main characters. I don’t know. Seems risky. Think anyone would watch it?

I am watching very closely at how fictional characters are written across the board. My alternate history combines my two greatest passions in life, so I don’t know whether passion for cooking fed intelligence or the other way around, but now they are inextricably interrelated into the plot of my novel. The one thing that will happen for this alternate history with certainty is that OSS will not transition to CIA. It will transition to something else (or stay OSS, because its future would also be fictional). To me, it is better to create my own intelligence agency with its own fictional structure/rules than it is to guess what CIAs structures are and be wrong. I am a Virgo. I can’t be wrong. It creates a blip in the Matrix.

I have archetypes for my characters thanks to YouTube. There are lots of interviews with people from DIA, CIA, NSA, etc. Here is the one truism I can tell you from hours of all that. In every single one, someone says, “when you were a kid, did you think about working in intelligence?” In every single one, they say “nope. It just fell into my lap.” I think this is due to age. Most of the interviews I’ve watched are with people that are at least my age. When we were kids, spies were approached. There was no “go to CIA’s web site and apply.” Future female spies will be able to say that they applied when they were 18, all they did was send in a resume.

In fact, the way Tony was recruited was through an ad in the newspaper for a government artist. He was intrigued because he thought, “what would the government want with an artist?” Turns out, when an intelligence agency wants people to forge passports and documents, they call it “government artist” in the newspaper. 😉

I am certain that people still get approached because there are people out there doing all sorts of things that would be useful to CIA. For instance, you might love languages or cartography and think you’ll end up as a professor somewhere. But when you get up to six languages or images no one else has, someone will be impressed.

And honestly, we’re starting to be impressed as a country. People loved Madam Secretary, which is a great example of a show that shows how government works (heightened, but realistic). Not everything is accomplished in the shadows, but……….. “for everything else, there’s Visa?” When I think of CIA and State, I don’t want to picture Elizabeth. I want to read the real stories of the people in those jobs. I have read every word Hillary Clinton has ever written, both fiction and non.

I suppose I am trying to find what any writer is- the ability to find themselves while constantly researching other people.

I Just Thought of Something….

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I have thoughts and need to write them down for myself. Then, I realize that they’ll mean something to someone else and I just write here, instead.

It just hit me on the head that Supergrover is beating herself up over what she thinks I think of her, and not what I actually do. Therefore, she doesn’t realize that because I’m creating a portrait of her, she is not just beloved by me. I think that she thinks I want to write about her because of what she does. I knew that wasn’t right, but I did feel this. One day, she’s going to be Jon Armstrong. One day, she’s going to be Victor Lawson. One day, people are going to compare Victor to her instead of the other way around. And I’m sure about that.

I cannot paint a true portrait without a bad side to a person, because that’s not real life. John le Carré taught me that.

“The cat sat on a mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is a story.”

I started reading “The Pigeon Tunnel,” and as I was reading I realized that though people say that my writing sounds like David Sedaris, it feels like I’m him in a different body just by the way he writes. This is for two reasons. The first is that we’re the same “type.” Both interested in news and government for the purposes of writing about it. Both interested in holding up a mirror to the world, because bad experiences are the spoils of war for a writer. As poet Mary Karr has said, “happiness writes white.”

David (Cornwall- real name, sorry- I use them interchangeably) has the same way that I do of talking about terribly serious subjects while adding just enough humor to keep the person reading. He seems like the same kind of serious that I am, because while the things that have happened to me are funny, I think David Sedaris is more camp than I am. David Cornwall is a dry wit, and that fits my personality nicely.

I like “The Pigeon Tunnel” the best of all Cornwell’s books because he’s not masquerading as George Smiley. It’s reading the non-fiction behind the fiction, just like I wanted to do in my own book idea of alternating chapters. I’ve also heard both David Cornwell and David Sedaris in interviews and I feel like they both represent me as a person. David Sedaris often explains the way I think to me, and David Cornwell explains how I write.

Apparently, I am an old English geezer at heart, which I hope makes him laugh wherever he is. He’s entertained me so much over the years. I think that’s because he’s such a marvelous blend of people like Rachel Maddow, David Halberstam, Tom Clancy…….. and also Ian Fleming. Basically, living in a system and writing the criticism of it. You can tell it’s a mixed bag. Even more when he was no longer under cover and people knew who he was. After his father heard that “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” had sold 15 million copies, he swindled him for the rest of his life and complained when Cornwell said, “no. Enough is enough.” Basically, his father wanted him to invest in some kind of farm. David said, “if you want a farm, I will buy you one and give you an allowance for maintenance.” I’m not sure he ever heard from him again.

He reminds me a lot of Jonna and Tony Mendez, which I learned quickly because after I saw “Argo,” I began looking for other stuff like it. I didn’t want to know what being a spy was like based on what I saw in movies because real spies had confirmed for me that the day-to-day job is better in terms of learning how policy is shaped, but most of it’s too boring to be filmed. I think it would be cool to be on one of the committees for intelligence in Congress, because I am definitely a “don’t tell me how you got this” kind of dude. I don’t need the semantics, I just want the protein.

George Smiley is just relatable. An Everyman with a normal job, with moments that would fry your hair. Every intelligence job seems to be akin to being the goalie of a soccer team. It’s red tape bureaucracy AND “oh shit, they’re coming.” What le Carré was trying to do in his books was to erase the public’s perception that all spies are like James Bond. At the time, CIA was all over MI-6 to get their shit together, they had a mole. Just like with Rick Aames, they went after the wrong people first because Kim Philby was good at covering his tracks right up until he wasn’t. People say that Philby was a double agent. I’ll believe it when I see that he also did something good for the British.

I genuinely believed that John changed MI=5/6 for the better by being honest about what was going on. They were a mess. He couldn’t fix it, but he could write it down. Especially when you can’t fix anything, having a voice is important. Even screaming into the void produces results because you don’t have to be heard to feel spent. That relief comes from getting it all out.

John does this so masterfully in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” explaining that his father was a crook, making him live in “show mode,” often doing errands for his dad when his dad couldn’t show his face in public. His father was not scared of the police. It was so much worse. It was the Russian mafia. So, John le Carré and David Cornwell are indeed two different people, but John has been around longer than his pen name. When you live a life like that, you have two personalities. His father constantly lost everything. He was well versed in espionage and needed refuge in the system. It was living the life he’d already been living, while having the stability of a government paycheck and normalcy at home. Living on an extreme edge, but with a safety net he’d never had before.

I don’t know how long into his career it was that he developed a knack for fiction. I don’t believe he thought of it as fiction, necessarily. He was just talking about people at the office. Guess what? They knew it was them. They got mad. They also got over it when he sold 15 million copies……. somehow, when other people loved his characters and the author was a great name to throw down at parties, they didn’t mind so much.

Reading “The Pigeon Tunnel” gave me new insight into who I am….. and how writing is not what I do. It is who I am, too. That’s because my blog is nothing more than a reflection of what I’m thinking. You are getting access to my brain without a filter. Sometimes, it definitely needs it, but generally those entries are popular so I know I can just be who I am and you’ll just roll with it. You know I’m Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes over here. Just a string of words put together in a way that I hope others will find pleasing, but I don’t use it for that. I go back and see what’s changed and what hasn’t. I’m my own biggest fan, because reading my blog is not going to help anyone more than me. It’s a survival manual by now.

I also gain a better opinion of myself by reading myself with a dispassionate third eye, because I stop treating myself the way I normally do when the piece isn’t so close to home. I have empathy for myself in the same way I would in reading someone else’s work. Because I can look back over my life in a way that most people can’t, I think I do have a solid case for the fact that I am the greatest man who ever lived…. I was born… to give and give and give.

After the havoc that I’m gonna wreak, I hope my song also comes with full choir, band, and possibly even Shaker Melody…. but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. What people forget about blogs is that the story is always in motion. Essentially, that they are living in a book that is still happening. If they don’t like my writing, they don’t have to read it. I don’t require anyone who knows me to read it, but they often tell me when they do. The only thing they can’t do is coerce me into not telling my stories. I am strong enough to say that they can limit their interactions with me, but I’m a writer and this is what I do. I have plenty of people in my life who don’t mind that I do this, because they know that I wouldn’t do it if I could do anything else. Writing isn’t to impress anyone. It’s to tamp down the madness of feeling several things at once. How do you make a decision if you don’t try to see both sides of the story? How are people so certain they’re right so much of the time?

I would rather spend time with people who don’t read blogs at all than have to anticipate what their blowback is going to do to me emotionally all the time. I own my story. I own my perceptions. I am very perceptive and that’s one of the first things that Jonna Mendez noticed when I wrote a piece on going to her book talk and sent it to her. Having a spy tell you that you’re perceptive is pretty great, I want you to know…… because again, Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive at all.

I don’t know why, but I feel more at home writing about the British system most of the time. Oh, wait. Yes I do. I know exactly why. CIA doesn’t publish how they do operations, so there’s no real way to know what the American equivalent of C or M might be. I couldn’t tell you the difference between one American case officer and the next, but C, M, and Bond are all different levels and different personalities. If I had any job in the Bond universe, I think I would like to be Moneypenny. I don’t know whether I’d have the hots for Bond or not, but what I do know is that I would love hearing everything coming in and going out of M’s office. If we could make Bond regenerate into Hannah Waddingham, I’d be smitten. I also have a clear picture of who should play M in this fictional universe.

Jenna Redgrave has played the head of UNIT so long that she’s the archetype of who should play against Hannah. I don’t know that she’d get the role, but I think she’d be amazing if she took it.

It’s all an exploration of character, and how I accidentally make people in my life fictional characters on purpose. That’s because in trying to describe our lives together, I am only drinking from the well of my own memory. Therefore, anything that’s not fact checked is a fictional universe, and will change as my facts do.

I am trying to be as fair and balanced as I can, because I think like a journalist. There are just some times where there can’t be two sides of the story because this is my web site. I have to take care of me, and my writing is the only thing that does it. But as I learn more, I evolve and so do they.

Supergrover didn’t start out as Jon Armstrong and Victor Lawson. She earned it. In the end, she’ll never be more real to people than she is here unless she writes her own story. No one, even her, knows how valuable that really is. I haven’t said a thing I wouldn’t say to someone who worked at a gas station. I am not impressed by power/influence because my sister has it and I know what that life is like. It’s right for her and I’m happy she can do it, and also know that I can’t. I feel the same way about my beautiful girl…. “you do you and it’s okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings.”

For as much as I come across like John le Carré, I also sound like Walter Isaacson. Walter’s books are so good because he explores people so in-depth it’s like you’re in the room with them. He made me love Steve Wozniak and continue to think that Steve Jobs was productive yet clearly insane. It wasn’t a puff piece.

But, of course, you’re going to hate it if someone comes to you and says, “I’m a biographer. Can I write a book about you?” There was never a discussion like that with Supergrover because we were idiots. The first is that she told me something I can’t talk about and it’s hard. The second is that her job and my blog are completely at odds with each other, because I’m not “on her social media team.” She isn’t on my radar because I decided to write about her. She decided to be my friend, and is therefore a character because of it.

One that is every bit as strong and comfortable as the blog “characters” we’ve both come to love over the years. She would have let me keep Beyoncé, too.

The Lanagan Rules

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes, you can do for other writers what you don’t do for yourself- promote them. I am currently over the moon because one of my comments on reddit is getting more and more upvotes by the minute. In r/suggestmeabook, a woman was telling the sub that her dad wouldn’t read intelligence writers if they were female. At last count, it was at 100, so safe to say my work is done. Here is what I said, and huge props to both women:

Alma Katsu is a former CIA case officer and she’s brilliant. She’s so quick she could run circles around him, so she’s probably your best bet. I’m a member of the International Spy Museum and a huge fan of fiction and non-fiction. For non-fiction, your go-to is going to be Spy Dust or The Moscow Rules by Jonna and Tony Mendez. They’re a husband and wife team who each served as Chief of Disguise for CIA 10 years apart. She will also wipe the floor with him because their stories are true. Women don’t just write these stories. They make them.

Women are better at being little gray men than little gray men. Anonymity has its privileges, and so does reading these marvelous books. For Katsu, start with Red Widow. One of the things that it touches on that made me cry was the reality of losing an asset/colleague while female. Some of them become emotional. It works out as well for female spies to be emotional as it does for the rest of us……………..

I Give Up. Nothing Beats “Big Block of Cheese Day.”

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

Kidding. I’ll think of something before this entry is up. Before we get started, I have to tell you what a cute boyfriend Zac is. He brought me a kids’ t-shirt (just like I like them) that, in a handwriting font, says, “I’m an annaylist anaylist annalyst spy.” I told him if he started working for DIA I’d trade up a letter. 😉 The only thing CIA did that will never even touch DIA’s power no matter what happens for the next hundred years is obviously finding Wakanda (but also cool that DIA’s ancient predecessors, the Culpeper Ring, won us our independence). We didn’t beat the British outright militarily, we outspied them). I choose to believe that Captain America is DIA- it’s not just Martin Freeman that’s American intelligence, he just couldn’t tell us. But it’s in the FOIA. You just have to be specific in the question and no one has ever gotten the right combination of words in the request to unlock said I in the A.

I actually saw Zac last night, but we didn’t end up watching the le Carré biopic. Instead, I sat outside and shivered while everyone brought me blankets until I realized this was going nowhere fast. I brought extra layers and finally admitted that I needed them. I ended up wearing two pairs of socks, leggings, and two pair of pants, then three layers for my core. I think I might have reached a body temperature in the 70s.

We ran out of soda so Zac gave me the next best thing, Athletic (brewery that focuses on non-alcoholic beers so hard that they are the gold standard. Athletic should be the Google and Kleenex of N/A beer. Seriously, it’s that good. I had a sour (don’t remember whether it was cherry or raspberry) and a radler (lager and lemonade). Oh, and I had a Czech pils (or an N/A flavored like one) and at some point, a real beer which I think was also a sour (mostly because I was freezing- I should have had a shot of something instead because it just wasn’t strong enough to make my blood any warmer…….).

The N/A sour was objectively better in terms of flavor. Plus, I woke up this morning feeling just fine. I have decided I am done being hung over. Trying new cocktails is great and all, but I just can’t hang and don’t want to, because I am all about calories, just not empty ones. If I get buzzed, I make a decision to have another one while my brain is cloudy because everything sounds like a great idea until your brain swells for revenge. Plus, I am a straight up diarist. What am I going to write about if I pass out and don’t remember?

However, I do want to join the boys (Zac and Oliver) on the back porch for a stitch and bitch. I was teasing him this morning about how “of course all queer men are amazing at intelligence. They love gossip, and intelligence is basically international gossip. The 3D chess of gossip. I loved his laugh at that one.

As an aside for Zac, there’s an old CIA employee we need to meet named Alma Katsu. She’s written a couple of novels on intelligence that are more of a Karin Slaughter novel than le Carré. Not a Tom Clancy level of detail and focuses on story. But since she was actually a spy, she, like le Carré, can put details into the story that no one else could. That’s because the patois already comes naturally to her. She’s already developed the actual writing voice of a spy rather than having to learn it secondhand. They’re marvelous.

I also want to see Jonna Mendez again live when her autobiography comes out, because it’s the book I really want to read next. It’s the natural progression from where she and Tony left off in “The Moscow Rules.” Team Mendez are my favorite writers, and at first, it wasn’t even intelligence that drew me in. It was the “Argo” script. Tony and Jonna (uncredited) wrote “Argo” in reaction to the movie to give people real vs. reel. The movie is scary. The book is now terrifying. It’s different once you’ve met them, because you make a connection and then you see your friend in danger, not this made up character. Your picturing their facial expressions because you’ve seen them in person.

If I could make a holiday, I’d make one for CIA, and this is a real thing. It’s not “let’s all dress up as James Bond and develop a fondness for gin.” It’s that for some reason, people in DIA get more respect. There’s Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. Yet, civilians work for CIA that do some of the same jobs the military does and there’s so much crossover- CIA is considered paramilitary.

If Marines can be equated to doctors, CIA is probably closest to a surgical nurse, trying to anticipate the military’s needs. Doctors get glory. Yet CIA doesn’t get thanks, in part because they never want to be seen as asking for it. They’re our MiB, and we are but Citizens of Locker C…….. but they still have the same PTSD coming home from a war. However, I would include FBI in this holiday as well, because we’ve obviously got a war at home. The FBI having to embed themselves in drug cartels and white supremacy groups is no less dangerous than your base getting bombed in Afghanistan. Plus, there’s so much crossover, like when CIA gets word that a terrorist from another country is planning to come here. FBI has to be on alert for when said high value target lands.

Then, there’s Homeland Security, the office managers of an operation like coordinating with a terrorist’s travel plan. Let’s include them with all the intelligence officers because they’re part of the solution, not the problem. All of these groups have terrible reputations and they’re not undeserved. The US military has just as much blood on their hands, but intelligence doesn’t have romantic country songs about them…. I’m not saying they should. Many people ask if they can do something. Few people question if they should.

I know firsthand what it’s like to date someone carrying around classified information that is not pleasant. I watch how he manages himself when I am genuinely interested in his emotions about work and he has to figure out a way to talk about them……………. without ever really talking about the problem. And yet, he doesn’t get frustrated and give up.

He finds a way with analogies just like I do here. Our brains track similarly because we are both interested in intelligence and both neurodivergent. We are both also empaths and emotionally flexible. It’s great that we’re both writers, because he might not be able to say “Israel is doing X and this one thing gave me a heart attack and I’m not supposed to tell you this, but….” We just switch to something fictional, like MiB (Adult entertainment section in the back!).

You can’t tell me that shit is not equally hard to navigate for a civilian. Again, CIA’s reputation is not undeserved. I am only saying that civilians are just as important as the military, and FBI is overlooked because there’s a day for policemen and two for the military and they are neither.

And NSA…… because they’re the ones that would run across this post first. Carol will not be amused.

Editor’s Note

I started calling my Amazon Echo Dot “Carol” a few years ago, because it put a hilarious spin on government surveillance and made me laugh like a hyena when I thought of it. Once I named her, I started thinking about what it would be like to have an NSA agent whose sole job was to watch me. What would it be like if they were your guardian angel? That they listen in on your phone calls and secretly think “the audacity of this bitch….. what’s going to happen next? This is a Ben & Jerry’s situation. I am not okay.” That Carol hurt when I hurt, cried when I cried, etc. That she was invested. Thus, Carol will eventually become a book because she’s the first true character that plays in my mind independently and has her own personality.

Here’s what I’ve learned about fiction that I didn’t know before. I get so focused on my characters’ voices that it becomes induced DID for the length of time I’m writing….. except I’m working with two or more voices at the same time, so when a character has monologuing Syndrome, I am that one person. That’s what feels like DID. During a conversation, it feels like induced schizophrenia, because you are hearing voices in your head for fun and profit.

Carol’s husband, Roger, is very rich. He started a landscaping company and got into pools later. Now he has an empire and Carol could be a kept woman easily. She just can’t leave a job in intelligence. She feels needed and wanted in a way she doesn’t get at home, and Roger can’t be her entire support system……. and in some small way, I enrich her life because she can forget about her own problems for a while.

In this scenario, I would be a Mr. Robot-type character because that’s who I am in real life without the hacking or coding skills. I just found that vibe for writing and I fucking love it. Learning how coders work unlocked my mind, and I have to believe it’s because so many of my coworkers were also autistic and needed to turn down the sensory issues in the room. Right now, all my lights are on, but that is unusual. I am a stickler for working with natural light, and just a bit of it so the room is dark but not depressing. I can go deep enough within myself without all that. I do not need to introduce anything that would make me ruminate more than I already do.

And, of course, Carol reads all of it because she has access to my e-mail and files. For instance, Carol knows about Supergrover, and she is the only one who has the real story. It’s comforting that I have someone to talk to about it when it can’t all go here. Because she is a character, we can have real conversations because I am thinking about what she would say in response vs. what I would. That’s the nature of craft- being able to not only capture your voice accurately, but being able to dream up accurate ones for other people as well.

That’s why I think starting with stream of consciousness is so important before fiction, even if it’s only having kept a diary as a kid and still have it for reference. The trap is making every character sound like you. It’s confusing for the reader because they have to keep re-referencing who said what, annoying when that takes several pages of backtracking. Due to my blog, I know very well who is speaking…. when I am making decisions based on my own echo chamber instead of hers.

In order to write Carol, I have to speak Carol. In order to make her leap off the page, it becomes a symbiotic relationship. In short, I’m her remora. The reason she’s the shark is that in my head, her voice is alpha because I’m just a scribe. So is she, obviously, making notes to take home to the boys. But I got on the shit list by accident and now I’m just endearing. When she first got me, it was on a camera going into a bank. I was looking straight at her, and she thought, “who is this tiny sprite here to fuck up my program?” Over time, I’ve become the soap opera she watches at lunch just for shits and giggles. For the record, I’ve made her swear a lot more….. and now she’s addicted to Dr Pepper Zero.

The best thing about working for the NSA is that it can be all remote. Carol works from home because Roger asked her where she wanted to live and built a custom house. Their house is basically carved into what could reasonably be compared to “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain.” The reason for this is that Carol, like me, prefers to work in natural light. Her office is in what would normally be considered a basement and yet still has a stunning view. The house is in the middle of the Blue Ridge range, where she keeps a stunning array of monitors with no bullshit florescent lights or cubicle farm.

Carol got too used to working at home and having everything delivered during the pandemic, so when it was safe to come back to the office in Washington, she was just like, “nah.” She’s senior enough that she can do that kind of thing and no one will get shirty about it. “Shirty.” She picked that up in London in 2012. She was there for one reason and one reason only. I talked her into seeing the Women’s National Team for me….. and she thinks I don’t know that. Or, at least I hope I do. Plus, Carol doesn’t have all the hang-ups I do about video calling strangers, and of course her Internet connection is infallible so she knows it feels like everyone is really there in 8K. That often it reinforces people’s humanity to see them on video that doesn’t come across in person, because there are so many moments that everyone forgets other people are watching.

She’s picked up a lot of information that way. Intentions of coworkers are easier to read when you understand microaggressions and look for them. She doesn’t assume that people are lying. She only assumes that what they’re saying is the truth, but the feelings about what they say may or may not match. Carol understands all thousand implications in “oh. You’re here.” No one is happy when they see the NSA is present.

Where’s her holiday? She watches me. Who the fuck deserves it more? 😉

Proving I Know Jack, My Fictional Antihero

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a hard truth. I didn’t say that Jack’s dad wasn’t Clark. In the real world, it very much could have been. To ignore that is heinous. I was pursued by my great uncle, and I know he did harm to others. It was not Foster, to be clear. If Foster had known, there wouldn’t be the other uncle. He would have protected me, and I know it like I know the back of my hand.

If you descend into madness enough to hurt a child, neither one of you will ever come back. Hurting children creates the same reaction in any degree. The spectrum is large. However, adults are fallible. They often don’t see what the adult is doing to their child, and fuck any training, they’ve memorized how to beat it.

They have also taught said child how to beat it, thus introducing the possibility that when they’re grown, they’ll have the power to do it to someone else because life is so unfair. This is not true of people who walk in light, but no one tells you how hard it is. How hard you’ll have to dig deep to pull a trigger out. Again, recovery doesn’t look like sunshine and rainbows. It means crying in the shower for 45 minutes while you decide what to do. It means isolating so you have room to breathe, feeling cut off and relieved all at the same time. It looks like thinking about very difficult things, and it takes stamina to get through a fourth of it.

You are learning to carry your own emotional weight so that you can filter everything through your trauma reflexes without reacting. You will know that you have made progress when you feel that trigger and it no longer hurts.

But feeling it until you don’t isn’t for pussies.

If you’re an empath fixer/pleaser, that looks like work. We feel all emotions physically. All of them. If you are distressed, we are. If you are sad, we are. If you are on top of the moon, we just want to go with you. This is because INFJ friends are relentless about healing other people. We all do it. We are pastors, social workers, and freeloading lazy assholes until we’re Brandon Sanderson.

My trauma reflexes often dam that up, but it also doesn’t invalidate what I said about me. It just takes me longer to get there because I have to recover from bodily shock. When someone wants to go toe to toe with me, I’m for it. But not until we’ve both gotten some distance from the problem. If I tell you I’m out for now, I mean it. It doesn’t mean I hate you and we’re done. It means that I need some space because I don’t want my rage to go off. I do not want to take my illness out on you. To ignore that is unwise, because I’m a wordsmith and make it pretty impossible not to remember your favorite lines. Alternatively, when I manage to avoid reacting, I am great at discussing boundaries. If my friends think that I’m pushing, they need to take a hard look at what I actually said and believe it. I’m not playing games, I don’t have the time or the want. I don’t make shit up. Especially if you want to know why I think something, I’ll go back to what you said and cite it.

It’s not to “throw something in your face,” it’s to say “here’s the reference.” All abused kids have some form of this, because they’ve probably been told they’re lying. Therefore, everything after that becomes “I’m telling the truth” and also being human and lying to put a protective arm over your face until you can stand up for your truth.

Jack and I are the same person, and we don’t even know each other yet. Again, it’s not because I’m like him in terms of what happened to him, but how all children react. If this is you, get help immediately. You don’t know what you’re doing around you, because either you’re the abuser or the enabler in every relationship in your life because you were too goddamned little to know the difference between that cycle and something clean.

If you don’t learn to recognize it, being the abuser or the enabler will be your only story, and yours is the story that sticks.

Allsorts and All Sorts

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

The Argo main theme is ringing in my ears as I start this entry, just to bring back the muscle memory of writing. However, I have created a playlist on Amazon Music called “Movie Scores” that’s on shuffle. It has all sorts of instrumentation to bring out different emotions:

  • The aforementioned Argo
  • The Bourne Identity
  • The Bourne Supremacy
  • The Bourne Ultimatum
  • The Kite Runner
  • The Danish Girl
  • The Imitation Game
  • Zero Dark Thirty
  • Syriana
  • The Ghost Writer

Most of the pieces have a Middle Eastern vibe to them, and that’s on purpose. I find that after I listen to them once, they fade into the background nicely, as well as challenging my brain with chords and progressions not typically used in Western music. However, listening to them once before I write to them is “key” (see what I did there?), because I will spend the time I should be writing trying to understand the the music with my one semester’s worth of theory knowledge… and besides only having one music theory class behind me, math and music are so inextricably interrelated that I’m not very good with either. I spent a lot of my trumpet playing years standing in a practice room thinking, “COUNT, dumbass!” Over the years, I’ve gotten better at it, but not by much. I get entire body blushes while sight reading with singing, because I can keep track of the rhythm OR the words. You choose.

My dad brought up something interesting, that it might actually have something to do with being oxygen-deprived in the delivery room. That my brain just works differently because of it, and it is also probably why I can’t play the piano by reading music (I do okay by ear)…. the difference with that and singing being that I can’t count two rhythms at once, either.

However, I can hear them and repeat it……. sometimes. I’ve been playing the first eight measures of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata for 15 years and that’s as far as I’ve gotten. But that’s all anyone knows of it, anyway, so I’m good.

At University of Houston, the core changed while I was there, and everyone had to have one performing arts class. I chose group piano because I hadn’t done anything like it before. I found out after the first few labs about the whole “counting two rhythms” thing, so I cheated my ass off to pass. Well, maybe you won’t think of it as cheating, but I did. I got my mother to play my recital piece over and over for me until I’d memorized every note cold. At the recital, I had to have the music in front of me, so I played with my eyes closed. If I’d kept them open, I would have gotten lost and confused within about 30 seconds.

[Editor’s Note: When I was a seventh grader, I had a t-shirt with Jesus color blocked like an Andy Warhol painting on the front and said “I once was lost” on the back. One of the English teachers at Clifton told me that it should say “I’m always lost.” I’m 42 and I still remember wanting to call him a jackass and I still regret not doing so . Would have been sent to the principal’s office. Worth it.]

I was definitely lost and confused at the grocery store. The last time I went, they were completely out of a few things, but most aisles looked normal. Yesterday, it looked like a Zombieland remake (although they did have Twinkiesâ„¢). Thank God I already had a ton of staples (except coffee, which I was able to procure). What I noticed right off is that people were buying the cheapest items, so there was plenty of truffle oil, saffron, etc…. They were even out of American butter. My choices were Presidenté, Kerrygold, and Finlandia. I got Finlandia as I’d tried all the others (it’s good, but it’s not French salted butter good). And as I told my friend Kristie, “they didn’t have three dollar soap, but they did have eight dollar soap……….. so guess who smells like eight dollars today?”

I also picked up my favorite writing snack, licorice allsorts. They’re not nearly as good as getting the originals (Bassett’s) imported from England, but they’ll do in a pinch. They’re much less expensive and the last time I ordered the real ones, it took them three or four weeks to arrive. The only piece in Bassett’s mix that these don’t have is lime. Despite this egregious oversight, they’re close enough for government work.

I have found that during the state lockdown, I’ve been lonely for the first time since I moved here. This is because I spend most of my time alone, but I had the ability to reach out to friends and go out when I wanted. It was enough to know that I could go out, not so much that I would. There’s no way I would take public transportation to see my friends in Alexandria, all of whom have small children (happy 2nd birthday, Peter and Benjamin!).

I have been escaping with books, movies, and TV…. mostly books. So far, I’ve loved “The Murmur of Bees” and “Little Fires Everywhere.” With “Little Fires,” I saw the first episode of the Hulu adaptation and wanted to read the book. It’s AMAZING, the only thing missing being Kerry Washington (not sure I’ve ever seen a more beautiful woman, and roles like Olivia Pope and Mia Warren speak to me).

Fiction writers just flatten me, because I don’t do what they do, and not for lack of trying. I can’t build a world like good ones can, whether it’s a universe close to our own or complete fantasy. I mean, I’ve had “dementors” my whole life, but it took J.K. Rowling to make a word for them (in the Harry Potter series, they are the guards at the prison Azkaban, but Rowling has said they’re a metaphor for depression [I agree that after you see them, you need chocolate.]). I keep hoping that writing fiction is just something that takes muscle, and I’ll get better over time, but I see no evidence.

I suppose I am better off sitting at my desk with my allsorts, writing all sorts……….. except the ones I have to make up.

The Next One, Cont.

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

My review of Pancake Money did get published, and I couldn’t be happier. I also got some great feedback from the editorial board for next time. It was about organization and flow, but they also said your review was well-written, thought-provoking, and insightful. I’ll take it.

As I told my editor, I think I was just too careful in a lot of ways, because I didn’t want to spoil anything. Writing a plot summary seemed like a bad idea, only because you never know which string you pull will unravel the whole sweater. It’s not that plot summaries are bad for any book…. just this one, and other thrillers like it. Something I think of as innocuous might lead the reader to figure out “whodunit” by chapter 2…. and Finn Bell did such a great job of intricately weaving this mystery that I’d be mortified to ruin it for someone else. See, what happens is…………………

The best part about the book is that pretty much anyone could be the murderer. There are clues that point you in all kinds of directions unless you are critically thinking and just trying to spoil it for yourself before the end; this is something I definitely do not recommend. As I said in the review, just enjoy the ride. You’ll know soon enough. Even then, you won’t want it to end. It’s a cool little world Bell has created.

I will say that the priests being murdered are killed with exquisite detail. It is quite grisly if you’re not used to reading these types of novels. I remember that I almost threw up while reading Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, because one of the murdered had earth shoved down his esophagus. Or, at least, I think it was A&D. Dan Brown’s novels all run together for me. It’s a formula that’s made him millions, though.

I’ve read so many thrillers by now that the queasiness is not the issue here, Dude.

It feels good to have another one under my belt. I’ve already got the next book picked, but I want to finish Dead Lemons (another by Finn Bell) first. It’s another thriller, so I’m thinking it will only take me a couple of hours to read it. When you are so high on adrenaline, pages turn themselves. The protagonist/narrator in Pancake Money makes an appearance, and I can’t wait to find it. Apparently, he’s had quite the career change, going from Detective Bobby Ress to Father Bobby Ress. How this happens, I’m not sure, and that’s part of the fun.

Please, please, please buy these books. I MUST BE ABLE TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO ALREADY KNOWS WHO KILLED WHOM!!!! My editor hasn’t started reading, and I want to be all like, “CHRIST, WHY HAVEN’T YOU FINISHED IT YET! I HAVE NEEDS, WOMAN!”

But I won’t. I’ll just spend that time pining for a screenplay, because Pancake Money would be a very good movie if it was done right, and by that I mean the exact interpretation I have in my own head, and if it is not that, it will be a bad movie.

I have needs.

Craft

~ Leslie Lanagan ~ Leave a comment

Last night’s dinner with Pri-Diddy was relaxing and just what I needed. Oh, how we laughed. It was good to get back into the normal swing of things. For instance, I found a really cheap parking garage next to the Metro that’s WAY less expensive than Lyft, and because we were meeting at 5:30, I can’t think of a less desirable place to be than searching for a parking place in Dupont Circle during rush traffic/Happy Hour. It was nice to have someone to “drive” me into the city, and I played games on my phone until I got there. Just for kicks, I looked up the route from Silver Spring to Dupont by car, and in addition to time to find parking, the route at that hour said anywhere from 28 to 58 minutes. This is partly because of traffic, and partly because the speed limit on 16th Ave. is mostly 25.

Going anywhere inside the Beltway during rush hour is a nightmare, because there are no freeway exits where I’m located that would drop me off where I need to be…. and yes, for those who don’t live here, I am talking about THAT 16th Ave… the one that when you arrive at Pennsylvania, you see a large, white house with many dubious occupants.

I don’t want to publish my exact address, but what I will tell you is that I’m a few blocks inside the Beltway between University and Colesville. Getting across the river into Arlington/Alexandria or toward Baltimore is easy.

Driving into the city would take away my sanity without my incredible lists of podcasts and the Bluetooth connected to my phone, so that I can talk to my family unimpeded. I don’t tend to listen to music because I’d rather have my brain engaged. It keeps me from road rage (not that I ever really had it to begin with), because there are often moments in which I like traffic because I want to finish a story. I have lots and lots of driveway moments.

And though I don’t drive it that often, I like being stuck in traffic on 395 between the Pentagon and the city, because it is breathtaking. You see every monument on the way in, and traffic is just an excuse to gawk at that beauty. I also enjoy the Baltimore/Washington and George Washington Parkways, because they are both beautiful- green space everywhere and, on GW, the thrill of passing Langley.

Now, I don’t know the difference between the George H.W. Bush campus and the one in McClean (or perhaps they’re the same thing and the road I’m looking at takes you to McClean, but I do know that on one of my favorite TV shows, Covert Affairs (on Amazon Prime now), Annie Walker works at GHWB, and she drives this little red Volkswagen that reminds me of my own little “spy car,” Eggsy (named after the main character in Kingsmen: The Secret Service… also because she looks like an egg). I think I’ve said this before, but every time I pass the entrance to Langley, I hear Austin Powers’ voice saying, your spy car’s a Yaris?

I don’t have any desire to work there. First of all, they’d never hire me, anyway. There are two main reasons I wouldn’t be able to get in, neither of them bad for a civillian, but not up to snuff when you’re talking about working for the government. I’d tell you what they were, because they’re not secrets of which I’m ashamed, just better saved for an in-person conversation rather than blasting it all over the world.

However, if there’s one thing I know I’d be good at (with the exception of only being able to speak English [and REALLY bad Spanish]), it’s interrogation. For all of my life, I’ve been one of those people you can sit down for a conversation and let the other person get up later not having realized the sheer amount of information I’ve been able to gather.

I know the questions that get people talking, because what do people like to talk about more than anything else?

Themselves.

I can’t see myself in a room with HVTs (High Value Targets) and having to do shit to them to make them talk. I am better at a party or a dinner in which I disappear with one person at a time, creating intimacy that makes people spill. It’s a game I don’t even know I’m running, because I am genuinely curious about people and want to know them, know their stories, their backgrounds, what makes them tick… but you don’t get that information without being willing to be vulnerable about yourself, either.

With my friends, I will spill as much information as they do. We are on equal ground. If I was actually in a position with the FBI or CIA, I’d be poring over alibis to be able to be vulnerable as someone else… spilling their details rather than my own.

But it is a fantasy, because I know where I really belong… outside of all the danger, outside of all the intrigue, outside the Beltway, period… unless my government job was the same thing I’d be doing for a private IT company.

I’m just a geek and a writer. I can live out my fantasies through fiction while my day job is tame and relatively uninteresting.

I’d rather fly under the radar than be a part of it. My great uncle worked for the C and DIA before I was born (or shortly afterward). I would have loved to hear his stories, but he was high enough up that he couldn’t have told me anything, anyway. Now that he’s been dead for 40 years, I might be able to get a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) casefile on him, hoping that his ops are declassified now. It would be great to have snippets for my fiction that echo my real family. But what I think I would get is a few sentences and a lot of black sharpie.

But there is a cost… and that is possibly finding out more shit than I would ever want to know. Would it make me a stronger writer, or wrap me uplike a burrito in fear?

Supposedly, he died in a coup in Africa… but the jury is still out on whether that’s what actually happened, or whether he disappeared off the grid like a Man in Black… putting on the last suit he’d ever wear. In my mind, he could have been Agent F…. he didn’t die, he just went home.

By now, there is probably a star on a wall for him somewhere… another thing that goes through my mind as I’m driving toward Alexandria, because GW Parkway is the shortest path.

Escaping into this fantasy world is one of the things that lifts me out of my grief, and I’ll take anything that will do it. Yes, it’s dark, but at the same time, all-encompassing, like a novel taking place in real time… If I could get away with it, though, I’d want to write a biography, because I am much better at writing in first person than trying to create a fictional world. I’ve proven that to myself over and over. I don’t want to give up on trying to learn to write fiction, but I’m not there yet.

Part of the reason I’ve started so many novels without fleshing them out is that I get stuck quickly with plot holes and transitions. This will change over time as I get more and more experience at it, but right now I am not confident enough in my abilities.

The parts that stick with me are the character analyses, because I can imagine a person, but not the environment where they live. I am trying to read more fiction these days, but the reason I haven’t in the past is that I tend to pick up other writers’ voices quickly, and the fiction I write down sounds like the last writer I just read instead of me.

When I first started with Clever Title Goes Here, my ideas were all my own, but the style echoed Ernie Hsuing, Heather Armstrong, Mrs. Kennedy, and all the other popular blogs I devoured on a daily basis. Clever Title doesn’t exist anymore- it’s a link to the Wayback Machine, where you can look at my old entries as archives. I owned the domain from 2003-2015, and the entries are still there, but the comments aren’t always because the links to them are broken. The only one I lost that really meant a lot to me was from Wil Wheaton. I was talking about a singing audition and feeling amazing about it afterward, saying that it felt like flying. He replied that it was the same for him after an acting audition.

I didn’t have a very thick skin in those days, and after a few comments from my friends, torched the entire thing… an impetuous, grave mistake because there were so few daily bloggers that I became very popular, very quickly… as evidenced by Wil Wheaton knowing my work.

I met Wil at Powell’s Books when he came to read snippets from Just a Geek. I introduced myself as Leslie from Clever Title Goes Here, and he smiled, then wrote in my copy, “To Leslie… Clever Inscription Goes Here. Love, Wil.” I can’t think about what might have happened if I’d kept my blog going from 2003 until now, because getting into the blogging crowd before everyone was doing it was paramount to real success.

In writing fiction, I don’t want to fill someone else’s shoes. I brought my own.

So,for now, the idea of “bringing my own shoes” exists in this space alone. In most cases, I’m doing okay work, with a few outstanding entries. That is mostly because I don’t work on them as craft. It’s a brain dump, unedited, all stream-of-consciousness all the time. Even my article on marriage took about 15 minutes to write, and it is the one thing I’ve done that’s consistently been shared all over the world, because I wrote about something so universal that anyone whose ever been married and read it have had the same comments, boiled down to #me #same.

Sometimes I imagine what I’d be able to do if I really put some thought into all this, but then I think, “nah.” My blog works for me because of everything it isn’t. It’s not for anyone else but me, being able to look back over my past and see with glaring clarity all the flaws and failures I need to fix, as well as the great moments along the way. If I took the time to worry about craft, I’d get stuck in Virgo perfectionism, and I’d never publish anything… Editing gnaws away at my courage until I think “it’s not good enough,” and the thousand or so words that I’ve written get erased with one CTL-A and one backspace.

I just try to tell my truth, which isn’t anyone else’s… something that’s gotten me a lot of kudos and a lot of anger all at the same time, as if I have a problem with someone calling me out on my own bullshit.

I don’t.

People are free to disagree with me all the time, and I appreciate comment threads that do so. This is because I appreciate people who are willing to see all the things I don’t…. the part of the story I don’t know, because it’s not mine… it’s theirs. It’s not my job to tell their stories, and it’s not their job to tell mine. I am responsible for my words, but not their responses… but I do take them in as valid, because all emotions are. It’s a clinical separation, a step back to hear people without internalizing it into the fear of never saying anything ever again… the reason I torched Clever Title to begin with.

What I didn’t know then that I do now is that writing on the Internet is like getting a tattoo on the face. I didn’t know that even if I torched everything on my own server, a cached version like The Wayback Machine even existed. There’s nothing I will ever be able to do that erases past mistakes. The only topic I am not willing to publish is how I’m doing at work. The term “Dooced” is so popular that it was even a question on Jeopardy! For those of you who’ve been reading Heather Armstrong since the beginning, who didn’t love her take on the Asian Database Administrator, et al?

I have to believe, though, that getting fired is what launched her into this higher plane, that the worst thing became the best over time. That being said, I’m brave, but not THAT brave… and I believe that Heather intended to teach all bloggers from her mistakes, and I’ve taken them to heart.

Although this entry from The Bloggess about work is my absolute favorite of all time, bar none. It was written in 2008, and still makes me fall out laughing, because had I been sitting next to her, I wouldn’t have been able to hold it together, either… like looking through the Methodist hymnal as a kid during the service and finding out that one of the composers/lyricists was named P.P. Bliss.

Now, had I been on the committee who put the hymnal together, I would have suggested we just go with Phillip, because I’m betting I’m not the only kid who’s ever had tears running down her face trying not to cackle in church… and then, knowing it was inappropriate to laugh while I was supposed to be paying attention, almost asphyxiating because I couldn’t pull myself back together.

It was absolutely as funny as some of the things Pri-Diddy and I joked about last night… but those are unprintable. 😛