In age of texting and social media, does anyone engage in lengthy telephone conversations anymore?
Well, I've had phone calls with my adult children that can last an hour.
But I've also had phone calls that extend to nearly a fourth of the day with a few, very few, select individuals.
Currently, one of those people is Ed Calkins, Steward of Tara,
These long phone calls gradually began when he was writing Ruthless because he wanted to be certain he was representing the BryonySeries franchise correctly (his vocabulary, not mine).
And I would always reassure him that his character Ed (which is a caricature of himself, twice fictionalized) is completely unreliable. So Ed, as author, has complete freedom to develop any of the BryonySeries characters any way he wishes and to place them in any situation of which he's inclined.
Still, he really desires to be authentic to the series. And I want him to be authentic to his writing.
So he'll call from time to time to chat about premises already established in the series and what I'm working on for future books.
But this is where it gets super fun for me and, honestly, for him, too.
Some conversation gravitate to deep discussions about the people, place, things, and circumstances in the series as if they were real.
We talk about them as if we are both following the same series, and neither of us are the authors.
The BryonySeries has a lot of books, a lot of characters, a lot of places, a lot of circumstances.
So we can talk for a very long time.
We can talk five hours or more (and have).
Now, we don't talk for hours very frequently. Living life would be challenging, difficult, impossible.
But we do talk like this a few times a year, when our schedules sync up.
And we have smaller conversations (maybe an hour or so) when Ed is really stuck on his sequel Tu Ruthless or has a revelation he wants to share.
This past Thursday night, Ed gave me a ride home from WriteOn Joliet. We started talking before we made it to the van. And then we sat in my driveway, immersed in the BryonySeries, for nearly an hour, until we abruptly realized the time.
Now if all this sounds like vanity (it isn't), you should know that Ed, for all his dyslexia, shyness, and stammering, is really quite discerning.
I remember the first time Ed stammered out his feedback on a written piece a writer shared at a WriteOn Zoom meeting during COVID.
The other writers had given writing advice and tips for improving the piece.
Ed understood what the writer intended to say - and said so.
After the release of Ruthless on Calkins Day 2020 (February 13, Ed's birthday, part of the lore - his and now mine, too), Ed joined WriteOn.
Since then, he's accepted both praise and criticism for his writing with equal grace.
He's grown in confidence and hardly ever stammers at meetings now, whether he's giving feedback or reading aloud from his own writings.
And, if you can believe this, he is very excited for the release of the new Girls of the BryonySeries series. If that sounds weird to you, I'd like you to know he understood the premise before I told him.
Ed thought eleven was the perfect age for the characters of these books. It's the age when girls are leaving childhood but haven't quite entered adolescence. They're still very dependent on their parents or guardians, but they are beginning to feel that need to stretch away from that and to become themselves.
When he finished speaking, I told him the premise of these books: Each book features one eleven-year-old girl with a seemingly insurmountable problem to solve that the people in her immediate world do not understand.
Before we cut off the talking for the night, Ed had brought up the character of Savannah Holloway, whose only appearance in the BryonySeries was one chapter in this book, the very end of a scene followed by a mention in this book, and a memory and stalking in this book.
And yet, Ed was full of reflective insight on this character: her past, her motives, her skills, her influence. Only one deduction was slightly off the mark - but the rest, really was spot on, even though that's all unspoken.
So these BryonySeries conversations are not vanity, although having my books appreciated on this level is exhilarating, absolutely.
But isn't that the goal of anyone who makes art?
Why else do artists spend hours and hours and hours developing, in small and very nuanced ways, a book, a painting, a drawing?
Sure we're happy when people enjoy it.
And we're ecstatic when people fall in love with it.
But when art can settle in another's soul and live there, when art can become an inherent part of that person and, perhaps, inspire even more art and generate five hour phone calls where the inevitable disconnecting of the call always comes too soon...
Well, that is a satisfaction that defies words.
Even for writers who write books this size,
May we all continue to find ways to hear and be heard and to forge those connections in life that makes living life worthwhile.
