(TLDR: Let me know what you want to see more of down below)
Dear Reader,
I’ve been working hard—really hard—on more projects than is probably good for me, but I don’t know what else to do with my hands.
I had two new essays just picked up by County Highway: one is about fishing for critters in the woods of North Dakota using glow sticks and is called “Fish On”. The other is about my time finishing concrete in Kentucky summers and the lessons I learned about family and about a life worth giving to my wife and sons. It’s called “Something Solid”.
I’ve got an interview that I did with Devon Eriksen (author of the breakout novel Theft of Fire) being run in the fall issue of Man’s World Magazine next month.
I finalized a short story collection (called Open Windows) that’s currently with two publishers. Hopefully it’s not too damned weird for them. It might be. It’s a journey through lots of different genres that I think reasonably coheres. I’ve been wrong before, though.
As of this morning, I’m over 90,000 words in on a new novel. I think I have five more scenes in it before I begin the rewrite. It’ll be ready in time for the Ark Press contest in October—it’s pretty weird, too. Maybe there’s a pattern here.
Lastly, I’m still finding time to have quality coffee talks with the wife and do boy/creative stuff with my sons. I recently took them cliff-jumping into the American River for the first time. They were pretty sketched out, but they got it done, and they felt ten feet tall—which is about the height of the little cliff they jumped off of.
My two favorite little guys also commissioned me to draw badass Zelda stickers for their school notebooks. I think I delivered (that sword is the size of my HAND):
Aside from delivering an update, I wanted to see what to do with all that free time I don’t have (while finishing grad school and doing all of the above). I think you’ve gotten to know me through my writing, but I’d like to get to know you a little more on here—maybe by finding out what type of writing appeals to you most below? Feel free to drop specific essay/story titles that you’ve enjoyed (whether on Substack or elsewhere).
Talk soon,
—C.B.
Thanks for the privilege of reading "Open Windows." While your experience of storytelling is quite different to mine, it was enlightening to look through your window into the stories that have emerged from your process.
Yours is a kind of writing that I still enjoy, despite having committed to a different approach for my own fiction. Even though several of your stories skip along the boundary between the quotidian and the phantastic, at no point do you move into territory of the genre called fantasy. But at no point do you leave off your wise and often painful examination of the worlds your characters believe that they inhabit, and by the end of each story I feel, as I think you intended, that I have been inside another person's soul. Not YOURS, except to the degree that all fiction is self-revelatory. But rather the soul of the person that your character approximates. I am better for having read these stories.
The most powerful story, for me, is "Broken and Complete," which enters into some of the territory marked out by "A Prayer for Owen Meany," in which a character's life of suffering finally turns out to have been directed toward one decisive moment which makes the suffering seem to be premonition or prophecy or, at the very least, purpose. This theme shadows around all the stories of Huckabee's that I have read so far: There must be a purpose here, and if we only do our best to live kindly and patiently, everything will come to the point at last. Why are we alive? the characters seem to be asking, and then they are answered: Wait and See!
It is unfortunate that a search for "Huckabee Open Windows" brings me to a few manuals for using Windows, and when I exclude those, a whole raft of books by the political Huckabees, in whom I have no interest and with whom I have less patience. Would that you had chosen a different pseudonym that had no political associations, since your work has nothing to do with our culture's current savage divisions. But knowing that you have no connection with them makes me all the more eager for "Open Windows" to be generally available, so readers can associate that name (or even, if you choose, your real name) with stories of such penetrating wisdom and generous humanity.
My professional preference is for psychology themes, but my personal preference is for personal themes, if that makes sense. But whatever the theme, it's always good to read your work.