A moment to say 'Thanks'

Sometime tomorrow, I don't know when, the next book, our second book, Holy Ground, will be born. What started years ago as a way to memorialize my grandfather's stories we all had to listen to, over, and over, and over again, writing them down so we could read about him, morphed into, well, this.

I hope you like it.

No, Mark, you really hope we hate it. What person would create something so the viewer or reader would hate what they created? Good point. No, I say that because this is a story about a lot of us. Us with issues.

Stand in line.

When I first drafted this story, it was funnier. I had some ghosts and, well, it was just funnier. But only to me and a select handful who helped me create those characters over some well worn single-malt scotch. Everything is funnier over scotch, especially well worn scotch.

Then my editors read it and they all slapped me like I was stealing candy. So, I listened to them. That's what Stephen King said you are suppose to do, listen to your editors. Especially if you're paying them to be listened to. I thought they were wrong. But when the three of them came to the same conclusion. Look, I can be stubborn, but I'm not totally stupid. They saw something that I didn't want to. So the book took a turn.

Now, you can see the story for what it is, not what it was trying to be.

I hope you like it because of all the insecure reasons anyone hopes people like what they do. Like a party. You go to a friend's party and they have some wonderful food. But on the way home, you are happy to point out that they used Chick'n-in-a-bisk't crackers as the foundation for their Cheese Whiz and salami. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

No, I want you to like it because I want to enjoy this feeling of being absolutely humbled, brought to my knees humbled, that I have been allowed to go this far. Sure, it costs some greenbacks on my part, but there is something you all have caused and I want to share it with you. You see, you helped create this baby. It's ours. I believe everyone we meet, effects our lives, changes our path, sometimes in big ways, sometimes just a degree or two at a time. Most of the time-at that moment of contact, it is insignificant to us. We don't even feel it until later. Then, it has had time to build and grow, until we find ourselves on a grassy knoll with our own box of thoughts and issues. Then, in the sunlight and never alone, we look back over time.

So take a look at the cover. It's a neighborhood bar like a thousand others, but its a safe place, at least it was for our main character and a few others. It is a warm and inviting place, with fresh pastas, ice-cold beer, fresh made breads, and a French onion soup made with Guinness beer that you want to try to figure out how to bathe in-its that good. You can sit and have a conversation or just sit. Our hero likes to sit right there at the corner where the bar turns. He can watch the TV to his upper right. His favorite program comes on late and the bar owner flips it off of ESPN just for his friend. A small two-piece band, the Catfish Hunters, is playing for a few who venture out on the floor, another pair are playing some pool. The smell of whiskey in oak casks and fresh bread fill the air. You find yourself just sitting back in your chair, not speaking. You can actually feel your pulse slow, your blood pressure drop.

Yeah, I don't want to stop doing this.

Enjoy the ride.

And so, it begins again.

So, there's another book. Sorry, I can't stop. Holy Ground follows the life of Cooper Gardner, a man living a life like many of us. It will become available on November 1st. A friend of mine has graced this book with its Foreword. When you ask about the book, I think this describes it the best. Enjoy.

Foreword
___________________________

Mark Williams writes his heroes the way God probably sees us. We find them stumbling around in their own personal battles: grizzled, failed, weary, tough and cynical. They have a great heart, but it’s had the life nearly kicked out it by failure, pain or rejection. They drink too much scotch and employ language usually reserved for dockworkers and pirates. But near their lowest, they find themselves inexorably drawn into a life altering, life revealing chain of events. From somewhere within, they discover themselves responding with bravery they didn’t know they possessed. I think that’s how God probably sees us all: messed up and full of compromised sludge, without the slightest awareness that our moment to shine is waiting, just around the corner.

His hero is usually encouraged and reminded of his purpose by a partially-sane vagrant, or some such sketchy character. In speaking wisdom through them, his books give strange and wonderful dignity to the forgotten, misplaced, rumpled and ignored.

Smack dab in the middle of the most dangerous scenes is where you discover some of the best humor. And oh, there is humor! There are one-liners in here worth admission to an overpriced Vegas buffet!

Toss in his ability to seat you in a neighborhood bar-where undercover cops swap war stories…or an evacuated office where you learn horribly close-up how trigger pins detonate explosives-and you’ve got a page-turner like few others.

Mark has this great ability to show the invisible thread woven throughout each of our lives-giving meaning to every moment; especially the ones that presently make no sense.
He has become a writer worthy to stand with the “big boys of fiction.” He tells a story you don’t want to end. I think it’s because you’re not reading a rehashed plot a ghost writer has reworked for an author who has run out of good ideas. Mark’s letting us into how he sees life. He somehow convinces us that this life, in all its pain and ugliness, is still worth hanging around for. Because that moment is coming…where all the unraveled threads form a tapestry…where the good guy’s unseen courage gets displayed…where you finally see that your day to day life actually counts…where the garbled mess of real life turns on a dime, just when you’d feared it was all a random hoax. And he hands this gift to all of us who read along with him. You’re in for a wild and delightfully redeeming ride. Enjoy the pie!

John Lynch
co-author
True Faced and Bo’s Cafe

Nothing Important-or is it?

I haven't been writing my blog as much lately. For some of you, that's probably a good thing, well, deal with it. I've been busy doing other writing and just dealing with the mundaneness of life, if the word mundaneness is actually a word, which today, it is. At my age, still feeling young at this point, which is closer to the end than the beginning, I can look back and actually have an opinion that is worth something because I have walked the road. At least this much of it.

There is the bulk of our lives that are just, well, mundane; at least we think they're mundane. Its just life, refilling the toilet paper roll when there is three or four squares left on the end of the roll no one wants to try to use, that makes up the vast majority of our time on this rock. If you think about it, really analyze it, anyone can be a hero-really. What glory there is to strap a supersonic airplane to your butt and throw yourself off the front end of a moving ship, or run into a burning house and pull a small baby out of its smoldering crib, or my favorite-'keying' a door to a house with a forty-pound ram on a search warrant. Really, who wouldn't want to do that? Everyone wants to do that!

No one, absolutely no one, wants to refill the toilet paper roll.

Holy Ground, my next book after Emancipating Elias is coming out in a few more days. I was telling a friend I was having coffee with yesterday that writing to me is like heroin-the good kind of course. The type you can apparently now buy in California at their CVS pharmacies. After Holy Ground I am finishing up Looking for Indianola. Its a story of just this issue-the mundaneness of living. Life is not filled with fighting fires or the eighty yard touch down drive. Its filled with vasts amounts of time of what we could perceive as 'Boredom.'

We try to fill and remove our boring times with carrier launches and search warrants. We buy a car, we take a trip to the woods, we paint a room, something that is safe yet, whimsical. Now, don't sit there and say, 'Mark, you are just against change.' Because, you would be right. That is an Achilles issue I have had for a long time. You don't need a new couch or drapes if they are still working as a couch and a drape, do you?

The last few days, and writing this new book, is proving very interesting for me. I've gotten to focus on this topic and compare it to my life. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, until its your grass and you have to mow it. Ask any fighter pilot and they will tell you they love to fly. If you ask them what the worst part of their job is, they would say the three hour pre-flight and two hour post-flight de-briefings. Cops, cops love search warrants. They hate the eight to ten hours of paperwork afterwards.

Last night was an example. Everyone was over for Joni's birthday. She just wanted to be surrounded with her kids and grand kids-plural-jeez, it still stuns me that I am a multi-grandfather. Anyway, it was pizza and wings and toys on the wooden floor, and noise, and dogs, and TV on mute (why have a TV with a 'mute' button?-seems wrong). Then Spencer had one of those Latoya Jackson wardrobe malfunctions and blew threw his diaper like a shotgun blast at a watermelon, all over his mother, his father-my couch. People were laughing, screaming, running for towels. I just sat back, as a true grandfather would, and in all my wisdom of such things over the years called out in a calm, yet firm tone "Get the spray-someone spray the couch. Get the spray." Whatever that meant.

Actually, from a grandfather and a man's perspective, I was kind of proud of my little grandson. THAT, was an impressive feat. Most men would think so too.

I have also been working with my one son in law with his back yard sprinkler system. My other son in law, I helped lay sod when they moved in and so now is was plumbing. Of course, we waited until the hottest time of the year. Hey, if you're going to do something challenging, you might as well risk your life doing it. Also, on the last day of September, my oldest brother reported he turned the big sixty-five. This is a guy, who could and still can run us all into the ground. Lastly, my little boy sent me his first e-mail since going back to the Middle-east as an 'Advisor.' We talked about the Iraqi food and how he has Spencer issues for about a week.

Yep, the mundaneness of life.

What does it take to stay in the fight? To stay and deal with those things that come up and wash over our lives every day. I am not going to sit here and say it takes hero status to do so. That term gets misused enough. But it does take us sometimes stopping and looking around to truly appreciate what life is giving us at this particular moment. Sometimes the dancing Santa's and the Burger King commercials mask what is truly there for us to enjoy. A walk around the block, early morning coffee before the world is awake, a nap, a good book, trimming a hedge, window shopping with no intent in buying anything, anything that makes up our lives that have been given and laid out for us to look at and find humor or comfort in. Right now, as I write this to you, I have one dog asleep on the far side of the room under a desk and the other laying on my foot, sound asleep with her breath hitting my ankle. I am trying desperately not to move my foot so as to not wake her-my dog. Jeez.

The mundane, Old man Kopchek says in Looking for Indianola "You were feeling nostalgic about the good old days, or bad old days, whatever they were when you were a tike on a trike and wanted to reclaim that feeling? We could search forever for that feeling when all we have to do is open our eyes and look around.

Or we could go in and clean a toilet and change the roll. Try it. See if the next time you do it, it doesn't bring a smile to your face. I'm going to see if I can actually use those last four squares. Three cups of coffee will do that to this middle-aged man.