Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 9: Dr. Coffee's Pill (2004)

I really don't want to write this one. There. I've said it. Now I have to stop procrastinating and get it done.

Don't get the wrong idea! I love "Dr. Coffee's Pill." It's one of my favorites, and I'm very proud of it. I just re-read it, in fact, in preparation for writing this blog, and I didn't cringe once. Well, maybe once, when I saw a "he" that might have been better clarified in the narration, but the dialogue made it clear whom I was referring to, so ... I am now both overthinking and procrastinating.

Here's the thing. "Dr. Coffee's Pill" is a short story about the relationship between art and pain, and, for me, it is a story that comes from a place of deep personal pain; a pain that  might have killed me once, as I see it.

So ... Let's talk about "Generation X." We weren't given that label for following the non-existent Generation W, no. We were given that name by the Baby Boomers more in line with the term "Brand X." The lesser ones. We weren't like them, and therefore, we were basically deemed defective by the mainstream media of the time. I don't want to overdo it with generalizations here. There are billions of humans on the earth, and more exceptions to every generalization than I am willing to try my hand at counting. That being said, yes, I am using generalizations to make my point, because the generalizations match my experience, and stopping to point out every exceptional member of each generation whom I personally know would be tedious. Suffice it to say, I acknowledge these individuals, and this is not a story about them.

Looking back at my life, I have noticed that most Baby Boomers I knew growing up were extremely good with children, aside from beating the hell out of them. They doted on their children, as long as they could. Gen X was the last generation to have the luxury of a stay-at-home parent, until we became the first generation of what the media dubbed "latch-key kids." The divorce rate skyrocketed with the Baby Boomers, and we wound up with no parent having the luxury of time. Everyone had to have a job. The media dubbed our homes "broken." Gen X got home to an empty house after school. We looked to the television for guidance, as we microwaved our own meals and waited for whichever tired parent we lived with to get home. I'm not saying this to elicit pity; I'm simply pointing out that there was a dramatic change in the average family dynamic, and it threw everyone for a loop. I never bemoaned being a "latch-key kid," at the time. The media did that for me. I was fine with it. I learned to enjoy my independence in the hours when no adults were around to advise me, to tell me yes or no. Still, It was when Gen X hit adolescence, specifically those of us born in the '70s and early '80s,  that the Baby Boomers generally stopped liking us so much. Suddenly, we weren't the obedient and adoring children we had always been. We were angsty teenagers who listened to "immoral" music and dressed like slobs. We didn't jump for joy to greet them when they got home anymore. We were too busy being developmentally normal adolescents and distancing ourselves from parental authority as well as we could. Our parents didn't have the energy or the patience for it, nor were they very inclined to stop and evaluate what was happening, or whether or not it was to be expected. All they saw were behavioral changes they didn't have time to nurture us through.

A lot of us were embittered by their sudden absence in our lives, as we made an effort to spread our wings. And a lot of our parents were embittered by the loss of their innocent children who were now obnoxious teenagers, too big to successfully beat without us realizing we could hit back. As a result, in the late 1980s, there was a trend of teenagers being needlessly tossed into mental hospitals by their parents, who simply didn't know what to do with teenagers. In their minds, teenagers, "Generation X," were the worst, most ungrateful, and mentally deranged people in the world. If they couldn't subdue us with Ritalin, there was nothing else for it. We had to be institutionalized until we learned to either revert to being obedient children or grow instantly into fully functional and responsible adults. There was no time for any in-between phase.

The message was simple. Conform, or vanish.

I was no exception to this trend, and it's another part of my story I don't like to talk about.

In 1988, my mother and father had just divorced. I don't want to get into the private details too much, for the sake of respecting everyone involved. I will say, it was an ugly divorce, and, in that, it wasn't very exceptional. I was luckier than most kids my age, in that my father remained in my life. He left our home, but he didn't leave us. It probably would have been a fairly smooth transition, if my mother hadn't insisted I was depressed and sent me to a psychiatrist I had nothing to say to. I was actually relieved when my dad left. The tension in the apartment had only been getting worse. Mom was getting more and more dramatic, and Dad was getting more and more silent. He didn't speak to anyone. He would stare at books without ever turning a page, just so he didn't have to interact with any of us. He was miserable. She was miserable. We were all miserable. Dad moving out was more like lancing a boil. He and my mother were suffocating each other, and it had to end. Frankly, I never understood how they made it as long as they did. I never understood how two people who were so extremely different even got married in the first place, but I'm glad they did, for my existence's sake.

I'm not  trying to condemn them here. Divorces happen. Toxic relationships break down. It's never pretty. It's never happy. In my opinion, in the case of my parents, it needed to happen in order for everyone to be happy and healthy again. I'm only giving you the backstory so that you understand how I got stuck in this particular situation as a teenager.

Mom insisted I see a psychiatrist, and as I said before, I was not depressed about the divorce; I was relieved. I also didn't have a choice, so I was dropped off once a week or so, to tell the doctor who shall remain nameless here all about why I was depressed and hated my dad. The problem was, I wasn't depressed, and I didn't hate my dad, so I pretty much said nothing. Doctor Moneybags (let's call him that) would ask me questions, and I would say things like, "Yeah," or, "No," or, when I couldn't decide between the two, an I-guess-sinister, "I don't know." I never gave the man any reason to suspect that I was a danger to myself or others. Still, he told my mother that I was, in fact, a danger to myself and others. I denied this tearfully to my mother, when the doctor said I had to be put in a mental hospital so that I didn't murder my family, but he was a doctor, and I was a deranged member of Generation X; branded a smart-ass, a slacker, a punk, a latch-key kid, and every other "X" that the media could invent to slap us across the face with. I had no chance.

Moneybags wanted to put me away that day, but my father put his foot down. It was December, after all. I couldn't miss Christmas! And so it was that the day after Christmas, I was institutionalized.

I met a number of interesting people in the mad house. There was a former child star, who had been on a Saturday morning TV show I had watched years before, whose mental problem was pretty much that she was no longer a child, and her parents didn't understand why. There was another girl who had been put there, because she frequently had sex with her boyfriend and fully intended to continue doing so. There was a boy whose clearest symptoms of insanity included listening to heavy metal music and growing his hair long; another boy whose parents thought he prayed too much; another who had a Mohawk haircut and had smoked some weed. You know ... crazy people.

The point is, despite the opinions of the experts, none of us belonged there.

Dr. Moneybags would come to see me once a week, to continue our non-conversation and collect his check from my dad's insurance. There were other, equally corrupt doctors there who made sure we all took our meds, which were never explained to us. But if we got caught spitting them out, they would watch us swallow them thereafter and check our mouths. If we questioned them or resisted treatment, we were isolated. I once got busted for eating a grape without permission. I was clearly on the path to a depraved life.

While I hadn't been depressed before, that started to change fairly rapidly when I was locked up for months. I didn't see any way out. I started to lose the will to live. I thought if I had to stay there one more night, I would simply die in my sleep. I wasn't about to conform, but I had to pretend that I was in order to survive. The doctors would try to lead me into saying that I wanted to experiment with sex and drugs, but I never took the bait. They were trying to justify keeping me there and draining my dad's insurance money. Curiously enough, when the insurance money ran out, I was declared cured and released.

When I got home, I  stopped expressing my feelings so much, for fear of being sent back to the hospital. I lived with that fear every day until I moved out. I learned to hide my feelings and my actions from my parents and others of their generation. I learned to nod my head until the totally-not-insane grown-ups went away, and I just did my teenager thing on my own, letting them think they had won whatever argument they were having with themselves at me. My mom hid all of the knives from me, still convinced I was a danger to myself and others. She even hid my BB gun, which I find hilarious to this day. My dad, unconvinced by the psychiatric conspiracy theories, fantasized about crossing paths with Dr. Moneybags in public and beating the hell out of him. I, too, fantasized about my dad beating the hell out of Dr. Moneybags.

As a result of all this, I grew up to be an obstinate non-conformist. I evolved from actively hiding my actions and feelings to just not advertising them. I would do what I wanted to do, and if someone noticed and didn't like it, I would shrug and do it anyway. If someone, usually from the previous generation, started having a meltdown over my refusal to obey and conform to what they thought I should be doing, I would watch them melt down, for entertainment, or I would shrug and walk away, continuing to do my own thing, not really caring that they were giving themselves an aneurysm over it. It's something I identify as a Gen X trait. I know we're not all like that, but I am, and most of the people I grew up with are, and so many of the articles I read about Gen X support the whole "does not play well with authority figures" stereotype that can be said to define our generation.

I'm not sure where this cartoon originated, but it's perfection.

So, what does all this have to do with "Dr. Coffee's Pill?"

Everything, as it turns out.

"Dr. Coffee's Pill" was originally an essay assignment in a college English class I was taking in the early 2000s. We'd been studying all of these creative historical figures for weeks, and the professor, Dr. Mary Northcut, whose every class I dutifully signed up for, gave us some prompts to choose from. I chose the one that called for us to imaging some of the people we'd been studying in a support group together. I can't take credit for that part of the idea, but as for who was in the support group, the character of the psychiatrist, the topic of their conversation, and the story that followed, that was all my own.

I based the character of Dr. Coffee on Dr. Moneybags, who had basically stared at me for an hour a week while drinking coffee incessantly, before having me committed. His drinking coffee was the affectation I took the most notice of, so I gave it to my fictional psychiatrist. The artists in the support group were Frederick Chopin, Vincent van Gogh, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Frida Kahlo, all of whom had been affected by profound pain in their lives.

I looked up the artists' own words for a lot of their dialogue, working quotes or stylistically similar phrases into their discussion. The topic of conversation was the relationship between artists and their pain. Would they still be the greats that they were, if someone took away their pain? Dr. Coffee had a pill that promised to do just that.

I dipped into my own pain to write the group session. I went back to my experience with Dr. Moneybags and the mental hospital I should never have been in; the attitude displayed by so many of the Baby Boomers I grew up around, that I should conform, or vanish. Conform, or be erased. Conform, and be erased.

The story was short and to the point. Just the way I like them. Dr. Coffee left the group to discuss his proposition, with the bottle of pills sitting there before them. Would they take the pill and free themselves from the torments of their experience, or would they refuse and continue swimming upstream in a world whose expectations and realities had deeply wounded them.

When the name of the medicine is revealed at the end of the story, it was Basquiat who tied it up so brilliantly, highlighting the truth of the proposed non-solution by crossing out the word. I like to think that, should I find myself in a similar support group for dead artists some day, I would do the same. 

My pain is a bottomless well of emotional intelligence. My pain is the ink that I bleed on the page. My pain informs my joy, and thus my joy is boundless.

I stole this screenshot from Austin Kleon, who stole it from the
documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child.

"Dr. Coffee's Pill" was published to my website as a PDF e-book on December 4, 2004 and in paperback the following year. It was re-issued most recently in 2012, as a Kindle e-book and a print edition available exclusively through my website, via Lulu.com. 

Next: "Metrognomes: Worse Than a Gremlin" (2005)

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 8: Music of the Metrognomes (2003)

What else can I say? I love these little guys!

It may be best to save the big story about Metrognomes for my upcoming blog about the first novel in the series. Suffice it to say, the two short stories and the novel series were all coming together simultaneously, way back at the dawn of the 21st century.

I want to say it was 2001, when Molly Brimer and I started working on this world in earnest. I was spitting out story ideas, and she was feverishly sketching character designs from my notes and rantings. I wanted to do three fully illustrated short stories to dip my toes into this magical world and to lead into the events of the first novel. They were intended as direct prologues to the larger story that would be told in the books.

I wound up writing two of the three short stories that I had pitched. The third one didn't really come together for me, even though it likely would have been the shortest, and I could have written it in a day. I will likely return to it though. It's never actually left my thoughts.

But, to the subject of this blog: "Music of the Metrognomes" was my first step into this universe; a dramatic departure from the horror fiction I had written up to this point.

I had this idea for a big novel that would tell a story covering about a decade of its characters' lives. I'll come back to this in a later blog, but the short of it is, I chopped that story into treatments for five distinct books, because I thought it would be more easily digestible for readers that way. Then, I decided it was too cartoony, and I thought I'd never actually go there.

That changed, when I met Molly Brimer, while we were both working at a Barnes and Noble subsidiary called Book Stop, in Dallas. She revealed herself to be an amazing illustrator, did some work for me, and reawakened these gnomes in my imagination. Perhaps the story wouldn't have worked for me as a mere prose narrative, but, with illustrations, we might just have something!

She signed on with enthusiasm matching my own, and we started meeting frequently, outside of work, to go over the characters and plot lines for the series.

I was in a really good place creatively when I wrote this first short story. My website was getting a decent number of hits, my first novel was selling steadily, I was well into working on The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas and The Great Debate, and I had so many ideas of where I wanted to go next. I'm so glad I settled on the gnomes!

The overarching theme of the Metrognomes series was about the power of diversity; about gnomes from different cultural backgrounds coming together and adding to each other's strengths. That's really all I wanted to set up in this first short story, aside from the world itself; a world I was very nervous about writing.

I had primarily written horror and other dark fiction up to this point, and I had no idea what the tone of this new world was going to be. That was my first inspiration for writing these little prologues. I wanted to meet the characters before we got into the big story. I wanted to understand their world, before I tried to go there for the length of a full novel.

I had planned to tell the story of how Ak'ten, a magical Old World gnome, and Pete, an atheistic Techgnome, first met as children. However, when I looked into the world to start jotting down a basic plot, I discovered that I was far more interested in the second time they met as children. It gave them each an opportunity to worry their guardians before heading out, by confessing they had each met a gnome whom they were forbidden to associate with, and that they had not seen what the problem was.

The adults in the protagonists' lives were there to establish the philosophical contrasts of the two gnome cultures. Ak'ten was an Old World gnome, training under his mentor Malík to be a shaman someday. His people believed in magic, and fairies, and gods. They viewed Pete's culture to be dangerous blasphemers. The Techgnomes, represented by Pete and his mother Resna, believed in science, technology, and secularism. They had seen too many wars started by religion and had long since abandoned magical, dogmatic thinking. They viewed the Old World gnomes as dangerous pagans. Each of these societies had forbidden their people from interacting with the other, but when Ak'ten and Pete crossed paths, all they could see in each other was a different sort of gnome, who wasn't actually threatening in the least.

The story of their second meeting gave me a chance to foreshadow the friendship that would bloom upon their third, which would be the basis for the novel Metrognomes: The Shaman's Apprentice. 

Nervous as I was to try my hand at fantasy, I was delighted by the characters when I met them on the page. I started to find the tone of the overall series in the young gnomes' innocent curiosity about each other. Once I'd finished this first tale, I knew I could write the novel from the perspective of Ak'ten and Pete without trouble, though they'd be teenagers by the time I touched base with them again.

While Molly did concept sketches for several interior illustrations, it became so time consuming to do them in full color, as we had planned, that we eventually abandoned them in favor of getting the story published sooner, with the intention of doing an illustrated second edition later. Molly did finish a couple of the full color paintings, before we let the idea go, and one of them was chosen to serve as the cover art for the e-book. I would still love to work with Molly on finishing these other illustrations someday. Time will tell, if we ever have the chance to go back and do just that.

"Music of the Metrognomes" was published as a free PDF e-book on my website on July 30, 2003. It was the first story I ever published in that format. A number of e-book and print editions would follow over the years, the most recent being the 2013 Kindle e-book and a paperback available exclusively through my website, via Lulu.com.

This story has always been very dear to me. I met some of my favorite characters in its pages. In fact, to this day, Ak'ten and Pete remain two of my very best friends.

Next: "Dr. Coffee's Pill" (2004)

Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 7: The Great Debate (2003)

The Great Debate was my second multi-format book release. It was a short book of short fiction; four stories, one of which had already been published on its own previously; and it was the hardest writing project I had ever taken on at the time.

I was still in that bleeding demons phase of my early writing career. I was struggling with things, as I wrote in "Part 1" of this blog series. I was struggling with coming out, with the hypocrisy of the church I had been raised to believe in, with the fear of them being right and my being wrong; the fear of Hell. The fear, and the reality, of being rejected by people who mattered to me.

I had launched my writing career with the publication of my short story, "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," in 1999, and it had been cathartic. It had been healing, in the way that having a good cry is healing. But it hadn't sorted the issues in my soul. It had merely opened the floodgates. I needed to say more. Much more.

I set out to write an anthology of stories that would illustrate the process of coming out as gay while struggling with the self-hatred  happily encouraged by a deeply religious upbringing. I was always angry about these things, and rightly so.

I didn't start writing the book as a cohesive thing at all. I wrote "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," and called it a day. I'm not sure, exactly, of the order, but I think the next story I started in on was actually the last in the book, "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." The third story I got sucked into was the novella, "Six Nights to Damnation," which was placed second in the anthology, and the fourth was "Christian's Dilemma," which wound up sitting between "Six Nights" and "Reverend Philips."

It took me years to write this book.

It was still the late 1990s when I started "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." I had fully embraced the Theatre culture on the campus of Richland College at this point. I had made friends of all the girls, and the other guys were often overheard saying things like, "What does Glenn have that I don't have?"

The answer? Safety! I wasn't trying to get anything out of the women in our group, other than the  friendship they freely offered. It was a game to us, not letting the straight guys know what was up. The girls would drag me into the ladies' room for chats, never explaining to the straight men what was happening. And it was still dangerous to be completely out. Even in a college Theatre group. There were men who were known to be a threat, and everyone knew it. So the women kept my secret from these men, after sussing it out for themselves.

Those were good times; the promise of creative freedom was all around me. I started growing out my hair, expressing myself boldly in everything I did. I had written all of the stories I would publish in 1999, but that year had not yet come. I felt that my writing had been bold, and my spirit had taken the hint and followed suit. I was out to my friends, but not to most of my family. I still feared the repercussions of that particular act of future boldness.

The group of us actors was cast in a production of Frankenstein, and the director, a noted puppeteer from Mexico, wanted to form a script from our ad-libs. It was bliss! We weren't just memorizing lines from a prewritten script, we were forming the script effortlessly, as we played off of each other's imaginations on the stage. I was doing everything Theatre at this point in my life. I practically lived on campus.

One of my many Theatre-related classes had us all write and read aloud a one-act play for a final grade. This is where "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell" was born. I was inspired by my outrage at Westboro Baptist Church, which was often in the headlines of the day for their brutal homophobic bigotry. Their leader, Reverend Fred Phelps, was on trash talk shows all the time, red faced and furious, shouting his sinister catchphrase, "You're going to Hell!" at the gay community and their allies alike. He was a raging microcosm of the evils of the Christian church worldwide. Granted, some churches taught "tolerance," but even this was an insult. We didn't want or deserve to be merely "tolerated." We wanted and deserved to be fully accepted and embraced for who we were!

Fred Phelps was the genesis of the character, but Aidan Philips was certainly not a clone of the man. I took the attitudes of other like-minded pastors, the sinister actions of other churches that were obsessed with attacking gay people and their families, and I put them all into one character. I wrote this one-act play for class, performed it, and felt like I wanted it to be more. I wanted to expand it, even if only a tiny bit. I wanted Reverend Philips' bigotry to go beyond homosexuality. There were other hateful headlines. Women being run out of the church for leaving their abusive husbands, children of white mothers being exhumed from the grave when the church learned that their father was black. Monstrous acts being done in the name of Christianity! I wanted Reverend Philips to embody them all in his personal mission.

Script-in-hand, post Intro to Theatre class, I mapped out The Great Debate, planning to expand upon these themes progressively with each story, using "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep" as the springboard and "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell" as the resolution. It seemed simple enough; write three new stories, stick them between the two I already had, add a scene or two to "Reverend Philips," and bam, there's a new book. I erroneously thought I could knock it out pretty fast.

By the end of the process, I would swear off writing structured anthologies and working with illustrations forever! Here, in 2020, I'm laughing at myself for that, but the feeling was real. This book was hard to write!

I wanted the book to serve as one collective metaphor. It was really about coming out as gay in a community of faith, confronting the hypocrisies, embracing and valuing oneself, and becoming a positive example for others in coming out myself. From beginning to end, the stories told a meta-story about the importance of coming out and standing up to the crippling power of fear.

"The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," was the first step: Recognition. In the coming out process, we first recognize that we are not like the so-called "white fleeced sheep." We are not welcome by them, unless we stay hidden and pretend to be just like them. There are social consequences to not going along with the herd, but there are personal consequences for conforming. We choose our consequences. Do we serve our haters, or do we serve our selves?

In order to come out, we must choose to serve ourselves; to step off of that ledge, to allow them to ostracize us, forcing us to sleep outside in the rain, like the protagonist of that story, with their taunts and promises of Hell.

These evil assurances invariably lead to fear, when you've been brainwashed your entire life into believing these attitudes to be the unequivocal word of God. So, after one has taken the first step, the next is to face one's fear, and that is what "Six Nights to Damnation" was really all about. It was a story about these fears being proven right. It was a story about what we fear will happen after coming out; that it will destroy us, that we will ruin every relationship that matters to us; that we will find no mercy or forgiveness under God; that we will be perfectly damned for what we are.

In order to transcend these fears, we first have to look them dead in the eye.

The novella's protagonist, Anthony Paul, faced his fears, and they destroyed him. He became the very monster that he had feared he would. And, in the end, he was nothing more than food for the creatures of Hell. This story works great as part of the overall metaphor of the book, but I would never give it a solo publication. On its own, it could only be seen as hatefully homophobic; as supporting the corrupt teachings of Christianity and other religions. As a part of the whole, it is redeemed in the end as an honest part of a much larger internal process.

This one was probably the hardest to write for me. "Six Nights to Damnation" was me, as a writer, facing some personal taboos. I wrote a torrid sex scene for the first time, I killed off a child, and even more horribly for me, I killed off a dog! At the time, some of these things were actually funny to me, once I got to them. I have a habit of writing sex scenes to be deliberately over the top and laughing as I do. When people tell me how much those scenes titillated them, in my head, I'm remembering how hard I personally laughed while writing them. I got through it, just the same. I even laughed when Anthony, having just murdered his six-year-old cousin, cheesily told his wife that Christopher was, "Out like a light," when she asked if he was sleeping. This was, of course, before I knew any children as an adult, before I would even write "Night Light." But the murder was still nightmarish for me to write, even if I did let out a few ghoulish giggles as a coping mechanism. In truth, I was utterly disturbed by the murderous nature of Anthony as the story progressed. I was riddled with nightmares by the butchered bodies piling up in the trunk of his car. And, all that considered, the hardest part was killing Patches the dog. I stopped writing for a bit when I got there. I couldn't do it, but I knew the story demanded it of me. In Cry, Wolf, there was a dog, Sampson, slated to die in the outline, who had other and better ideas for himself, in defiance of my outline, that helped to tie up the novel perfectly in the end. Sampson survived, but there was no hope for Patches. I have a powerful memory of taking a shower, trying to put off the moment, and breaking down sobbing, because I had to kill the dog.

Then ... I killed the dog, and it was awful. But I did it. I faced it, and I wrote it, and the story worked. The horrific metaphor of Anthony's fears being realized was complete.

The next step on the coming out journey, after acknowledging these fears, is defeating them; self-forgiveness; taking a side in the great ethical and theological debate; learning to love ourselves unconditionally, despite the abusive teachings of a life-long system of belief. That's where "Christian's Dilemma" came in.

This story was more autobiographical than the rest for me. It was about a man, Christian Rivers, Jr., who had come out in his faith community as bisexual. He had continued to fight the uphill battle, remained a leader in his church, but he had not been genuinely accepted by the Church. He was still told that his very being was a sin, that he was an affront to God, that he was hurting his family. He was struggling with all of the fears that had been presented in "Six Nights to Damnation."

"Christian's Dilemma" also confronts the problem of suicide in the gay community. The suicide rate is much higher among young LGBTQ people who do not feel accepted by their families or other communities. The story opens with Christian being urged by a demon in his closet to take a gun and kill himself, ridding the world of the inevitable pain he was going to cause by his mere continued existence. He was assured that everyone would be happier without him. Then he trips over an angel on his front porch, and a fresh perspective comes to him in conversation with that angel, one of his guardian angels. He starts to pick apart the mixed messages of the Bible, of the Christian faith, of an inexplicable dogmatic presentation of the Supreme Being as a petty monster. In the end, he accepts himself, he doesn't just ponder the possibility of God's love, he accepts it as a reality, and he chooses life; full life, as the man he was born to be.

The challenge in writing this one for me was facing my own inner "suicide demons;" facing the part of me that was filled with self-loathing because I'd been told to feel that way about myself my whole life. Writing this story for the protagonist was the same as experiencing his personal revelations for myself. I came out on the other end of it changed. I was ready to take the next step ... sort of.

There was another story I had planned to put in The Great Debate that just didn't happen. It was about an ostrich who'd been raised by eagles and didn't know he wasn't an eagle until he grew up. This was maybe the only instance of me not knowing where a story was going before I sat down to write it. I did write one scene, as I recall, and I loved it. It was funny and cartoony. It would have added a whole other vibe to the book. I got stuck on the story for a long time. I even spitballed ideas to friends, never coming up with a satisfying conclusion. I finally abandoned it, realizing the cartoony vibe probably didn't fit the book anyway, and feeling the message of self-acceptance would have been somewhat redundant. I may go back and finish this story someday, if the ending presents itself, but in all this time, that has yet to happen. I'm comfortable with my choice to leave it behind.

That brings us back to good ol', bad 'ol Reverend Philips. I thought it would be weird and cool to end the book with a play, rather than prose. I wanted to add a couple more scenes to the one-act, to flesh it out, to make it more about the full hypocrisy of Christian hate groups. I realized pretty quickly, however, that I could get deeper into it through a traditional prose narrative. I wanted to convey thoughts and feelings, beyond the dialogue and stage directions. This meant I would have to do an extensive rewrite of what I already had, which took more time. For the additional scenes, I pulled from the headlines. The aforementioned exhuming of children's bodies being the most gruesome. My main character here wasn't just guilty of hate speech. Unlike the real-world pastor who had inspired him, Aidan Philips was guilty of orchestrating lethal attacks on gay people.

This story openly steals from Dickens, then takes it to the next level. Instead of merely revisiting his past crimes under the guidance of his former protege, Reverend Philips is forced to live as the various types of people he has condemned in the name of Christ. He has to feel a battered wife's anguish as she fights off her husband and escapes with their child, he has to feel the deep and sacred truth of a gay couple falling in love, he has to feel the unconditional love in the hearts of an interracial family. He returns from this astral journey a changed man, with a new mission.

The final step in the coming out metaphor of The Great Debate, then, is that once we have identified our truth, once we have faced our fears and defeated them, once we have accepted and forgiven ourselves, learned to love ourselves, we must become proactive. We must unflinchingly guide and defend others as they make this same journey, whether they are facing discrimination for the same reasons we did or for some other, equally insane reason. We are all equal in value, as humans. The oppression of any  unjustly marginalized group, is the oppression of humanity itself. If we do not accept every opportunity to stand up for others, it means very little that we ever stood up for ourselves. The next, and final step, is to see ourselves in others and treat them no differently than we have treated ourselves.

I had wanted to publish this book in 2000, the year after Cry, Wolf, but it took a lot of time to fight through the first draft. Then I had to go and get ambitious, deciding it would be cool to have illustrations at the top of each chapter, since I already had one for "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep." It took a lot of extra time and money, but I'm glad I stuck with it. I've learned over the years that it is always best to follow a vision, even if it takes more work to realize it; even if it takes far more time than I had planned to spend with a project. My sister, who had already provided the Website art for "The Rainbow-Colored Sheep," did another black-and-white illustration for "Reverend Philips is Going to Hell." Molly Fine (then surnamed Brimer), did the illustrations for "Christian's Dilemma," and "Six Nights to Damnation." The "Six Nights" illustration caused us insane amounts of grief with the publisher. For some reason, grayscale was declared undoable. Molly had done a brilliant color graphic that looked terrible in solid black-and-white. She had actually done two, to give me a choice, but they both looked equally bad when stripped both of color and the subtitles of grays. She did another in white chalk on black paper that was gorgeous, only for the publisher to change their tune and say that grayscale was fine. This nightmare was the main reason I swore off using illustrations; a vow that would be undone when we got to the world of Metrognomes, but that's a story for the next blog.

The Great Debate was released, at last, on January 13, 2003 in hardback and trade paperback editions, followed by a release party at Lucky Dog Books on April 27. I dedicated the book to my friend Charlotte Deaton, the mother of one of my best friends from my teenage years. Charlotte had been there for me when I needed some extra courage, when I had to get my first HIV test, when I needed someone to hug after getting the word that the test had come back negative and I was in the clear. Facing such fears is what writing The Great Debate had been about for me. It seemed the perfect touch to dedicate it to such a friend, who had been there for me during its writing.

The publication of this anthology ended an anxiety-inducing drought that followed the third chapter of The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas. After publishing nothing in 2002, it was a Godzilla-sized relief to get this book behind me and finally have it out in the world, being read.

I tried to get iUniverse to release an e-book, when Kindle started making waves in the publishing world, but they told me that would require an entire new edition of the print versions, that I would have to finance. I went on to work on cutting out the middleman. Meanwhile, they eventually released an e-book of their own in 2011, without consulting me. I found this both irritating and amusing. I released my own revised edition of the book in 2012, in hardback, trade paperback, and Kindle e-book. For the e-book, I was finally able to present the two color illustrations in color. A pocket paperback was released in 2017.

The Great Debate remains one of my most widely read books, and it remains one of the closest to my heart. A forever reminder of where I was when I wrote it; a reminder of my responsibility to speak out and be brave for those who find themselves on a similar path.

Next: "Music of the Metrognomes" (2003)