The Final 50th Anniversary Post: Remembering the Kent State Shootings of May 4, 1970

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On this date in the year 2070, someone will be writing about how the Great Coronavirus Pandemic of fifty years earlier changed the world and why we are better off for it in some ways, worse off in others, and how mystifying it is that there are still those lingering issues that haven’t yet been settled. And, isn’t it about time we finished the job and stopped repeating history?

Anniversaries are important to make sure we ask those questions. It’s why, over the past two years, I’ve written posts about the anniversaries of so many events that shaped the world during the time frame of my novel The Fourteenth of September and still resonate today: the Bobby Kennedy Assassination, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Moratoriums to End the War in Vietnam: October 15, 1969 & November 15, 1969, the First Draft Lottery and the Kent State Shootings.

This will be the last anniversary post on the history behind my novel; the cycle is done. The story takes place roughly between the first Vietnam Draft Lottery and the Kent State Shootings, two seminal events that book-ended a six-month period wherein I’ve always felt the character of my generation was formed, including its early feminism. The novel ends shortly after Kent State when the country fired on its children, the turning point incident in support of the war when the country went too far and knew it.

 
 
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Fifty years sounds so long, but in many ways has gone by so fast. What we haven’t learned in that time frame is legion. Just this past December, the Washington Post published a report, “At War With The Truth,” about the war in Afghanistan, that sounded like the playbook for Vietnam: falsified data to show we were “winning,” admissions that the strategy wasn’t working, and the objective unclear. On the positive side, we learned to treat our vets with respect, to never have another draft, and we keep coming close to electing a woman president. Two steps back, one step forward, another we just can’t seem to get quite right.

We are still so in the thick of this pandemic that, yes, it’s difficult to focus on anything else. But it’s illustrative, on today’s anniversary, to consider how we might try to learn the lessons of how to be the admirable country we consider ourselves to be, the first—or the fifth—or the fiftieth—try instead of so often falling back into the hamster wheel of history.

A high school friend of my vintage found this recently among his late mother's things. He had no idea she'd been a protester."RIGHT ON, Mrs. Gustafson," It worked.

A high school friend of my vintage found this recently among his late mother's things. He had no idea she'd been a protester.

"RIGHT ON, Mrs. Gustafson," It worked.

Following is a post I wrote on this day two years ago, that includes the story of what happened at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, and why it still matters today. In rereading it, I see that we were only thirteen months into the new administration, dealing acutely with school shootings and already hearing about alternative facts and incredible re-interpretations of reality. I asked readers to look ahead and think about what would be on the conscience of the country on this fiftieth-anniversary date to which we should also be saying “No, that’s not who we are.”

The issues have changed, but not the question. How we’re dealing with acceptable percentages of pandemic deaths and knee-jerk 180 turns in policy that impact lives and livelihoods. I ask again. Haven’t we learned how to be better than this. Are we ready again to stop and say, “No, that’s not who we are?”

 
 
 
 
The Iconic Kent State Photo

The Iconic Kent State Photo

Recently, while promoting the fall publication of my novel, The Fourteenth of September, which takes place during the pivotal 1969-1970 years of the Vietnam War, I was asked if—of the many iconic moments in American history that happened during that time period— one had impacted me more than any other.

I paused to consider the word iconic... icon — a symbol. No question. It was the Kent State Massacre, a symbol at the time of the total chasm between the government and the youth it was supposed to be protecting: the bridge too far that blew away most of the remaining support for the war, though it’s death throes dragged on another five years. 

 

48 Years and We Still Remember

Every May fourth since 1970 there has been media coverage of the shootings, always featuring the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio with arms outstretched in agony and disbelief, kneeling above the body of twenty-year-old Jeffrey Miller. An iconic image of how we felt. Agony and disbelief. This is America? How had it come to this?

We know the facts: The National Guard fired into a crowd of students protesting the war’s expansion into Cambodia. Sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds killing four, wounding nine, permanently paralyzing one. The massive national student strike after. A turning point in how the country viewed the war. It was just too much to kill kids. 

 

Early Alternative Facts

It all began with a lie—and it was bald-faced. Nixon was elected because he said he'd end the war—something his predecessor, Johnson, hadn't been able to do. His Administration said we were winding down. Hard as it may be to believe from the vantage point of today, media was limited. We only heard one side and assumed what we were told was true—though obviously that was disavowed later on many levels, most recently in the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War.

But, suddenly, on April 30, 1970, it's announced we just bombed Cambodia. It was earth-shattering. The war was being accelerated, not contained. Of course, there were protests; of course, they were full of anger; of course, those protests would be on a campus where the populations of draft-age men were among the largest. We had just been through the roulette of the Draft Lottery and the news about My Lai. Nerves were raw, the rage was high.  Above all, trust was waning, and this Cambodia lie just wiped it out. How could we believe anything the government told us ever again?

And then, to top it off, unbelievably, students were shot dead at one of those protests. It was the very definition of a word we were just beginning to use to describe what we thought were mind-expanding experiences: surreal. 

 
The Memorial to Jeffrey Miller, Bordering Where He Fell, on the Kent State Campus

The Memorial to Jeffrey Miller, Bordering Where He Fell, on the Kent State Campus

Where Were You When You Heard?

I think many people of my generation can tell you where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about Kent State, just like all the assassinations that punctuated that time—King, the two Kennedys. I remember walking into the Student Union with a few others and being shocked to hear my friend, Tommy Aubry, screaming from the top of the stairs, “They’re Shooting Us! They’re Shooting Us!” We didn’t know what he was talking about. He pointed to the only television set in the Union and ran past us to shout the news to others.

We didn’t believe it at first. Who would? They must have shot over their heads. It had to be an accident. Surely no one was actually dead. It was too fantastic to comprehend... until we had to. The truth of it was horrible. It wasn’t enough that we could be sent to Vietnam to die; we could die here.

 

They Could Shoot Us, Too!

I came across a quote by the survivor, Gerald Casale, that summed up a student’s point of view. “It completely and utterly changed my life. I was a white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of people I knew...”

Abraham and Isaac Sculpture in Commemoration of the KENT STATE Shootings, at Princeton University

Abraham and Isaac Sculpture in Commemoration of the KENT STATE Shootings, at Princeton University

In an era of embryonic diversity awareness, it was astounding that supposedly the most cherished of us all were now being killed just outside a quiet Midwestern town. Anything could happen next. Casale founded the band Devo, creating music and a movement as a result of his experience.

I have a chapter in my book you can read here that’s based on what happened at the campus I was on. It was not something I had to research. I still remember every second.

Within days after the shootings, the National Guard actually did arrive on my campus, and we thought we were also going to be killed—another chapter, another iconic situation. We were still teenagers and most of us had been pretty sheltered, but now we understood what it must be like for those fighting for civil rights in the south, for anyone living day in and day out in any country at war. It was a sobering lesson. We were truly in what we called "the war at home."

According to the final report on the Kent State Massacre by the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest: “It was unnecessary, unwarranted, inexcusable”—an iconic symbol of the war that caused it.

 

A Coming of Conscience Moment. America Said No!

The subtitle of my novel is “A Coming of Conscience,” because it was a time when we weren’t just growing up and Coming of Age. In addition—by the way we chose or were forced to cope with the situations presented by the Vietnam War—we were each defining our own character. We were each faced with decisions where integrity could—or should—trump consequences (pun intended). Would I go to Vietnam or to Canada?  If I join ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) am I being realistic or complicit? If I put my head in the sand and try to ignore it all am I being apathetic, cowardly or just understandably self-preserving?

We’re in a period now where we’re questioning our leadership and taking our positions on matters to the streets in massive marches. It’s our right and our privilege, and they don't fire on us—we feel safe. One reason is that on May 4, 1970, the country looked aghast at the bodies of those dead children and decided that this was not who we were. This was not our character. It was a coming-of-conscience moment for the country.

It all reminds me of watching Apocalypse Now, a brilliant film that I admired greatly but could never see a second time. Viewing it made me feel I’d personally been through the war. It told the Heart-of-Darkness story of Colonel Kurtz, who embodied "the horror," as he put it, of how we would actually have to behave to win such a war. In the movie, the government has sent an assassin to eliminate him, because as a people we couldn’t accept that Krutz is what we’d have to become to do what Washington considered so essential—continue as the country that had never lost a war.

With Kent State, the horror rang through every level of America. Is this what it’s come to? We answered, “No.”

 May 4, 2020, will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the massacre. Over the coming years, let’s remember and honor what happened at Kent State. And, in this current moment of dubious facts, incredible re-interpretations of truth and Never Again, let’s think of what else is on the conscience of the country to which we should also be saying, “No, that’s not who we are.”

 
 
 

October 15, 1969: The Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. A Pause for Reflection in a Polarized America.

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The anniversaries of seminal events that rocked our world fifty years ago are coming hot and heavy this fall. Today, we remember a time when we tried a reasoned strategy to attempt to deal with a generation-defining issue in a country as divided then as we are now.

TIME Magazine Cover: Vietnam Moratorium — Oct. 17, 1969

TIME Magazine Cover: Vietnam Moratorium — Oct. 17, 1969

By the time of the Moratorium, America had been involved in Vietnam, in one way or another, for nearly ten years. Any initial objectives for the war were long gone, the domino theory relegated back to the game it was named after, the war’s progress descended into body counts, the goal now so incrementally small that there was no big picture left or possible. Our defense secretary was telling us that if we killed more Vietnamese than they killed Americans, it was a good week. Period. The Killed in Action Numbers came out on Thursdays.

It was pretty universally agreed that the war was a disaster. What wasn’t agreed upon was what we were going to do about it. Half the country felt we should stay in Vietnam until we “won,” because America had never lost a war. The other half felt that we should cut our losses and get out—those losses being so obvious in the form of body bags containing young adults (many just teenagers) we were seeing each night for the first time on television, on the nightly news, just before dinner, when the numbers of killed and wounded on both sides were announced with a chart, like sports scores. No one could not know—or pretend not to know—what was going on.

On October 15, 1969, America was stuck in an existential dilemma. Who were we if we stayed in Vietnam? What were we if we left? Lines were drawn at the dinner table; people couldn’t talk to their own relatives; friendships were made or lost depending upon which side of the argument you were on. The country was at a loud and strident impasse—no one was budging. And the policies of our new president, Richard Nixon, despite campaign promises, were alarmingly close to those of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, who’d abdicated the presidency because he couldn’t figure it out.

One Day in October, Two Days in November, Three Days in December. . . A Strategy That Should Have Worked

THE NORTHERN STAR, NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1969

THE NORTHERN STAR, NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER 1969

A moratorium is defined as a delay, a postponement, to give time for reflection. The plan for the Moratorium that October was to apply this concept to ensure the country didn’t stumble blindly ahead in a direction that might be wrong. It was to be peaceful: to put the war on pause, while we reflected about how we had arrived at this point. How did the war begin? What were we trying to do? How could we bring it to an end? The theme was grief, sorrow, and solidarity, rather than anger and rage. It was important to demonstrate that a war protest didn’t have to be violent and destructive like the one at the Democratic Convention. Instead, the tent was wide and had room for anyone with doubts about the war and the direction of the country, knowing this cut across all segments of age, race, and economic status. The concept was to build a groundswell—to engage the widest representation of all groups and factions. You didn’t need to be a radical to be against the war. Your desire to end a war that had lost its way was the common thread.

And it worked—huge groups gathered in Washington (250,000), and cities across the country. The idea was to expand it month by month, to increase participation and demonstrate the widespread support across all subsets in the country—civil rights organizations, churches, business groups, universities, unions—to end this war that affected everyone. After all, who didn’t have a connection: a child, a boyfriend, a student, a brother, a cousin—some family, some connection, anywhere. A war experience enters the DNA of a country, our DNA. Our lack of power over its escalation gripped us all: it was time to build our side of the argument. What were Communist dominoes and saving the world for democracy, versus the loss of actual lives? Did we need new ways of looking at conflicts—of considering more carefully how we got into them, and the points at which we needed to get out? Just what were the ethics of unwinnable wars?

Students Went on Strike

The way this played out on college campuses—which represented the largest concentration of draft-age men—was in the form of “strikes.” Students were encouraged to skip classes and attend informal education sessions about the roots of the war, the options for protest, how they could regain power over their lives. Since Vietnam had been around through most of the students’ childhoods, they had grown up with it, and now were in it, without really understanding how the country had ended up where it was. It was time to revisit the Gulf of Tonkin, the French involvement, the anti-communist fear that ensnared John F. Kennedy. Or, to learn about them for the first time.

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Ken Burns traces all this beautifully in his PBS series The Vietnam War, but back on October 15, 1969, no one was piecing it together, talking about what it all meant, what was really at stake, perhaps, versus what had previously been wagered in other wars. We needed new comparators.

Teachers were encouraged to suspend their syllabus of the day and discuss the war with students. The chemistry teachers balked, but the history and political science professors were in heaven. Students came, the straight (in the old definition of representing the norm) and the freaks. People were talking. Check out the excerpt from The Fourteenth of September that takes place on that date, and you’ll see that it was an opportunity for people to talk about what they felt, to finally ask their questions, to face their fears, to begin to understand rather than just react.

Time magazine said the Moratorium had brought “new respectability and popularity” to the antiwar movement.

The Aftermath

The Moratorium was a huge pearl in the string of events that eventually led to the demise of this long national ordeal, that would take until 1975—six more years—to conclude. Though the administration retaliated with Nixon publicly stating that “under no circumstances will I be affected,” he was. The event led to Vice President Spiro Agnew’s infamous speech when he called anyone against the war “effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals” (which would have made an exquisite tweet in today’s world). Significantly, it also resulted in Nixon’s defining “silent majority” address, asking for the support of what he assumed was the vast heretofore quiet bulk of Americans for his Vietnam policy—that we had to stay and win. Peace with Honor, he called it. He conceded the point that South Vietnam wasn’t important, the real issue was that America would lose face. This was startling. From then on, the country knew what it was in for, what side he was on. And each of us had to decide what was more important—an escalating number of soldiers killed with no objective or end in sight, or maintenance of a perfect victory record?  As a young person with your life or that of your friends on the line, you had to wonder if it was worth it when some old guy said it would hit us in our pride. We did not think this was a compelling case for the carnage, not a decade into this war, with a possible additional decade ahead.

Conversations were stirred up, assumptions were being challenged. It was a brief illuminating moment. We learned a lot. It was a start.

Power to the People

We all looked forward to the next phase of the Moratorium on November 15, 1969, which was to be the biggest March on Washington ever. We were empowered and activated to change the world. It felt so good, finally, to think that we could be heard. Illusions about this would be shattered as events progressed rapidly through the end of 1969/1970, but it’s instructive to remember that there are moments when progress did happen, and that it takes so painfully long. We paid a price for not listening to each other back then.

March at night to the White House, led by Coretta Scott King, part of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

March at night to the White House, led by Coretta Scott King, part of the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

It makes you wonder if we need a Moratorium today—a time for reflection, to really think about the character of the country. Who are we if we continue on our current path? What are we if we choose another, hopefully better, one? We lose all when we stonewall and stop talking to each other. Perhaps our Moratorium is the impeachment process? It could be. Let’s be open. The sin of what happened fifty years ago was that we took so long to do what was inevitable in ending the war. The horrible price was in loss of life and damage to our national integrity. Our DNA is still frayed. There are echoes of what is at risk at present today in our country. There is a war going for our integrity. But there could be hope.

 Like Judy in The Fourteenth of September who went through a Coming of Conscience journey to a decision where integrity trumped consequences, there are a lot of people today who are or who need to make a similar Coming of Conscience decision. Whether you agree with them or not, you have to admire their willingness to risk personal consequences for doing the right thing. We need so many more of them. The country awaits how this current Coming of Conscience moment will resolve—not just how it will be written about in the history books, but how will happen right now.

We can still change the world. . . if we listen.

All power to the people.

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Audiobook of "The Fourteenth of September" Now Available: Leave the Reading to Us

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Now that I have your attention, I will fess up that the novel has been available as an audiobook via Amazon since the book launch back in September of 2018. However, since I didn’t do any specific promotion on the format, it has just been sitting around, quietly, with modest purchases by experienced audiobook fans who knew how to find it. It’s time I gave it some love.

The Casting Cloud

The audiobook deserves its solo spotlight, given all the time and attention that went into producing it, but also because its development challenged me as an author in ways I’d never expected.

Right off the bat, the process of choosing a narrator sounded like great fun, but in practice it was unnerving. I can see why authors so often hate the films that are made of their novels. As a writer, you spend years picturing and “hearing” specific faces and voices in your head, and it’s very hard to envision, if you will, a stand-in. Very. 

Though I was asked many times to narrate the The Fourteenth of September myself, I felt it needed a voice for my nineteen-year-old main character, Judy, that sounded the right age. The casting process for identifying potential narrators was exceptionally efficient. Over sixty professionals sent audition tapes based upon an excerpt I had provided. Just pick one, easy-peasy, right?

Hardly. I did have the foresight to hire an experienced producer to help me with the project—primarily because I was totally focused on the all-consuming production and promotion of the paperback and e-book. We both thought it would be a piece of cake. Not so much.

Thankfully, my producer winnowed the audition tapes down to a dozen for me to review to make it an easy afternoon project. Instead, it was... just... too much. All those voices—all good, all young, all saying the same thing, all sounding so... SIMILAR, but not at all like Judy. I felt instead that I was listening in on a gaggle of her friends at the Tune Room, the site of so much of the story’s action. I finally had to do what I’d been hoping to avoid—listen carefully to each audition over and over, trying to pick the voice I thought I’d want to listen to for hours on tape, but actually found myself looking for reasons to eliminate, so the last person standing (or in this case, talking) would be the obvious choice. It was a bit like shifting through great candidate resumes back in the day but with higher stakes for me and my story. I finally got it down to three, and the producer and I compared our choices and picked a final voice. Whew! I was ready to turn the nuts and bolts over to my producer to get back to the world of words on paper. But no such luck.

Nailing the Voices

Before I could walk away, the producer sent me the recording of the first two chapters, where each of the large cast of characters appeared at least once, to ensure the narrator had the voices correct. I was appalled. None of the voices matched the characters in my head. And all of them—male and female—had two things in common. They were PERKY, and the inflection of every sentence went up at the end. To borrow the vernacular, we SO didn’t talk like that back in 1969. We were happy or sad, sarcastic or whiney, enamored of the curse-word vocabulary we were trying out like truck drivers now that we had left home, but we weren’t full of endless pep every minute. We were never, ever PERKY. And, not being interrogative-loving French, we preferred to swallow the end of our sentences and let the words descend into unintelligible mumblings that our elders would struggle to understand perhaps, but we would never go UP. After all, that implied asking permission, and in Judy’s era we were more likely to be trying to disappear, be sullen, or have POWER. Oh, the Valley Girl of it all. I considered removing the word like from anywhere in my manuscript. It wasn’t there much, but somehow, after listening to the narrator, it sounded as if it were. I can fix this, I thought.

Author as Actor... Not

After years making business presentations, I told the producer I would settle this quickly. I recorded my own voice reading my own first two chapters, filled with my own intended tone and inflection, so easy then for the narrator to imitate, right? I was sure I’d be great. I’d once harbored an inclination toward the stage. The narrator would probably be in awe, and I needed to be prepared to keep her dauber up by reassuring her that she could do it, perhaps not as well, but she’d be fine.

Again, a surprise. I virtually slapped myself in the face. First of all, it was exhausting. Forget the character voices: I could hardly manage to keep the energy of my voice up let alone on inflection pitch for twenty pages in one sitting. And I... there is no more politic word to use... sucked. As the narrator might put it, “I am SO not an actress, ya know?” I couldn’t listen to myself, and above all, I DIDN’T SOUND LIKE JUDY. It was so hard to wrap my head around that. A few decades on or not, I deep down inside guess I thought the words in my mind would come out the way I heard them, sounding like Judy, and Wizard, and Vida, and David, and all my other characters. It wasn’t age, it was... like listening to your voice on the telephone. It wasn’t me and it wasn’t Judy. Instead I sounded vaguely like a more nasal version of my sister and the guys sounded like cheery kids, not the voices I needed to communicate the sarcastic bravado in the face of fear that ruled the story’s Draft Lottery time frame.

I feared what the narrator would think when she listened to my version; suddenly I felt that I was the one auditioning. “You call this acting?” I could hear her complain. “Don’t give it to her,” I said to my producer in a middle-of-the-night, follow-up email. Too late. “It did confuse her,” the producer admitted. “I think her narration is fine,” she added after a long, diplomatic pause, asking how I wanted to proceed. Someone needed to listen to the narration chapter by chapter as it was recorded, to be sure it was accurate, words weren’t dropped, etc. “It was critical,” she said.

I humbly told the producer to take me out of the loop and just run with the project. Like Puff, this little dragon sadly slipped into her cave, realizing that there was a reason I had chosen the boardroom over the stage in my earlier career.

In the end, I came to see why movie directors ban authors from the set. We are pathetic, not capable of suspending our belief. We are in love with the vision we put in words, yes, but also the one in the netherworld between the words we write with our inside voice and how they are delivered out to the world. Mere mortal actors/narrators who cannot hear inside our minds will never rise to this impossible-to-articulate ideal. And in fact, once I was out of it, things proceeded just fine; as pointed out by my producer, the narrator may not be “me,” but she is Judy. And isn’t that the point? I was a bit taken aback—after all, there would be no Judy without me—but of course she was correct.

 
Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook.
 
A message from Marissa DuBois, audiobook narrator.

At this point audible Judy is doing pretty well. See listener reviews on Audible and Goodreads, and listen to the excerpt. And also hear the narrator, Marissa DuBois, talk about her excitement for the project in this interview. Then, check out the audiobook yourself, which is available on Amazon on the same page as the other formats for The Fourteenth of September. One tip, be sure to turn up the speed when you listen, Judy has a lot to say... she needs to talk fast.

Audio Is Cooler Than You Think

My first audiobook was my own novel and that helped me catch the bug for my long, fair-weather walks along Lake Michigan and car rides. The more you use it, the more you think about where to use it. My trainer listens to audiobooks while she cleans her apartment, an idea I can absolutely get my head around. I’ve begun to inventory life activities that don’t require paying attention.

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Above all, to my friends and family who tell me they support my story but just aren’t “readers,” or who only read nonfiction: Please try The Fourteenth of September on audiobook, and Judy’s voice will make it all go down in an exciting way. Let me know what you think... and about new creative ways to listen. I personally, for example, think my brother should read it during those endless hours of home repair and tinkering in the garage. I mean, he’s already on engineering-genius autopilot—he can listen to a story at the same time, right?

Time flies when someone’s telling you a story.  For me, the audiobook experience is like Mrs. Sellen, my first-grade teacher, reading us Dr. Seuss’s The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. Its like a personal movie. They talk and you imagine. You know, just like a book. Hands free. Enjoy!

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Torn Between Two Lovers: A Tragicomic Tale of Second-Novel Rivalry 💔

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My first love, a thirteen-year affair, caused a lot of emotion over its long life—excitement, rage, fear, euphoria, satisfaction, frustration. It was both thrilling and exasperating and, truth be told, there were a few breakups, one I thought would be irrevocable. Friends were concerned we wouldn’t make it, calling it my phantom novel. But we went the distance and finally celebrated going public nine months ago. Since then it’s been a party, all champagne and celebration. A victory lap full of hard work, yes, but mostly pure joy.

One of the names I call the object of my affection is The Fourteenth of September. When I’m in a rush, I use its pet name, “A Woman’s Story of Vietnam,” sometimes just a short but sweet “Set in ’69.” We’ve had our moments. Never will a relationship be so volatile, meaningful, or memorable, and it will always be with me.

But I’m ready, as they say, to move on. It’s me, not it. No fault, harm, or foul. It’s just time.

I confess I’ve been flirting for about a year with a tall, dark, and handsome story with a foreign accent—about expats in San Miguel de Allende searching for their last dream. I admit I love rolling my tongue around its working title, “La Querencia,” and intriguing the curious with its definition: “The place in the ring where the bull feels safe.” The intrigue. I want to dance! In March, we slipped away together for a delicious month at the Ragdale Artist’s Retreat where we fantasized about our future in a ninety-page plot plan. It’s fresh, it’s sexy. It could work. But we have to commit.

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And yet, The Fourteenth of September won’t let me go. And part of me—and I confess this is a surprise—doesn’t want it to. It’s done well for a debut novel by an unknown, already in a second printing, in fact. But it’s so needy. So many months since launch and it still takes up 75 percent of my time. My juicy next novel beckons, and if I pause for even a moment to look over my shoulder and give it an encouraging wink, promising I’ll come soon, sales of the first just stop. It’s fond of these foot-stomping tantrums for attention. I will not be ignored, Rita!

I admit, sometimes I rather like the rivalry, if I can say that out loud—as I type this and have just moved the stacks of San Miguel research out of view. Each week I have opportunities to talk about the attractions of Lover #1, now fully wrestled to the ground and lovely. We’ve been through so much. I enjoy telling the tale: how my personal experiences became integrated into the story of an important historical time, the characters I both offed and paired off, the “soundtrack” I peppered throughout the action, the journey I renamed from “coming of age” to “coming of conscience.” It may be rough around a few edges, but it was my first love, a dream come true, and I relish sharing it. It still has a long runway, with the 50th anniversary of so many of the events it recounts upon us. And I owe it. I’m a different writer than before we met: better, wiser. Without it, what would I be? I don’t think I can give it up yet.

It’s just not a good time, I keep telling Lover #2, but realistically how long can I ask it to wait? The thought of it is so wonderful when I’m dreaming of how the plot will spin, but exhausting when I buckle down into the daylight of bringing it to life. I remember how much #1 took out of me, and my knees start to wobble. I sweat. Give me at least half your time, #2 demands, or I’m outta here. And, in fact, the details of some of the squishy parts of the plot plan have come to seem insurmountable. We’re no longer dancing. I already miss our early days: the spark, the promise. The certainty that this affair would be so much better, so much smoother, so much more. . . efficient.

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I’m at a crossroads. My publicist sends intoxicating Friday afternoon emails about major media that have requested review copies of #1, potential placements that are targeted for as long away as December, as far into the future as next spring. How long can I sustain this affair, I wonder? At the same time, book club members and other readers clamor for news of an arrival date for #2, when I’m not even sure how serious we are. My hairdresser tears up when I tell her about the bullring. Can I balance both? Must I walk away from one of them, shutting the door, drawing the line, refusing to answer the plot dreams that visit nightly about #2, or coldly let those unsold copies of #1 sit spurned in storage.

I need couples therapy. To sit them both down and duke it out. Who gets visitation on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and who gets the long, productive weekend mornings? The need for discipline and organization blasts at me through a subconscious voice of authority as I lie on the couch. “I know, I know,” I answer, as it regales me with stories of the unwavering work habits of Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton. 

I am weak. I am fickle.  I simply cannot live without them both, for now. A remedy will present itself, a favorite will emerge, I’m certain.

Well, isn’t it pretty to think so?

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