I’m so damn proud of this novel.
Until now, I’ve been writing this blog in roughly chronological order, but I’m skipping over my seventh novel, Omegaball, to discuss my most recent release, Strong Bones. I’m prone to using a lot of folksy metaphors and turns of phrase, including many from the world of sports; one expression I think applies to this book: I left everything on the field.
Such as it is.
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I’ll talk more about Omegaball later, but suffice it to say it was a disappointing, destabilizing, and unmooring experience for me, one that remains forever tainted in my memory, despite some good work I did in that book. (Though to be clear, I think Omegaball’s mostly a failure.)
I also spent almost five years collaborating on an audio adaptation of The Odds. Make no mistake, it’s a wonderful piece of work, but it also absorbed most of my novel-writing energies for those years.
I also wrote a sequel to The Odds, The Remnants. I love that book, but it was one of the less remarkable compositional processes I’ve undertaken. I think it’s a fun book, with some really cool ideas, but I fell prey to some bad habits while working on it. We’ll talk about it another time.
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As silly and self-important as this sounds, Strong Bones marked a return to form for me in a few ways. First, it marked a return to the joy of novel-writing. And again, please let me stress that I had a blast working on the audio adaptation of The Odds, but at the same time, it was a collaborative process, and writing novels in solitude like a weird cave troll remains my happiest of happy places.
Strong Bones also marked a return to a certain level of joy in my craft, one that had mostly been erased by my experience with Omegaball as well as some other events that took place during those years. I spent almost seven years either not working on a novel, working on a novel that brought me a lot of heartache, or working on a novel that was simply too far removed from my inherent skill set.
I needed to get back to basics.
So I spent six years writing a sprawling horror-fantasy epic that’s longer than Moby-Dick.
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I ran across an old text file where I’d written the very first kernel of the idea—“kids scatter mother’s ashes in theme park ride,” followed later by a more robust logline:
Haunted Mansion Goonies idea: A group of “goonie”-like kids all embark on a quest to lay one of their dead parents to rest. One of their moms dies, and she said she’d wanted her ashes to be scattered in the legendarily scary haunted house in this great old amusement park in the Smokies.
These text files were timestamped in 2015. I wouldn’t complete the book until 2021. I wrote a great deal of it during the Covid lockdown, which I’m sure influenced the text in ways I’ve yet to fully grasp.
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One sandbox I’d always wanted to play in is Kids on Bikes. Let me explain:
I’d always wanted to write an homage to works like The Goonies, IT, Stand By Me, and The Monster Squad, among many others. There’s a role-playing game engine that gives this pseudogenre a wonderful name, “Kids on Bikes.”
https://www.huntersentertainment.com/kidsonbikesrpg
But it wasn’t until 2013 that a possible story emerged for me to write about: the death of my mom, Wanda Sue Bohon Peterson. I’ve always written about my family and formative years to some degree, but Strong Bones is easily the most autobiographical novel I’ve written, even though it involves magic maps and an enchanted theme park.
If The Island Circus books emanated from my angry twenties, and Magic Spiders was about my high school (and college) years, and The Odds was about the beginning of middle-age, Strong Bones was my first attempt to really write about my early childhood in the 80s. (The book slides into the 90s, but it’s very much an 80s retrowave story.)
I always knew I’d write about my early years sooner or later, and I suspected it’d be in the context of a “Kids on Bikes” story—but the structure of that story wouldn’t start to take shape until the aftermath of my mom’s death.
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My sister called me and, no kidding, led with “Are you sitting down?”
I called my girlfriend (now wife) to tell her, and then I drove out to a massive funeral home to sign some documentation required from her next of kin.
One major theme of this series is the sense of failure I feel looking back at my writing career. I always hoped I could help my mom more financially. I always thought some big success was right around the corner. I was always so proud to tell her about what I was up to, even as she grew more and more bitter and removed.
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This is random, but: In Los Angeles, there was a wonderful stand-up comedy event called “Comics and Comics.” Stand-ups would perform sets that focused on comics and pop-culture. Every show featured a poster that was a spoof of a famous comic-book cover. The show’s creator usually drew them, but I asked if I could draw one. The creator agreed.
Man, I worked my ass off on that art. I’m a decent cartoonist, not a great one, but I poured so much effort into it. I digitally colored it, integrating assets from the original cover—the first issue of Camelot 3000—along with my own art. The event took place at a famous comic book store, the now defunct Meltdown Comics in Hollywood.
My art was hanging on Sunset Boulevard. I was only able to get one copy of the poster—the creator kept the other one—and I sent it to my mom as a Christmas gift. That Christmas morning I called her to see if she’d received it. Here’s what she said:
“You didn’t sign it.”
Let me add some italics and ellipsis so you get a better idea of how she said this:
“You didn’t … sign … it.”
Imagine how that would sound through clenched teeth. Needless to say, I suddenly felt like garbage about one of the coolest things I ever did, all on Christmas Day. My mom could do that.
All moms can do that.
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I don’t think my mom was a mean person. She could be incredibly kind and super-cool. She came to just about every sporting event I participated in, and later, she always supported me and my attempts to pursue the arts.
But as she approached the end of her life, I think she succumbed to a lifelong depression she left untreated, and it made her incredibly brittle and harsh. She was always a little brittle and harsh, but it worsened in her twilight days.
She could be incredibly kind. She could be incredibly cruel.
Again, I wrote about all of this in Strong Bones.
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After she died, the rest of my family shouldered the work of putting her to rest, and to them, I’m grateful.
The one task I undertook was writing her obituary. My undergrad degree’s in journalism, and obits are one of the first things you study in J-school. I called upon those skills, such as they are, as I combed through my mom’s records. You can read it here:
https://www.timesfreepress.com/obituaries/2013/sep/22/wanda-peterson-87aa/
It’s standard stuff, but I added this line near the end:
Not since George Bailey vanished from Bedford Falls on a lonely winter night has the sudden absence of one person been felt so strong by so many.
I don’t expect that bit to make sense to anyone but me, but I liked it, so I included it. (My sister liked it too, calling it whimsical, as I recall.) As silly as it sounds, this line taps into the same center of my brain that houses my love of genre writing. As I wrote her obit, a simple question came to mind, What happened in Bedford Falls after Clarence transported George to the parallel reality where he’d never been alive?
As is suggested in the movie, I think everyone turned out looking for him. Word of his bad luck got grapevined, and the whole town suddenly and distinctly felt his absence. They’d look up from a book, or out a window and wonder what ol’ George was up to. Out into the streets they’d wander, knocking on neighbors’ doors and asking after him. Over time, their alarm would grow at his absence. No amount of searching would turn him up.
Over time, they’d give up, wondering what became of him—and noting the gulf he’d left in their lives.
After my mom died, I spoke with one of her best friends, who’d lost touch with her despite making every effort to remain friends. I suppose I was thinking of that best friend—and others like her—when I wrote the George Bailey line.
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Like most writers, the characters in my books are variations, shards, and/or combinations of myself and people from my life. I mean, that goes without saying. There’s no other way to conjure characters, though I’ve certainly invented some from cloth based on research and literature.
Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve commented on the … well, varying and unusual role manliness and masculinity have played in my life. In some settings and contexts, I come across as manly, while in others … well, I don’t. There’s a lot to unpack in that pronouncement, but rest assured, I speak from experience—and I love the way I come across. I once heard someone say I had a “gentleness” about me, and while I don’t think that’s always the case, I try to live up to that compliment. (One woman I dated described me as “manly but unthreatening,” and hey — words to live by!)
But I digress. A challenging part of growing up for me was this tension between—for lack of a better term—manliness and unmanliness, which manifested largely in how I butted heads with one of my older brothers. I wound up playing sports (terribly, I might add) for the better part of my high school career, only to get burned out by my sophomore year. I still ran cross-country the fall of my junior year before I decided to sit out sports that winter to help edit my school’s literary magazine. I’d perform in my first play that spring.
I still remember my brother intoning on a long car ride, “I just can’t imagine going a whole year without playing a varsity sport.” He eventually came around on my artistic side, but it felt strange to stop playing sports, although I emerged from high school with a lifelong commitment to fitness that’s unhappily overlapped with obsession and the attendant eating disorders. I brought those under control more than a decade ago, but their symptoms still flare up from time to time. (That’s a whole other essay.)
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This is all a long-winded way of saying that before college, I had a difficult time connecting with the men in my life. I didn’t have many—if any—male role models. My dad was MIA, I had contentious and complicated relationships with both my brothers, and a great many of the adults in my life weren’t worth a damn.
I know that’s harsh, and to be clear, I’m generalizing. It was complicated. I had good and bad days with my brothers, just like anyone. My sister and I got along better, but we had good and bad days, too.
That said, by and large, the men in my life seemed more dubious of me than the women, especially when I was a little kid. My neighborhood friends seemed to like me at first because I was goofy and funny and liked the same video games they did.
But when their dads met me? Oof. Different story. I have vivid memories of three different fathers all ranking me out or making fun of me to varying degrees, always in front of everyone else. (It’s worth noting that the moms were usually around for this nonsense and did nothing to stop it.) After those incidents, those childhood friends pretty much all vanished on me.
And that’s okay. I made better friends as I got older. I honestly think “making friends” is a skill you have to hone, and I’ve gotten better at it over the years.
Let me pause and acknowledge how brittle and thin-skinned I must sound to still be carrying these wounds after all these years. If you think that, then hey—I get it, but at the same time, these experiences compose us and, for better or worse, they write our interpersonal DNA. In my case, they left me mistrustful of a lot of the men in my life.
But on the flip side, I met some good men, too. Some of my teachers kept an eye out for me. A few went to bat for me. A few took me under their wing and coached me, taught me. Those men manifested in the characters of Justin Johnson and Holton Webb, both of whom I’m really proud of … even though I think I could’ve combined them into one person. I’m glad I didn’t, but I acknowledge that would’ve been a legitmate choice.
My mom manifested in a lot of characters in this book, including the “main” mom, Corrie Gresham, as well as Justin’s mom; in another supporting player named Shiela; and even in the book’s most kind-hearted mom, Sandra. I share this detail because as proud as I am of these characters, I think Corrie Gresham comes across as more unforgiving and cold than I might’ve intended. Even though the book’s entire fifth act is dedicated to her making amends—and me making amends with her—when I think of her character in a vacuum, I worry that it comes across as too harsh. My mom wasn’t only Corrie Gresham; she was a lot of people, and I only got to see the end of her story.
Robert J. Peterson, Author 