If all goes well, you are reading this. And sorry, it’s not important who you are. Just that you’re reading this. It will mean that after surviving and writing through 2025, I managed to put together something like a book. It will mean that I did the last lap, and crossed the finish line, however bedraggled. It will mean that I failed, inevitably, because I didn’t do the craftsman-like job of stepping back, looking at the job at hand and what I had to work with, and setting down an organized plan.
Oh, and then sticking to it.
I had two big advantages—I’m a man with a past. Not the dimly lit halls with the roaming men clad only in bath towels, though that certainly is true. But another past, certainly, since I really did have a grandmother, and she did remember—and write down—enough to hint at who we are, or might have been. I spent a lot of time in 2025 thinking about Henry Herrick—my ancestor who at 21 had to live in the hysteria of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. Worse, he had to go out and round up some of the women whom I had read about in English class, when we had to read The Crucible (or whatever the title of the Arthur Miller play was….) Even more painful would have been to watch his “charges” (or rather victims) spending all their day with their legs wrists and head brutally chained together. The women he arrested had to be sitting, probably in filthy straw on the floor in a medieval torture device. Let’s steal from Getty images, and see if they sue me…
Henry’s perfect, a gift on a platter. Any writer could squeeze juice out of Henry for days. Do a little research—for God’s sake. Call up the Herrick Family Society—or whatever it is—that safeguards and preserves the treasured legacy of our family and our brave and unfettered service to our country! When witches prowled the foul streets of Salem, polluting innocents’ minds, causing fits of demonic possession, sickening animals and destroying crops, unleashing plagues and violent storms….
When the devil prowled Salem in that dark decade before the 18th century…
When mothers had to stand by and watch their angelic children writhe in possession. The hate, the fury the demon unleashed in the reverent homes of the good people of Salem…
The dark forest-green of the forest….
Not the sanitized forest green of my book covers, but the forest green of evil Mother Nature herself. The forest green shelters the “Indians,” and Herrick knows perfectly well that they are not “native Americans” or “First Nation peoples” or Winnebago—Ho-Chunk. At the moment, without conversion, they are willing slaves of the devil. And if little David Thoreau is ever going to be able to hike out into the woods by that pond called Walden—well, sure, he could do it, in 1692.
But he’d last about a week.
The forest is evil, the Indians are evil, and we are—coincidentally—evil.
Save for the grace of our almighty Lord.
That’s why we gotta kill ‘em, see?
This was Christmas morning—this gift of an ancestor like this—but did little Marc bone up on the history, dig into his family ancestry, sort out properly who was who, and then engage in a calm exposition of the facts?
Did he deliver the goods for the reader?
I come from writers, but there is craft in writing—if it’s something other than a tweet.
Have I practiced that craft?
(…funny how much work those three little dots—technically called ‘points of ellipsis’—have to do before that word ‘funny’ that appeared 18 words ago at the start of the sentence (though really this is a fragment or more likely a run-on sentence,) since I have to tell you that my shoelaces are untied. I know this because after I wrote “did he deliver the goods” and “have I practiced that craft,” there was a strange silence in this always quiet room, and I had to look downward…
…you know…
…at my shoes.
Funny about that.
Couldn’t look at my laptop in the eye, or the screen.
Of course I didn’t do the work of “developing” Henry Herrick.
And I screwed up on the second gift under the tree, this time from the crazy Pickards—my rich uncles from the other side of the family. Did I do my homework on the guy who had lost his son in the Civil War, gone into enemy territory to retrieve him, brought him home to his Quacker wife?
That Quacker wife that had every virtue, damn her, but softness. I have two pictures of her, and I can see why my grandmother loved her grandmother. But I am a man, not an American-Victorian child. I know things my grandmother did not.
God bless them—the Christians produced a miracle in the 19th century by effortlessly building both the fierce abolitionists of the North and the savage slaveholders of the South with utterly glorious, crystalline, theological palaces. Palaces that could hold two utterly opposing points of view on the central moral issue of the 19th century.
For the South, it was something now called the “theological defense of slavery,” and it did have logic on its side. Slavery is Biblical, and it’s no big deal. The idea of individual freedom for everybody was unthinkable in Biblical times.
You know, like being gay in the 1950’s….
But Evangelical Christianity also brought us Wilberforce—the great British figure who spent 20 fighting to free the slaves who were harvesting the sugar on the next islands over. Every breath of his struggle was fueled by his Christian beliefs, and if he got the job done before anyone else (The British got rid of slavery in the 1840’s, the US in the 1860’s, and the Spanish still later), we have Jesus and his death on the cross to thank for it.
Anyway, any decent writer could have a field day with poor old Nicholas Coleman Pickard, but did I? Have I researched the Civil War, which is so monumental a deal that even Ken Burns couldn’t bear the idea of doing a documentary on it? True, it may be where angels fear to tread, but that’s my business, dammit. Find out what you could about the man, write a letter to the Historical Society of Lena, Illinois, who actually reached out to me.
A couple years ago…
Did I bother to follow up?
I’m an awful kid, the very worst of the worst, and it is Christmas morning and I have ruined the two glorious gifts of Henry Herrick and Nicholas Coleman Pickard. I have ruined them and abused them and neglected them and never once did I do the decent thing.
The reasonable thing.
Did I try to understand them? Get to know them? Learn at least something of their live and their times—so that I could deliver them unsullied to my harried readers.
Of course not. I made my great-great grandmother into a virago, and my great-great grandfather into a combination Hamlet / Sartre existential crisis-goer.
You know what a Hamlet / Sartre existential crisis-goer is, right?
I haven’t done my work, and the four-hundred bound-but uncovered manuscript that I am lugging around shows it. I have absolutely nothing to show for it except this, which I have been hauling around for days. This is the book that should have been a masterpiece—that couldn’t help but be a masterpiece.
Didn’t do his job, Little Marc.
Well here it is, and I am going to tackle it logically.
Manfully…
With Christian fortitude and a strength ever-growing in the goodness and grace of our Lord….
Today is 13 March 2026.
I will read everything I wrote in the month of January, 2025, next Monday, 16 March 2026.
I will read everything I wrote in February, 2025, on Tuesday, 17 March 2026.
In 12 days, I’ll be done with the damn thing.
I’ll get back to you.
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