This was kind of fun. I can affirm that my story, and my one-liner, are absolutely true. I told this anecdote long ago, on a two-person panel with Terry Pratchett, where we expected to be funny about the writing business. We set out to ‘one-down’ each other with publishing screw-ups. This one triumphed. Always good to make a gifted humourist laugh!

Some writers noted that they hug their books, or do a happy dance. My primal moment comes when I write the last words of a book, and there’s another, of sorts, when I have a printed manuscript and do the ‘it goes thump when you drop it on a table!’ thing.

(No, have not tried that with an iPad or Kindle.)

 http://sf-fantasy.suvudu.com/2013/02/when-writers-meet-their-debut-books.html

I posted the full wrap of the Canadian (and essentially the American) cover of River of Stars this week, and people have been saying really nice things in various places. They’ve been saying that for awhile, since the front cover was posted some time back.

That, of course, is a compliment not to me, but to the artist and the art director. The art director, in fact, is a too-often-overlooked player in all this. A cover can be made or broken by their creativity. Not just in typeface and design, but in commissioning the right artist, and making the right use of the work delivered. (Sometimes only a detail of a painting is used, for example.)

We say two contradictory things on this subject. We say ‘don’t judge a book by…’ but we also say ‘I bought this book because I loved the cover.’ Even if we don’t verbalize it that way, research suggests that cover art plays a major role in book sales – even with online buying.

Given that this Journal is built aorund the idea of sharing info about the book world, I should say that one of the most often asked questions I get (and I suspect this is true of most writers) is, ‘How much input do you have in the covers?’

The predictable answer is: it varies. Some authors, like my friend Janny Wurts, are also painters and they will often do their own covers. (Janny also plays bagpipes, but we won’t go there.) Self-published writers will often be their own art directors, for better or worse. (Sometimes they can afford to hire someone.) Younger writers, working with an established house will rarely get too much in the way of consultation. (I used to warn younger friends that consultation means they have to ask your opinion before ignoring it.)

Once you get to a certain level, real consultation is more common but even then it is fraught and authors can get intensely frustrated. (So can publishers, to be fair.) It doesn’t help much to be ‘consulted’ if one’s first glimpse of a proposed cover comes so late in the production process the artist has no time to revise, let alone start again, or he or she wants more money to keep going. (This isn’t unreasonable, in many cases, by the way.)

I always ask (read: beg) to see cover ideas early in the process. With many of my editors by now I have really good working relationships and I have conversations with them before anything is even put together (before anyone else in the house has seen the manuscript). The editor is almost always the one who briefs the art director. ‘I see a 19th century British country house. Therevare stairs going up and down. There are pink zombies with ak47s, and pre-Raphaelite women and …’ (I just disturbed myself, actually.)

When it comes to foreign-language editions, most contracts (once you are reasonably senior) will provide for consultation as well, but communication and timeliness are even more of an issue, and there have been a few times when the first look I have had of a book is when actual copies arrive at my agents’. This doesn’t necessarily go well. A glance at the Art Gallery at brightweavings.com will reveal (expose?) a few of my … well, less-loved cover children.

On the other hand, I have been really lucky in my cover art here and in the States for the last several books and I love Larry Rostant’s cover for River of Stars. The editors wanted ‘big book’ as part of the underlying message, and I think they got that.

Subsequent editions (trade paperback, paperback) are likely to have very different covers, incidentally. That’s another post. But the mandates for initial hardcover and for reprints in paperback are very different. Paperbacks are still, for strictly economic reasons, much more of an impulse buy, and the covers try to take that into account.

I’ve just been told actual books will be in the warehouses first week in March. I will use ‘tangible’ here. (In-joke, from the Journal for Under Heaven.)

I did promise there might be a bit of news on Monday. And I’m able to announce, as it is online now.

This isn’t anything major, but it pleases me for a few reasons. Each February in Toronto the Book Lover’s Ball takes place. It is a black tie gala fundraiser for the Toronto Public Library system. There are 50 (very expensive) tables, mostly corporate commitments, and 50 authors (mostly not incorporated!) attend, one at each table. They do a red carpet, take classy photos (sometimes not so classy, the Toronto Star last year decided to be playful with lenses), auction items for a very good cause. It is an evening I’m always happy to be a part of.

The main BLB webpage is here:

http://www.bookloversball.ca

Each year they also offer entertainment inspired by 5 or 6 books by authors attending. This year they picked River of Stars as one of these.

http://www.bookloversball.ca/entertainment.html

That’s nice in itself, but then something even better happened. There’s a backstory.

When I was researching Under Heaven I came across a refernce to a historical change in the way the pipa was played (it is often called the Chinese lute here). I love bits of information like this. Some may recall a scene in Sailing to Sarantium where there is an argument about the best way to lay down a ‘setting bed’ for mosaic tesserae, the traditional one or something new. That was exactly the same thing, for me. A chance to do something with character and, er, setting by way of the debate and transition.

So in my slightly crazed fashion I started trying to find experts in the pipa who might tell me something about this. I came across the website of a performer named Liu Fang, Chinese-born and trained, living in Montreal, recording widely, hugely admired, and performing around the world.

I wrote her (of course) and she wrote me back a lovely email full of interesting information. We kept in touch. She and her husband/manager, Risheng, both read Under Heaven when it came out and were wonderfully enthusiastic about it. I bought her music (she sent me other CDs), we attended a concert of hers here in Toronto and met them both.

Long story shorter, I dropped her a note when the BLB people indicated they wanted to do ‘something’ this year with River of Stars. Usually Fang is in Europe in winter, and she will be by late February. But she’s in Canada before that, and said she’d be delighted to be part of the gala fundraiser and to be connected to River of Stars. I put the BLB showrunners in touch with them, everyone clicked and coordinated, and on February 7th, Liu Fang will be coming into Toronto to perform a solo pipa number at the Book Lover’s Ball in honour of River of Stars.

I couldn’t be happier about all this. She an exquisite performer, a truly classy person, and the number she’s chosen is just perfect for evoking the book. None opf this counts as ‘major news’ but sometimes the book world gives you connections and moments that feel just right, seriously cool, and this looks to be one of them. We’re hoping to be able to get a recording that night, to share.

Her website is here. Listen to what she can do on the pipa and the guzheng. There’s a video of a concert she gave in St Petersburg recently, too.

http://www.liufangmusic.net/English/

The title is a riff on a poem by Wallace Stevens. (I had lunch last week with the woman translating him into Chinese, which was pretty cool.)

My very clever UK agent, Jonny Geller, tweeted today about starting a fee-for-service business of chasing authors off Twitter and back to work, said he’d do it for other agents, and charge them. We shared an email and a laugh about it. (I lost some time yesterday to a much-too-much-fun volley of puns about wine, after finding a Slate magazine piece describing someone with a glass of wine in hand ‘pouring over a map of Game of Thrones‘ instead of ‘poring’. Ouch! I said the map would have more ‘clarety’ after that. Ouch, encore.)

Every generation has its sins in the eyes of the older generation. Sinatra then Elvis, then the Beratles (not to mention the bad boy Rolling Stones) led straight to sex. Movies, D&D, computer games, texting on smart phones … Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. All pernicious distractions from right thinking and diligent work. (We are not discussing fantasy baseball here. Don’t go there! Though I will note that my league is called Stan the Man, and the great, great Musial died last week and is being quite properly mourned. Class act.)

By the way, I do not deny that technology can and does change us and how we relate to and function with each other. My go-to book on this, one I urge on everyone, is Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together, where the Gershwin title says so much about us today.

I did a radio interview a year or two ago with the great Shelagh Rogers and another author, promoting a fundraising book for PEN Canada in which we both had essays. We were discussing the ‘online’ question, as it applied to writers. He lamented the disappearance of the ‘sacred space’ for creativity, due to the seductions of the Internet. I don’t use language that mystical, but I agreed completely that the difference between today and the days when a writer avoiding work would wander down to the cafe or bar is that today our work space is identical to our play space. And I added something else: despite my own agent’s teasing, most publishers and agents want their authors promoting themselves all over social media (we’ve been discussing that here).

I’m not as sublimely sure as Elena Ferrante (see last post) that quality will always emerge, whether in a few years or posthumously. I think our sped-up culture can very very easily cause something to be lost. I dislike it. I don’t like the extreme convergence of author and work, but I do see it as a core element of today’s book world. So I allowed myself to be lured on to Twitter by the tandem Sirens of Penguin (they even have Penguin Canada’s publisher out there now, though her corporate role will make it hard for her to be funny and casual). And I also find myself laughing a lot at the back and forths, over and above steering people to things I find interesting – or disturbing.

It is easier for me to hang out in this way right now as I am in the very first ‘incubation’ stages of sorting what might be a next book. One reason I am slow is that I always feel the need to let the last book fade before starting to properly address a next one. I don’t want language and themes to ‘bleed’ from one to another (I don’t mind if that overlap of themes happens because it feels interesting). And so this is the ‘marketing stage’ and that process has changed a lot … which is something I’m trying to share here.

Received the first two sets of email interview questions for pieces that will appear online on two websites. The publicity teams will sort out timing. I am also trying to figure something out, maybe people here have thoughts. I did a very enjoyable AMA on Reddit last year, typing as fast as I could to reply to funny/smart questions. We’ll do another this spring. Here’s the dilemma, and it was the author Brandon Sanderson who posted something and started me thinking about this.

Should we do it just as the book comes out and make it a wide open, general discussion, or wait a few weeks for epople to buy and read River of Stars and set up (as Sanderosn says he’ll do) a Spoiler Zone AMA where anyone there that night (or reading the transcript after) is on notice that questions will be about the new book?

One complication: predictably, I dislike over-explaining. I often avoid spelling things out in interviews, I don’t want to take away the reader’s ability to shape their own response to the text.

For example, I never have (and never will) address the last sentence of Tigana!

There is always a lot of talk on book-to-film, the issue of fidelity to the original material. Everyone knows the main parameters of discussion. That they are not the same medium, that they have different strengths, that a film fails if it tries to slavishly be the book on screen, and can fail (for readers) if it deviates too profoundly, in plot, casting, tone, or themes.

Leaving The Hobbit aside, since I try not to talk to much about Tolkien-related issues, the mixture of outrage and bemusement over the casting of Tom Cruise recently as Jack Reacher (in the film of a book by Lee Child) has been extreme. Reacher, for those not in the loop, is vividely described in all the books as being really big and strong, about 6’5″ or so, and it isn’t just a throwaway fact, it is at the core of the character: a man who causes other men to shrink a bit, whenever he enters a room. He is massively physical. Cruise … isn’t. Yet despite readers’ howls of dismay, Lee Child is on record, whether sincerely or as a good soldier, in saying he thinks Cruise ‘nailed it’.

We’ve done ‘Casting Couches for my various books. In the Bright Weavings Forums, on the Pinterest board, and recently on the Facebook page as part of a draw for an ARC of River of Stars. I make Danny De Vito jokes and (mostly) enjoy the indications of how readers ‘see’ people. I do remind people that hair colour or anything like that is not an important criterion. Easy to adjust. Go for the acting skill. I have my own wishlist (for directors, too) but tend to keep boringly quiet on this, too, as there are real discussions going on all the time. It wouldn’t be smart to diss someone who might be part of a major proposal. (I may have killed the De Vito-as-Diarmuid option already.)

I’m also intrigued by artists offering their takes on scenes or characters from the books. The very nature of visual art seems to allow more room for interpretation. (Not always, this week sees a lot of debate over the unveiled first royal portrait of Kate Middleton.) In fact, when Deborah and I were discussing Bright Weavings, one request I made was that the site try to encourage submissions of scholarship and art.

So to round this rainy morning post off, I’m attaching two works from the Art Gallery on the main site (get there by clicking at the top here, to see some other artwork submitted over the years – Deb, consulting with my artist friend Martin Springett, acts as curator in selecting).

The first is by Naomi Tajtelbaum. Her comment on the site reads, in part,

“My sister introduced me to GGK’s works when I was a teenager, starting with Tigana, which has remained my favourite novel ever since… I chose the riselka since it is a fantastical creature and therefore I felt I could use license to give it an abstract image… I tried to bring in imagery from the book; if you examine it carefully you will find three faint paths and faces. One of the paths includes some gold, whereas one of the faces looks drawn, possibly ill, and one of the paths is branching. The colours mirror the colours used in the description of the riselka, the greens and blues and purples…”

The other piece (there are many I could have picked) accompanied the Washington Post’s review of Under Heaven. Artist Goni Montes called it a ‘dream job’. The piece is called ‘Peony’ and the slight irony is that this image would also be a terrific one for River of Stars, because a Peony Festival in springtime plays a role in the novel. (It was called the ‘king of flowers’ by some, though there is irony there, too, as neo-Confucian purists saw it as too ‘feminine’.) Here’s that one. I like the way the horses, so critical in the novel, are quietly integrated:

Well, ARCs are being sent out, people have started tweeting that they have them, which feels strange, I have to say.

It is an odd time for me, this stage, with every book. Probably so for any author. (Though I should qualify that, as the range of responses probably goes from catatonic terror to blithe indifference.) I am curious, edgy, have time and energy for a bit. Anyone need their roof reshingled? (Old joke about a handsome, inebriated guy who comes up to a woman in a bar and murmurs, ‘I will do anything for you that you can imagine, or think to ask. Anything. As long as you can say it in three words.’ She gazes deeply into his eyes and whispers, ‘Paint. My. House.’)

Thing is, every reader of a novel, up to a certain point, is someone personally connected with the writer or with his or her ‘partners’ (agents, publishers, marketing people). It can be fine-tuned, revised. Then there is a point where … it is in the wild, as I said in the header. No more amendments, revisions, no more working on the cover or jacket copy…

There’s another very old meme about revised famous last words. So for Admiral Farragut the revision goes, ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! … No! Wait!’ Authors can be like that. Paul Valery said, ‘A poem is never finished, only abandoned.’

But a novel being sent out, as River of Stars is now, isn’t so much abandoned as released to the world. Different feeling.

There is a two-tier process at work with the ARCs. Review newspapers, magazines, online journals get them now, because many of them need a long lead time to assign a book for review (or for an author interview or profile). They observe the convention of holding reviews back until publication date (so that people can read a review and go buy the book).

Bloggers tend more often to be solo operators, need less time (generally, there are exceptions) to get to a book, and so that batch will go out in February. And the dynamic for these things online is very different. I’ve had, easily, some of the most thoughtful, engaged, informed reviews of my work from online sources. For one thing, there’s more room, usually. That matters. 400-500 words let you say what ia book is about (sometimes with spoilers!) and whether you like it. Not much more. Give a smart person room to explore a book and … you might get something  worth reading.

I worry about doing a straight ‘reply’ to interesting comments, as the whole discussion might get buried. I like WordPress but the reply/discussion process is slightly awkward.

BOB (yes, he uses all-caps) queried, as he is wont to, the second-class status of e-books. He is a regular on brightweavings, so we’ve had this discussion before. My sense is that there is no likelihood of e-books not becoming more and more significant (though the rate of growth slowed this year in North America it is just taking off in Europe). The dilemma for publishers is trying not to cannibalize their own products. It may be that hardcovers are a doomed species (again, in Europe, they mostly are) but it isn’t automatically ‘stupid’ to try to stave that off.

For a time, the publishing world seems to have flirted with the idea of a delayed e-book release, akin to delayed paperbacks, so the hardcover would have at least some time on stage alone, then the hardback would graciously withdraw and paperbacks and e-books would hold sway. My sense (I may be wrong) is that no one thinks that is a good idea any more, or at least a workable idea. Certainly the delay before trade or mass market paperback is continuing, but the e-books do seem to be arriving with the first hardcovers.

There may remain a pricing policy where the e-books cost a little more when paralleling the hardcover, then come down in price when they are beside a paperback edition. And in the background for everyone is the issue of piracy, of course. In some countries it is annihilating the book trade: I am told by agents in Russia that pirate editions of paper-copy books sell for a fraction of the ‘real’ ones, and then there are the electronic ones for free…

Another comment to the last post was generous but may have missed a part of my point about blogs and early reviews. George, I want to be clear: my own sense is that bloggers reviewing early are not offending the publishers. As I said there is a balancing act at work, though no one quite knows how to do it yet.

If publishers don’t want early blog reviews they have an easy solution: don’t send them out early! My sense (remember I was last dancing with Under Heaven three years ago and things may have changed) is that the industry is perfectly fine with blogs reviewing as soon as they get the ARCs, unless they attach a specific request to wait – and they don’t need to, they can just hold back distribution until they are ready to see assessments online.

The line between a smart, widely read blogger and an ‘online magazine’ is really hard to pin down sometimes, and it may be a waste of time trying. I think the industry does try, and that was my point about their probably hoping that, say, the Los Angeles Review of Books would wait until a book is out, but not being concerned if an individual (or even group) blog reviewed as soon as they got it.

I also know (because I am hearing the discussions) that there are different attitudes among marketing and PR people about this. As I said, people are still figuring it out – and that will mean coming to different answers.

I am amused at myself these days. With the book gone from me, I am waiting for all my publishers and agents to get back in their offices (dammit!) so we can address some things. My dear friend and former agent Linda McKnight used to warn her colleagues about this stage … when I finish a book all the queries and to-dos I have for everyone levitate from the desk and demand to be dealt with. I do try to be cute about it, but a wry remark at the end of a list of six things may not always be enough.

I treat these Journals, in part, as a chance to share with readers a bit about the nature of the book world. I’ve become aware over the years that even people who are lifelong readers often know little about how books are produced, marketed, sold, how they get to them.

Sometimes in the next two weeks, advance reading copies of River of Stars will begin to go out, some in January, many more in February, on a timetable worked out by my various publishers – and ideally coordinated among them. (Monthly magazines get them earlier, for example, they need more time.)

When I was first published (back when books were written with quill pens and read by flickering candlelight), and even until the turn of the 21st century, pretty much, advance reading copies (or galleys) had a specific pair of functions.

They went out, a month or six weeks before publication, to the main review sites, in order that editors could assign them, and the reviewers would have time to read the the book and write their vivisections or rapturous encomiums, or whatever, to appear – ideally – the week the book went on sale. A classic frustration for publishers has always been a great review appearing in a major paper long after the book has appeared (and sometimes gone from the shelves of bookstores).

Another small batch of galleys would go to ‘major accounts’ – the buyers for important chains or stores, or the store managers, to start generating (ideally!) positive word of mouth about the title. A few might go to other writers or known opinion-shapers, for the possibility of a jacket blurb or press release quote.

There weren’t that many galleys prepared, and they were fairly rudimentary much of the time (they still are, in the UK, usually).

The blogosphere and online world in general has changed the game. Galleys (usually called ARCs now) are made in much greater numbers, often much more handsomely, and they go out earlier, and more widely. The underlying notion is that online world is where word of mouth is generated. A long piece by Laura Miller of Salon unpacked how cleverly this path was pursued for The Hunger Games when it was about to appear. http://www.salon.com/2012/03/18/the_making_of_a_blockbuster/

There are some interesting tensions linked to this. The tradition, the rule, for newspapers and magazines is that a review must not come out before the pubication date of a book. The idea is simple: publishers want someone to be able to go buy a book when they read a review, not wait three weeks – and even forget about it. But online reviewers don’t always observe this rule (there are exceptions) and – frankly – publishers don’t always want them to. Advance buzz has to be, well, advance.

This rankles book page editors. They are dutifully holding back their reviews and discussions till a book is on sale, but meanwhile the whole world (or the part of it with internet access) will have been reading about the title for a month or more.

There is no obvious right or wrong here, though I suppose I’d agree that holding the Washington Post or Toronto Globe & Mail to a pub date review starts to feel unfair if major online reviewers are way ahead. My sense, is that the important online sites tend to wait until close to pub date, while it is independent bloggers who like to get out early with a review.

Maybe it’ll become a measure of a blog’s transition to stature … that it begins to wait until closer to the book’s release. But the irony is, if publishers are excited or optimistic about a book, they may not mind if blog reviews surface early. There’s a complicated tension here.

In other words, as with so much of the book world today, we are in flux, people are still figuring out how to dance to this new music.

In lines I quote often Yeats wrote:

For how can you compete,
Being honour bred, with one
Who, were it proved he lies,
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes?

I think about these words often when I consider writers and readers and the marketplace. The need or desire to succeed, feed one’s children, make a name, ‘breakout’ (in a rush, not a rash).

Urgent marketing is not new. The idea of artists ‘dancing as fast as I can’ goes back a long way, whether it is being ingratiating to the monarch or marquis whose patronage could make a career, flattering the senior poet (in Tang China, say) who could do the same thing, or tailoring one’s actual work to the taste or expectations of the day. (You want sad-eyed-clowns, I’ll give you sad-eyed-clowns. With fangs!)

Most of the time I am genuinely not judgmental about peers who work the room (or cyber-room) ferociously, and it would be hypocritical for me to thunder about this: I am writing this, I am now cautiously on Twitter, people have created a website and Facebook page for me. I am not hiding, though there have been times when I have thought it is better for the art if one does

But I will admit that I do make judgements when some lines are crossed. We all have our lines, in everything, really. Trashing a ‘rival’ anonymously (then lying about it), as one very major historian did on Amazon in the UK, crosses. Buying a hundred five-star reviews from a business that sells them – crosses. A bestselling writer instructing, on her webpage, her very large army of readers in the step-by-step process of going to Amazon to register and then post those five-star reviews (to counterbalance too many one-stars) – crosses. Getting fans to rate a book before they read it – crosses. Amazon allows it. Grace does not.

My guess is a lot of people might share this view (though not all). Some of my other ‘lines’ may not elicit majority agreement. I don’t like hustling for award votes, asking people to ‘do me a solid’ and vote for my book in some popular-vote competition, even though that has become a norm, how they are won. I am delighted if readers support a given book of mine, if they inform each other that some vote is happening. I just find the hustle on my own part inconsistent with any sense of a proper way to be in relation to those to read my work. I take them – and the work – too seriously,

This is all evolving, as the culture (especially online) evolves. Authors and readers are more interwoven than ever before. If I give a ‘bravo’ reply on Twitter to some reader’s witty remark that made me smile, that really is something new, something that simply did not and could not happen when I was starting as a reader – or a novelist. I can (and I will) link to an essay or review of one of the books if I find it generous and intelligent. That feels like encouraging thought, highlighting insights I am pleased to see out there. (If someone pans a book I am less likely to link for two reasons: I am not a masochist, and if I disagree with the comment, linking it would have to come with a rejoinder explaining why, and life is short, art is long, time matters. It is easier to link a piece when the tacit implication is ‘I am happy to see this’.)

But the Yeats quote at the top was brought to mind yesterday by reading, in the New York Times, a piece about reviews being ‘disappeared’ on Amazon. (The full article is here, but may be behind their firewall, for non-subscribers, not sure: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/technology/amazon-book-reviews-deleted-in-a-purge-aimed-at-manipulation.html?ref=technology

The mystery novelist __________, for example, does not see anything wrong with an author indulging in chicanery. “Customer buys book because of fake review = zero harm,”

I say no, I’m afraid.  I agree with this quote, later in the piece:

“A not-insubstantial chunk of their infrastructure is based on their reviews — and all of that depends on having reviews customers can trust,” said __________, a science fiction novelist.

I don’t want to get into a detailed explanation of why I think ‘zero harm’ is just wrong. (This is already a very long post.) If I were to do so, it would involve an analogy with steroid use in sport (the ones playing honestly in a world of limited resources are harmed, among others.)

I am more saddened than anything else that the hustle mentality has so greatly eroded a parallel world of dignity, grace, at least aspiring to classiness. Treating readers (or potential readers) with some measure of respect, not as targets to be bagged – or used. Interaction needs to function with some awareness of this, or maybe I’m just wrong. The article in the NY Times focuses on Amazon and reviews, but that is just a single element in all of this.

If someone can say (and sincerely believe) that chicanery (lying, really) involves zero harm in the book-buying world, that person and I are inhabiting very different mental and moral spaces even if we both want to feed our children.

It is not a new divide. Self-promotion has always been an element of the artist’s life. Different artists, in the past and today, had and have different standards as to what they are comfortable doing in order to sell. All things being otherwise equal, the better promoter is more likely to succeed in commercial terms. One issue is whether those are the only terms. (For some they are.) And another issue is whether our culture allows us to draw (or even see) a divide between aggressiveness which might be tacky, and dishonesty, which is something else.

I spend time urging readers (those reading this!) to shape their own sense of where lines might be drawn. Yeats wrote ‘Were neither shamed in his own/
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes’ … that puts some power, some response, some pursuit of class, in the hands of the ‘neighbours’ too. That’s you.

It should be raining when children are buried.

Winter sunshine is a gift

But this is the wrong time

To be accepting brightness. Let it rain.

We know there may one day be laughter

Even for those now grieving.

We are made that way. It is how we endure.

Though we also know some will not come back

To sunlight for a long time, and some

Will not at all. It is possible for the heart

To break and not be healed.

For these, their life divides now and forever

Into before and after the day

Darkness found a child too much too soon.