The Den

Flip: I Got Dosed By You

October 28th, 2023

I always talk about knowing how a story ends before I start writing it, and of course this story ends the way all our stories end, with loss.

It’s funny that we don’t talk about loss as much as we should, because it’s always a good time to talk about loss.

When I watched the news on Thursday night, every segment was about murder, except the last one, which was about Taylor Swift. This week we’re dealing with deadly international conflicts and yet more fatal domestic mass shootings; today we lost Matthew Perry.

The tale of Flip is the tale of two real losses.

The first loss wasn’t of life, or at least not at first glance.

When I was younger, a girl we knew had a brain aneurysm. It changed her radically. Knowing other people who knew her, I watched them change, too. The idea that one day anyone could wake up and not be the person they were a moment earlier is terrifying and heartbreaking and haunting to me; it was then and it is now.

But it’s also a reminder to be here in the present, as I am. I read in a book recently the beautiful phrase “Everything is borrowed” and it’s something I think about every day. Nothing is ours to keep. Not even ourselves.

The second loss was of life.

I had a good friend named Tim growing up.

He went through it, in every way. He was always in and out of school, and he had to have major surgeries to keep himself alive, including a heart and lung transplant.

He was so optimistic it hurt, naturally funny, with the best taste in music. We had sleepovers and he drove me around in his car. He worked hard and he played hard and, on November 1st, 2007, at just 23, he died.

This death was also terrifying and heartbreaking and haunting, Tim living on borrowed time; like we all are, like everything is.

I would have dreams about Tim, and we would talk in them, and it was the only thing that actually made me feel better. I started to realize that even though I found no sense or solace in religion, I was still spiritual, and what happens to the soul matters.

I was out of control at this point in my life. All I wanted was to explore why.

If you’ve read Flip, you know how these pieces fit into the puzzle.

We’re all dealing with loss, at different levels, in different ways, all the time. For me, when I can’t deal, when the waves of chaos and uncertainty threaten to take me over, I just try to remember: nothing is ever really ours.

Everything is borrowed.

One Week Until My Writing Class!

October 25th, 2023

WHAT’S IN THE GIANT NOTEBOOK?!

Why, it’s all my publishing secrets!

My Writing Class is in ONE WEEK from today! There are still a few seats available, but now is your last chance!

We’re meeting at Labyrinth Puzzle Rooms in downtown Lakeville from 7 pm to 9 pm on Wednesday, November 1st; cost for the class is $25, payable in whatever way is comfortable for you. (Please reach out if you really want to take this class but can’t afford it; I will make it possible for you, no problem, no questions asked.)

We’ll be talking about creativity, my simple steps to self-publish (hidden in this big blue pad), and how I not only wrote Flip during National Novel Writing Month, but published it using everything I’ve learned.

I’ll see you so soon! I am SO EXCITED!

Flip: Dream a Little Dream of Me

October 19th, 2023

I have never been a religious person.

But that’s not to say I’ve never believed in anything.

When I was growing up, there was no shortage of things I thought were real but could never prove: aliens, ghosts, mutants, Bigfoot, vampires, time travel. I would spend entire days at the library (this was before the internet, kids), checking out books to learn everything I could about them. I remember being obsessed with the Weekly World News, and one day my dad told me it was joke newspaper, but I thought he said it with a wink; like he was comforting me because he knew I was scared, but when I was adult I’d be let in on the big secret that all of this was real.

All the stuff I couldn’t prove, plus the stuff I believed in that could, like science, all contradicted the concept of the Christian God to me, a paradox I have never been able to resolve in myself.

But I don’t know if I’ve ever believed in anything more than dreams.

They were frequently more real to me than real life, and I often wished they were. To this day, I feel like dreams exist on their own wavelength, and we’re able to access each other through them.

I had always wanted to tell a story through them. And for all the good dreams I had, I had my fair share of nightmares, too.

I worried I would die in one.

And that led to the creation of Alen: a serial killer who murdered people in their safest place. Their own mind.

I knew that writing a book about dreams would inspire people I met to talk about their own, but never in my wildest ones would I realize how much, and how deeply. Dreams are one of the few human experiences we have that are near-universal and boundary-less. All you have to be is a creature who sleeps to have them.

I get asked about the pop culture inspirations for Flip constantly, and there aren’t many I can count. Freddy Krueger pops up, and he wasn’t a touchstone for me; his shadow loomed over culture when I was a kid, but I don’t know if I’ve watched a Nightmare on Elm Street movie in its entirety to this day.

I love Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic series now, but I hadn’t been able to read it for most of my young life. It was too smart for me. (It is still too smart for me, but I love it anyway.)

I was actually introduced to a lot of dream stories after I published the book, and I’m grateful for knowing so little; it allowed me to write dreams the way I experience them with little outside influence.

While my beliefs have changed and evolved over the years, dreams remain something I deeply believe in. Their intimate and universal nature; their unknowable power and specific understanding; their sharp terror and warm comfort.

That faith lives on in me, and I explored the importance of it even further in Liam’s next chapter.

3

October 16th, 2023

Three years ago today, my mom decided to go on a forever trip. Due to her terribly dark sense of humor, she didn’t send a text to let me know, or even say good bye.

The good news, though, is that after going through these thousand days or so, I don’t even miss her.

Oh, can you imagine?

What a blessing it would be to spread the word that this loss was the kind that just took a few months and a fresh set of bandages to heal; that the wound closes, it doesn’t hurt anymore, and the scar that everybody told me I’d have simply disappeared. I just walked it off.

No, that’s not what happened.

I went through a lot of this online. Just like I did when I got sober, I documented it: I created the thing I wished I would have had when I needed it.

I try to be open and vulnerable here, but even I have my boundaries, because I realize a simple truth: I have to make these confessions pretty in a way, because you won’t keep reading if I don’t. And if you don’t keep reading, like Tinkerbell, I die.

(You could argue that you don’t keep reading either way, but here you are, reading.)

Because of that relationship, I can only be so honest. I can be sad, but it has to be funny. I can be ugly, but it has to be strategic. I can be dark, but I have to offer a door cracked open seeping light from the other side.

They call art a “craft” because there are rules; they would argue it isn’t enough to just say how you feel.

The truth is, some days are fine, and other days I deal with things that I can’t tell or write to anybody. I go through experiences of intense fear and self-loathing, moments where I am certain I am unlovable and irredeemably cringe, times when I question the point of my entire existence, and grief has made all of this undeniably worse.

I guess the difference is that I’m feeling these things with an emotional perspective I didn’t have before.

People familiar with grief will tell you there are good days and bad days, and then say some shit like “loss is a gift” which was clearly written on a good day.

I just finished a book recommended to me called Think Like a Monk (full disclosure: I thought the idea was stupid, even the title was stupid, read the first chapter and fell in love with it). A decade ago, I couldn’t imagine it: not only reading something like this, but taking almost twenty pages of handwritten notes about it.

This is how I choose to deal with things now. I dig.

When I feel unlovable, I dig into that and fill up my compassion for myself. When I feel the sharp fear I’ve been having of late, I dig into that, and use stupid techniques that calm me.

I visualize, and focus on the words: balance, calm, ease, stillness, peace, sipping on each syllable like I used to tiny bottles of vodka.

And every time I stumble wholeheartedly over an obstacle, I can see my mom sitting on the bleachers, cheering me on, her deaf-lady voice embarrassing and nourishing me in a way I won’t ever get back.

The same woman who kept handwritten notes, kept the history of our lives, who loved me, who knew that compassion and service were the highest purposes.

Three years later, I do still miss her. Terribly. So I try to embody the best parts of her, and be better than the worst parts of me. I still turn to her to know what’s good.

Even though she didn’t send me a text before she left.

Theia Book Club!

October 11th, 2023

I could not have asked for a better book club.

What a group of insightful, caring, vulnerable, funny, brilliant people (and a dog named Theo!).

Usually when a friend or family member tells me how they feel or what they thought about a book of mine, I usually get a “I liked it” or “it wasn’t for me” and we move right along; that is an absolutely normal human response to something.

But to hear the kindest people really dig deep into the story and make things personal like they did tonight not only helps me tremendously as a writer, but reminds me how amazing human beings are.

A big thank you, high five and hug to this table. Theia feels appreciated tonight.

And a special thanks to Leah for the invite and Kat for leaving Duck Duck’s lights on for us. I won’t soon forget it, and I can’t wait to hit up happy hour karaoke, miel in mug.

Flip: I Wish I Was Special

October 8th, 2023

Flip is, ultimately, about a sad, lonely boy.

Liam is the opposite of my ego.

He’s also the lyrics of a Radiohead song: kind of a creep, and kind of a weirdo.

I’ve never had to personally differentiate myself from a character so much; I think it’s because Flip (and its sequels) are, so far, my only books written in first-person. If your introduction to my writing is all this autobiographical trash I leave on the internet’s curb, you’d be forgiven for mistaking Liam’s “I” for my own.

Which isn’t to say that a lot of Liam’s hopes and fears aren’t mine, or at least more than familiar.

My first novella, Them, has a few thick themes woven throughout, and one of those threads is control. I’ve written on a handful of occasions about who I was at that time, and how out of control I felt, both intimately and universally.

That desire for control was the creative seed for Liam.

I knew he would be out of touch with reality (because I was aware of what was he was hiding from himself), and a few novel (to me) ideas helped me present that. Since we were in his head, I knew that we would be able to hear his every thought, even the unsavory ones. We also wouldn’t be fully sure of when he was dreaming or not, because, at times, he’s not even sure. The combination of cringe-worthy thoughts and questionable dreams would create distance between the reader, and I hoped to close it by encouraging radical empathy on their behalf, as well.

And Liam spends whatever empathy he earns recklessly.

There’s a recent song I love by Lizzie McAlpine called “All My Ghosts”; it tracks the beginning of a relationship, sipping a slurpee with a potential love interest at a 7-Eleven. Suddenly, the bridge declares: “I can see it now! The Wedding of the Year!”

That is Liam, a nut, in a nutshell.

Because who can’t relate to being lonely? To being sad, and out of control? To wanting to bloom and be loved? To being reckless in the pursuit of feeling alive?

At his worst and most shallow, Liam makes us deeply uncomfortable, as reflection or shadow; at his best, he reminds us we’re all creeps, that we are all weirdos, and we belong here.

SKP 2023: Flip

October 1st, 2023

I’ve always had vivid dreams.

For a long time, I had an idea for a story that wouldn’t let me go. It was about somebody who felt alone in real life and more real in their dreams, and somebody else who killed people in those same dreams.

I couldn’t get the sequel to my first book, Them, right. (Arguably, I still haven’t.) I was stuck, and I was anxious and depressed about it; I was also experiencing heavy feelings over a lack of control during this period.

The story about dreams, unexpectedly, decided that it couldn’t wait anymore.

On the second morning of November, 2013, I woke up and I knew the ending. (Knowing how a story ends is the most important thing for me before I start writing it.) November happens to be National Novel Writing Month: an annual event in which writers from around the world try to write a book in thirty days.

I decided to give it a try.

I did it.

And on December 16th, 2013, Flip became my second published book, a chaotic trip through the complicated mind of Liam, an awkward loner who is dealing with things not even he fully understands at the beginning.

Reviews were far kinder for my second novella. The Faribault Daily News gave me sentences that were both encouraging and have come to be part of the definition of how I write:

“…Moments of brilliance make a short read like ‘Flip’ worthwhile… Sometimes, Vogen unexpectedly breaks out beautiful, almost poetic, language at just the right moment.”

In 2020, I released a Special Edition of the book with a new foreword, embodying the concept of writing drunk, editing sober.

This month, we’ll be talking all about it, and the fascinating language and worlds of our dreams, the unreal places we visit to feel most real.

Oil Change

September 27th, 2023

“I may have been sober, but I didn’t start to get well until I could accept who I had been, who I was becoming and accept any distance there was between the two.”

– Nadia Bolz-Weber

I got my oil changed yesterday morning. They put a little sticker in the upper-left corner of my windshield with the date I have to come back, and that date always feels like forever away.

It’s the end of September now, and it’ll be almost April when I need my oil changed again. In that time, we’ll have gone through three seasons and most of the school year; celebrated Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and a new year; I’ll have released new work and written new words and drawn new pictures and a whole lot will exist that doesn’t exist now.

The distance between now and there is only six months.

Honestly, I’m at a stage in my sobriety where having a drink is among the least of my concerns. That probably sounds weird to some (the threat is real!), but others get it: I’m at a point in my life where my biggest struggles are accepting who I’ve been, what I’ve done, and trying to be able to wake up and be okay with the person I am today.

Just like sobriety itself, this is a lifelong dance I have to relearn the steps to daily.

One of the best and worst parts of the internet is its ability to remind you. It can set an alarm for birthdays and anniversaries, carry photo albums of the good times you’ve had with family and friends, and show you all the times you said something weird or mean or gross in the name of being broken and angry and refusing to do any better.

I have to reconcile the fact that I have been awful and selfish with the truth that I want to be friendly and kind.

I have never been one thing, and never will be. Not black or white but a palette of colors, mixed haphazardly. My struggle finds sense in balance, and I don’t have whiskers like normal cats do.

But recognizing this helps me cover the distance, from then to now, a short time that holds a lot of life.

Like how in six months nothing will be the same, how things will exist that have never existed before, how I exist now like I didn’t exist then. But present me doesn’t need to keep that distance between past me; I need to wrap him up and thank him for just hanging on, when I know it wasn’t easy for him.

Because he hung on, I got to be me. The one who struggles because he had to be him, but still gets to be me.

Me now, me in six months, and me for as long as life will have me.

Theia: Heroes

September 22nd, 2023

There are certain parameters that people find themselves more comfortable sharing within, and I fit into many of those boxes.

As a bartender, people are surprisingly open with me; as a person who is public about their sobriety and struggles with addiction, people are surprisingly open with me; as a writer, oh boy, people are so surprisingly open with me.

But none of that compares to what happens when I put on a superhero’s suit.

I could write a book about my experiences playing superheroes (Marvel, call me, unless it’s about a lawsuit). But the moments that stick with me are the things people tell me when I’m in that suit.

I’ve heard their severe financial troubles, somber reflections, sharp heartbreaks; serious (and seriously personal) stories of loss and grief, political rage, familial conflict, bitter rivalries. I’ve been the bearer of secrets, hopes, dreams, and tragedies.

And I’ve thought about why this is for a long time.

It actually makes total sense: when you stop trusting the people around you, your family and friends and neighbors, your community, politicians, the media, all of our trusted institutions, who do you have left?

Your heroes.

When you think there isn’t anybody who can save you, you refer to those who always have, even if you consciously know that’s just a normal dude wearing a few dollars worth of latex.

I think we have similar attitudes towards animals.

Animals are heroes of problem-solving.

It’s why we’re fascinated by nature. Humans complicate everything. (EVERYTHING. Is there a thing? We complicate it.) We love watching animals deal with problems because they do so efficiently, in the least complex way.

We know how to do this and simply refuse.

And in 2020, when I, like so many people on this planet, was feeling overwhelmed and anxious and depressed and didn’t think that any human power could fix it, could fix us, I turned to the animals for help.

I wondered what they would do if they were facing the impossible obstacles we were. And one truth became immediately apparent: our problems aren’t impossible at all.

We’re the ones who are impossible.

This is the last essay of Theia month, and I just want to thank everyone who has been so supportive of this now-three-year-old novella. It was my return to writing prose fiction; in fact, it was my first published book since getting sober. To get the response I have is nothing short of grand and humbling. This has been one of my most enjoyable revisits, and the number of people who discovered the book this month is mind-blowing; I hope you’ll consider joining our Theia Book Club at Duck Duck Coffee on October 11th.

Through all the twists and feels and laughs and tears, though, I hope readers take away one thing:

Nothing is impossible.

And, sometimes, the way we fix things is by staying exactly where we are.

Theia: Stuck In The Middle With You

September 16th, 2023

I get asked a lot if I have any secrets for how to finish writing a book. My secret has been shared so many times that it’s gossip at this point: I have to know how it ends.

If you had to run a marathon, but no one told you where the finish line was, do you think you’d keep running far enough to find it? In my experience, people regularly run out of gas when they don’t know where they’re headed.

Once I know how a story ends, I can get there.

Of course, there are always exceptions. And, of course, Theia is one of them.

I knew how it ended, and it was with a game-changing twist. But once I wrote my way to that revelation, I had another one: my ending was only the middle.

(If you’ve read Theia, I hope you’ll keep this twist to yourself. It’s part of the magic of the book and, three years later, I’m still getting messages from people who are absolutely shocked by it, and it’s because my readers have kept it to themselves and they are just the best.)

A funny thing happened once I found myself stuck in that middle, though: I had written such strong characters and knew my themes so well that the ending jumped up and curled into my lap. In fact, my ending had to be a direct result of these characters and those themes, and to think I almost skipped the stages of acceptance and resolution is just silly to me now.

One of the best-ever reactions to the twist was during one of my first writing panels last year at Twin Cities Con. I was telling this story, about how an end turned out to be the middle, and someone in the audience unexpectedly shared that they threw their book across the room when they got to that part.

One of the best reviews of my career, tbh.

And I was absolutely shocked, as I was added to the panel last-minute, to find that I had a reader in the audience and they reacted to my story in such an emotional way.

Keeping the spoilers, again, to a minimum, I also put a tremendous amount of foreshadowing in the book, starting with Theia’s name (the first person to get that reference sent literal goosebumps over my skin; I didn’t think anybody would figure that particular secret out).

All of this to say: you can follow rules and develop techniques and take all the advice in the world, but if you can’t pivot when confronted, and react — see what your characters want and need, where your story is going even if it isn’t where you thought it would go — then you may not be giving your story everything you got.

And every story you write deserves at least that much from you, whatever “everything you got” looks like the day you’re writing it.