Lolly Walter

Author

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Yes, Virginia, You Are a Racist

When I was maybe ten, I dressed up as a hobo for Halloween. The costume was probably a matter of convenience—we had the items on hand, no need to buy or make anything—but my family had a romanticized notion about what a hobo was. My dad and granddad grew up envying the idea of freedom, of escape—from picking cotton or from poverty or from annoying siblings. I believed it when I was told how fun it must have been, riding on the rails from town to town, taking the day as it came, no responsibility. I never thought about how a homeless person would eat; what he’d have to do to make money, find food; I never realized how dangerous and dehumanizing homelessness could be.

Hobos were a funny, romanticized notion.

I know better now, of course. There’s nothing funny or romantic about homelessness. And I hate that in my youthful ignorance, I made light of something so serious.

Here’s the more insidious issue, though:

Hobos weren’t real to me. They were some fairy tale, not real people. They were just props in a story. It’s not just that the blackface of Virginia politicians is hurtful because it recalls minstrel shows where African-Americans were denigrated and simplified into the worst possible stereotypes; it’s hurtful because the people painting their faces in the ‘80s were treating black people like caricatures. Cartoons. They weren’t thinking of black people as real, as having the same hopes and dreams, the same brains and hearts and families and souls as a white person.

That’s the bigotry I want to work on, for myself and for all the liberal whites in America.

Notes: Don’t just take my word for it, please. Seek out the voices of people of color and listen to what they’re saying. Also, this blog post in no way is meant to equate homelessness, which is often a crisis for the people experiencing it, to being a black person.

News: Navarro Suarez, my short story prequel to Dry Run is available for purchase on Amazon! Read on to learn more about it!

About Navarro Suarez

Family first. In a bleak future destroyed by climate change, family is all that matters to Navarro. He'll do anything to protect those closest to him, including violate his own moral code. Then one bloody day, he finds himself the caregiver of a fragile boy who threatens everything Navarro holds dear. He knows what he has to do. The only question is, can he do it?

Click here to purchase!

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We're Living in the Future

Today, Austin, Texas—quirky; fun; site of music, tech, and movie innovation—got slapped with a hard dose of reality. The entire city is under a boil order. The water may not be safe to drink, and the city’s treatment plants are only operating at about one-quarter their usual capacity.

The cause is flooding along the Highland Lakes chain, a group of six lakes created by the damming of the Colorado River and ending right in downtown Austin. The flooding has been going on for a week, and all the debris and silt washed downstream has overwhelmed the capability of the water treatment plants.

Austin is the eleventh-largest city in America, bigger than Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, and Washington DC. Imagine if one of those cities had no safe water to drink. The city officials here don’t have a clear idea of when the boil order will be lifted, either. As you might imagine, folks are on edge. Stores are selling out of bottled water; restaurants are shutting their doors; schools are trying to figure out how to keep kiddos safe.

When I was writing Dry Run, I read a lot about climate change. Since the story took place in Austin, I read even more about what the Austin area specifically could expect in the next hundred years. One of the more interesting things I found was that rainfall totals weren’t supposed to change much. I’d expected drought, no rain. That’s just not what the science says. What it does say, though, is that the same amount of rain will fall over a much more concentrated period of time. We’ll have more intense droughts and more severe floods.

One weather event can’t be chalked up to climate change, but floods like this one along the Highland Lakes are going to happen more frequently, perhaps even more severely. Climate change isn’t some sudden extinction event. It’s more subtle, easier to ignore. But this is just a teaser of what we can expect.

Announcement: Look for the release of my next book, Flanked, this winter. I’d planned to have it out this fall, but I’m a perfectionist, and I’m not quite ready to let Flanked go just yet. It’ll be worth the wait. Subscribers to my mailing list, be on the lookout for early-release content!

Fun Fact: The title of this blog post is taken from the excellent Bruce Springsteen song, Livin’ in the Future.

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No More

I wrote this blog post last Saturday. I have hung on to it for the better part of a week, waiting to see if that white-hot instant cooled with the passage of time. It didn’t. The only thing I want to add is to urge straight, cis, white women who may be feeling the sting of marginalization and disregard so acutely for the first time to be careful, when expressing their outrage, not to do it at the expense or erasure of other marginalized groups. Here’s the unedited original version, my visceral reaction to last Saturday’s Supreme Court vote.:

A little over a week ago, I watched a grown man cry and rage and whine and otherwise act like an entitled, arrogant brat. Today, at my daughter's soccer game, I listened to a group of men get into a screaming match over their daughters’ soccer game on the adjacent field. The game had to be stopped to manage the adults. I came home from the game and one of the football teams on TV is being coached by a man who pretended he didn't know one of his staff beat his wife. And the entitled, arrogant brat from last week got confirmed to the Supreme Court.

I'm angry. Furious. But I'm not supposed to be. Like most women, I've made a habit of scrupulously scrubbing my words and body language of anger. Angry women are hysterical, unreasonable, unhinged. Angry men are powerful.

Fuck that. I am so sick and tired of saying and doing the right (read: socially acceptable) things, of remembering my place. It's over. I'm done.

Men, get your asses in gear. Stand up with your wives and daughters, your nieces and your mothers and co-workers. Being a freaking ally doesn't mean staying quiet. If you haven't said one word on social media in opposition to the assholes among you, you are part of the problem.

Women, those of you who say you're scared your sons will be falsely accused, spare me. I've listened to your boys say and do hateful things because you allow it. If they get accused of something, odds are, they did it. I learned that lesson in, oh, sixth grade when you defended precious Johnny when he was clearly wrong. You taught him to be a pig. You are as much of a disappointment as he is. You would rather have a thousand women assaulted than two men falsely accused. Because those are the numbers. That's what you're saying. I don't have time for your bullshit.

I am tired of being kind to people who don't warrant it. I am tired of watching men hurt women without repercussions. No more. Not one more day of this shit. I am angry. Who's with me?

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What I Remember

In 1990 or 1991, my freshman year of college, my roommate and I went to the Osco to buy who knows what. I don’t remember if we took the El or if we walked. I don’t remember if we’d been anyplace before, or if we stopped someplace on the way back to our dorm. I don’t even remember if we bought anything.

But I remember the boys who followed me around the store and groped my butt. They stayed behind me, a group of them, high-schoolers, probably. I never turned around to see their faces. But I heard their giggles.

They took turns, some touching me lightly, some a little harder. Again, I never turned around. Never said “stop.” I managed to bat one’s hand away. They laughed even harder.

I remember being scared. Terrified. And so, so embarrassed. I remember shaking; I remember the way my face burned in shame.

My roommate may have eventually shooed them away. I’m not sure. We never talked about what happened. I didn’t tell any of the girls in my dorm about it. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell my friends. I didn’t tell my twin sister.

In fact, in the twenty-seven years since it happened, I’ve only told my husband. No one else.

I was so embarrassed then, and I stayed embarrassed afterward. Even now, I’m uncomfortable, uncertain. Will people judge me? Will they say I need to lighten up? Can’t I take a joke? Why am I so high-strung? Boys will be boys. I should have been flattered.

Those boys stole some of my self-confidence that day. They made me even more wary of men. They made me afraid—a fear that still hasn’t entirely gone away.

I don’t remember all the details of that otherwise ordinary day. But I am crystal clear about what happened between me and those boys. What they did to me was wrong.

I don’t know their names, but if I did, and one of those bastards were nominated to the highest court in our land, I’d speak the truth. I hope you’d listen.

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Italics and America

I wrote and discarded a big, long blog post to explain why I don't italicize (as style books indicate I should) the Spanish words in Dry Run. My post had lots of explanations and justifications. But in the end, it boiled down to this:

I wrote an American story about Americans. In America, we speak English and Spanish (and a host of other languages). One isn't more American than another, and it felt sort of like that was what I'd be implying if I italicized the Spanish words.

I don't think I need a big explanation for such a small and simple truth.

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They're Lovely People

"They're lovely people." That's what my friend told me after she mentioned she'd be seeing relatives soon. After she made the face. You know the one. The "I really don't wanna" face. Then she said, "They're lovely people." Pause. "Except they're racist, bigoted, homophobes."

We laughed together at the absurdity of it, those two statements side by side. "They're lovely people. They're racist, bigoted, homophobes." Lovely people. Racist, bigoted, homophobes.

Ask any straight white lady, and if she's being honest, she'll tell you the same thing I admitted to my friend: I’ve said it, too. We all have pretended like those two sentences can coexist side-by-side in the same statement. In the same person.

God, we love those good-people-homophobic-racist-bigots. We don't want them to be the bad guys. They're our aunts and uncles, our cousins, our third-grade teacher who changed our lives. When we talk about their bigotry, we explain it away. “Oh, it’s only because of…” Their upbringing or their ignorance, their age or their poverty, their small-town isolation. We make excuses.

Lovely people. Racist, bigoted, homophobes. The fact that so many of us have said the same thing exposes our privilege. We say those things about our loved ones because their bigotry, their racism, their homophobia doesn't have any effect on how they treat us. They are lovely people to us because we weren't born with any reason for them not to be.

But a lot of people don't have that privilege. They weren't born white. Or straight. Cis. Christian. American. Every time we, the privileged, make that excuse—"They're lovely people"—what are we really saying?

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Bigotry in 140 Characters

Major League Baseball's All-Star Game was played recently, showcasing this season's best players. Unfortunately, the game was overshadowed by the conduct of one of the participants, pitcher Josh Hader. During the game, Hader got shelled (for those of you not into baseball, it basically means his pitching sucked), but far worse, out in the Twitterverse, some of his old tweets began to surface. In them, Hader spouted racist, sexist, and homophobic nonsense. We (a collective we, I hope) were appalled.

In the two weeks that have followed, similar tweets from Trea Turner of the Washington Nationals and Sean Newcomb of the Atlanta Braves have been unearthed. I'm sure more will follow.

In all three cases, the tweets are old. They came when these still-young men were in high school or college.

My reaction to seeing those tweets from Hader was absolute disgust and hot, intense anger. I wanted him fined and suspended. I wanted him banished from baseball altogether--oddly, not for the degradation of women, but for the racism, for the hate directed at the LGBT+ community. (What that says about me, a woman who is neither black nor part of the queer community as anything other than an ally/advocate, is something for me to continue to unpack on my own.)

Not so fast, my progressive, enlightened husband said. He said he'd hate to be judged on some of the stupid stuff he said when he was seventeen. I had to concede he had a point. I don't remember saying anything terrible when I was younger, but I'm not arrogant enough to believe that actually means I didn't. At seventeen or eighteen or even twenty, we're all still very much a product of where we come from, not where we're headed.

So what to do with Hader and the others? I don't know. There's no satisfying answer, and there won't be until we figure out how to raise all kids to know that being hateful jackasses does not make them cool. That's a bigger issue than this blog can cover today.

What I do know is that Hader got a standing ovation from his team's fans, and that makes me sick. Baseball dealt with the tweets by requiring Hader to meet with Billy Bean, a baseball exec and one of the few out men associated with professional baseball. Hader is also required to undergo sensitivity training and take part in Major League Baseball's inclusion and diversity initiatives.

As for me, I'll be watching for signs of genuine contrition from these men. I hope they use what they've learned from this experience to make a meaningful difference either in society or in baseball (because there's an ugly racist and homophobic nature underpinning the game I love), but I won't be cheering for any of them for a long time.

What do you think should be done when professional athletes or celebrities' bigoted skeletons are revealed? Should their age at the time be taken into consideration?

Other perspectives:

Outsports's Cyd Zeigler gives his take on the situation.

The Twitter users who exposed the old tweets share why they did it.

Here's blogger Clinton Yates

Apology of Nationals' Trea Turner

A final note: The voices of people who belong to the groups targeted by the bigoted comments deserve to have their opinions on the matter listened to, respected, and prioritized.

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Hotter than Hell?

It was 110°F (43.3°C) here yesterday. 110.

My Facebook feed was full of people commenting on the misery temps like that were bringing to their lives. I took my daughter to a store, sat in the car for fifteen minutes with the A/C on full blast, and still had my back sweat-glued to the car seat. Stuck in rush hour traffic the other day, my car's thermometer told me it was 124° around us.

Sound God-awful? It is.

Climate change plays a significant role in Dry Run. It has to. Here in Austin during the summer, we're prisoners to the heat, chained to our A/C, hoping that whatever chores we have to do each day are please, please, please not outside.

So yeah, climate change has been on my mind.

When it was time to write Dry Run, I consulted extensively with the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a helpful Austin-specific report that the city commissioned a few years ago. The IPCC data is not an easy read, but at nine pages, the Austin report is. And what it lays out isn't pretty.

If we only modestly change our response to climate change, we're looking at spending a third of the year with days over 100 degrees. Overall, temps will range from seven to eleven degrees higher, with the extremes being, well, more extreme. We'll be drier by fifteen to twenty percent, which may not sound like much, but in addition to the reduced rainfall, we can expect fewer days when it actually rains, then when it does rain, the heavens will open. In Austin, where we’re already prone to dangerous flash floods, we can't withstand those sorts of changes.

By the turn of the century under that scenario, no one will live in Austin by choice.

How is the weather in your area changing? Where do you see it in eighty years?

Sign up for my mailing list today by clicking here! I'm giving away free e-copies of Navarro Suarez, my thirty-page short story prequel to Dry Run, to each person who joins the list. I contact my mailing list less than once a month, but I like to give them freebies and tell them important news first.

*Weather and climate are not the same things. Weather describes the daily or short-term conditions you're likely to find. Climate looks at long-range patterns and behaviors. (So yesterday’s hellish temp isn’t a sure-fire indicator of climate change; it’s the pattern of increasingly hellish days we’ve had in Austin over the last x-number of years that are indicators of climate change.)

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What's Up With the Running Man?

Dry Run recently received a couple of reviews (thank you, reviewers--you are the lifeblood of the modern author!) wondering why a place like Flights of Fantasy, the workplace of prostitutes Joe and Devin, where patrons act out a variety of chase scenarios before engaging in sexual acts, would exist. 

I hear you. Running around chasing someone isn't my idea of fun, at all. I'm a firm dweller in the "run only when chased" camp. Besides, I live deep in the heart of Texas, and for two-thirds of the year, I don't even want to leave my house, it's so freaking hot. Chase someone around? Yeah, pass.

But the men I picture patronizing Flights of Fantasy are far different from me.

They believe themselves to be the alpha male, the apex predator. They take what they want, and that power-grab is part of their fun. 

The idea of the chase isn't new. I read Richard Connell's The Most Dangerous Game in middle school. Maybe you did, too? In that story, a hunter becomes the hunted, trapped on a private island and pursued by a Russian big-game hunter. The film Predator explores a similar concept.

Look at the words modern America uses for powerful businessmen (and I say -men purposefully, because assertive women are too often viewed through a different lens when they achieve success). We use words like shark and wolf. Their sexual experiences are conquests.

It's easy for me to imagine that some men who view themselves that way (or who wish they were viewed that way) would be intrigued by the idea of being the hunter, the conqueror, of pitting their mental and physical endurance against a worthy opponent and coming out on top. The sex afterward is just an extension of the power trip--a way to dominate, to reinforce their position as the conqueror. 

Flights of Fantasy caters to those men.

Have literary ideas made their way into your world view or daydreams? Tell me about it in the comments.

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Pitching and Prostitution

Kerry Wood was a major league pitcher for fourteen seasons, more or less. He was good, too. But he could have been the best that ever played. Because he wasn't, I wrote a book about teenage prostitutes.

Bear with me.

Wood burst onto the scene with the Chicago Cubs in the spring of 1998, a big and baby-faced twenty-year-old with a crazy fastball and the most beautiful 12-to-6 curve I've ever seen. I won't bore you with the fawning that comes over me when I talk about Kerry Wood as he was that spring. Non-baseball fans won't care, and baseball fans already know how special Kerry Wood was. What I will say is that a couple months after his debut, he threw the highest-rated pitching performance ever, and baseball has been around a long, long time. He had so much promise.

Even people who aren't baseball fans probably know where this is going. It was a minor tragedy--nothing like the big ones we see with alarming regularity these days. Wood got hurt. And then he got hurt again. And again. Fourteen times in fourteen major league seasons. He was still a good pitcher, but all that promise, all that sparkling possibility that we saw in 1998, never came to pass.

It made me sad then. It makes me sad now. Kerry Wood was special. And then he wasn't. How does one cope when all their promise is swept away, through no fault of their own?

The answer, if I'd been looking at it as a human being and not as a rabid Cubs fan who only saw the legend he lost out on, is that Kerry Wood's life was never a tragedy to him.

He had a long big-league career. He played in the postseason. His last appearance took place where he'd started, in Chicago, as a Cub. To a standing ovation, he walked off the baseball field with his young son in his arms.

He has a lovely family, a job with the Cubs, and an active charitable foundation. He is grateful for the career he had, not filled with sadness over the one he could have had.

His life wasn't screwed up. The lens through which I viewed it was.

A long time after I had that realization, I started writing the story that would become Dry Run. I had this vague vision of a character being chased by someone, but why he or she was being chased was a mystery. Around the same time, for another project, I read an article about homeless youth and their attitudes toward sex. Joe, the hero of Dry Run, started to come into focus.

I wavered, though. A nineteen-year-old prostitute isn't your typical book hero. By necessity, if you're writing honestly, the world he inhabits is going to be pretty stark. The world that sprang up around Joe certainly is. 

People might read the blurb or the first scene and think, "My God, this is too dark." Some people will probably put the book down, and that's okay; it's not for everyone. But more than losing a reader or two, I didn't want to write something that exploited my characters or the real-life people in similar situations. I wanted to tell Joe's story honestly, without flinching, but without pity, too. Just like Kerry Wood, Joe doesn't view his life as a tragedy, and I would have been doing all of us a disservice if I'd treated him as if it were.

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What's that on the Bestsellers list? Dry Run? Yes, it is! 👋🚀🌈 Just a bit excited! (Also weirdly embarrassed that you can see my abundance of open tabs. I need them all open, okay? 😘) #DryRun #lgbtnovel #scifi #dystopian

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Naked and Not Afraid

Dry Run comes out tomorrow! Add it to your to-do list, put an alarm on your phone, write it on your inner forearm--whatever it takes to remind you to go to Amazon tomorrow and pick up a copy! (I'm a put-it-on-the-Google-calendar person, myself.)

And because Dry Run comes out tomorrow, I am feeling vulnerable. Like, really vulnerable. You know that dream where you go to school and suddenly realize you showed up naked? That's how I feel. 

I put my heart and soul into this book. And now, strangers and loved ones alike get to go buy that piece of me on Amazon ($3.99 ebook, $11.99 print, free on Kindle Unlimited). Anyone can see who I am.

It could go horribly wrong. That's a possibility. But what I've learned over the past three years I've been writing is that making myself vulnerable like this makes me happy. Sharing my early writings with my husband was scarier than the first time he saw me naked, but from the first chapter he read, he's been my biggest fan.

I remember whispering to my best friend (in a swimming pool, surrounded by our kids) that I was writing a book, and it wasn't meant for kids. Those words were too scary to say in a non-whisper. When she read the book, her first words were, "When can I read the next one?" She texted me as I was writing this, more excited about tomorrow than I am.

Opening myself up has deepened my connection to my closest loved ones. It's taken old acquaintances and turned them into friends who introduced me to other acquaintances who became friends, all champions of my work. It's turned strangers into colleagues, then turned those colleagues into mentors and friends. Every time I take a risk and make myself vulnerable, I'm so glad I did.

Viewed through that lens, tomorrow isn't so scary. I'm looking forward to it.

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Not What I Wanted to Talk About

At the time I finished writing Dry Run, almost two years ago now, I thought we Americans were on the precipice of shattering a glass ceiling, that we were working toward a more just and equal democracy. For years, I had heard the rumblings, though, and I wasn't foolish enough to believe that racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, and religious persecution were dying away. So I had written Dry Run as a sort of warning, a bogeyman's tale of what harm can be wrought by privilege, dehumanization, and desperation. I didn't ever want it to be real.

Dry Run comes out in eight days, and this blog post was originally going to be some catchy musing that would help convince folks they should read the book. Friends, I just can't, not when something so much more important is on my mind.

What's happening on the southern US border--families being ripped apart when their only crime is seeking a better life for their children--is the kind of cruelty I'd once naively hoped America was leaving behind.

The good news is that, according to a recent CNN poll, two-thirds of Americans disapprove of this policy. And this is our country. The people in our government are our employees, not our rulers. By making our voices heard, we can effect change.

And making our voices heard has never been easier. The League of Women Voters will happily tell you who your elected officials are; all you have to do to get the list is enter your zip code here. Even contacting these officials is easier than ever. Services like Resistbot and stampslicked.org will send messages for you. I'm sure there are many more resources. Even tweeting at your Senators and Reps matters. The point is, if you're troubled by what is happening to the children at the border, you aren't relegated to silence. You do have a voice, if you're moved to use it.

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Dry Run is up on Goodreads! It isnt available for pre-order yet, but it should be sometime in the next few days. I’ll keep you all updated!

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It's About Representation

"You'd sell more books if your main characters weren't gay--or whatever they are."

"You aren't a member of the community, so what makes you think you can accurately portray a (fill in the blank) person?"

I've heard both. The first statement was directed at me in person, the second online and was directed broadly. Both have merit in the sense that they're probably true.

But, as my friend Kate reminds me when I worry about stuff like this (and to be clear, I mean I worry about statement two, because I have never, and will never, care enough about sales numbers to justify making homophobes and racists more comfortable): It's about representation.

Simply put, there aren't enough gay characters, enough Latino characters, enough pick-your-underrepresented-group-and-stick-it-in-here characters in fiction (or in any media). We all need more.

What finally helped me reach peace about being a white, straight writer of the non-white, non-straight characters in Dry Run was the realization that I'm writing fiction. Yes, I did a lot of due diligence to get the thoughts and emotions of my characters as authentic as possible, and I hope I've done a good job, but my book is a fiction. It's made up. Joe and Devin and all the other characters are just--characters.

I want to get to a place where our choices in fiction are as varied as the people in the world. When deliberating over the "read or not-to-read" question about a book, I don't want to think about whether or not the main character in the story looks like me or shares my sexual orientation. I just want to know if it sounds like a good story. That's what I'm going for.

If you want to be educated about what it's like to be (fill in the blank again), seek out members of that group who are willing to share their experiences. Educating others isn't a responsibility of anyone in a particular group, but there are folks on Twitter and Facebook and in magazines and newspapers who are graciously talking. Listen.

Reading a work of fiction isn't the same education. But having lots of books full of diverse characters--reminding us that we are all worth writing and reading about--is important, too.

 Dry Run launches in two weeks and a day, friends! Can't wait!

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Dear Mrs. Tapscott,

It was your fault for having me sit by the window.

You wanted me to conjugate être and jouer when all sixteen-year-old me wanted to do was stare out the window, pick at my numerous split ends, and daydream.

Now see, as an adult, I can understand why my inattention irritated you. You were trying to teach my something useful -- though in the interest of full disclosure I'll say I've never needed French II. I wish I'd either been someplace where it was necessary or that I'd just taken Spanish like the kids who wanted an easier class and didn't indulge in romantic daydreams of outdoor cafes in Paris (or at least Canada). I've been a teacher, and French II-me would have irritated teacher-me a hell of a lot. But none of that matters, really.

I learned something more important than verb conjugation in your class. I learned the power of telling a story, even if I was the only person who ever heard it. In my mind, I sculpted worlds full of heroes and villains and intrigue and angst and very attractive boys who were inexplicably interested in the heroine, who happened to be a quiet, stubborn introvert with a whole lot of passion and a terrible temper.

The stories got me through French. And they got me through all of the most brain-killing times in my life: boring college courses, long car rides, the sometimes-crushing insomnia, the years when my children were small and days dragged on a diet of Caillou and the Bubble Guppies.

It took a long time for me to work up the courage to share my stories with anyone else, and it took another couple of years to learn to craft one into something I'm proud for others to read. But it started with you, Mrs. Tapscott. Thank you.