James Maxey is a writer I admire. For his work ethic. For the quality of his prose. For his imagination. His story “To Know All Things That Are In The Earth” is one of my favorites. So you can be sure I was pleased to find and read this today.

I will say, in utter candor, that Servant of a Dark God is a work that truly stands out from other fantasy books on the market. What makes this book work so well is that it’s a story about family first, and a fantasy adventure second. Full review.

James Maxey loved met and loved a woman named Laura. She told him she had breast cancer. He didn’t care. Later when the disease advanced, he offered to marry her. She turned him down, but not because she didn’t love him back. The disease progressed.

His posts about this experience are tender and poignant. When you read them you will rejoice. You will sorrow. And you will think about life.

He begins like this:

She was dying when I met her. We met through online personal ads, and she wrote me saying that she liked the philosophy I had sprinkled through my post. I don’t even recall what it said, really–something about finding humor and hope even in down times, I think. And she told me she’d been through some down times. She’d fought breast cancer, her husband had left her when she was diagnosed with the disease. This might send other people into a spiral of despair and self-pity that they could never pull out of. But, she hadn’t surrendered to her worries and woes. She bested them, and went on to live a terrific life. She had gotten a butterfly tattoo–it was her symbol of transformation. The time of her cancer and her divorce were when she had been drawn into her cocoon. But she’d emerged with wings.

Here are the five I would read. They’re short. So take some time. Savor them.

1. Laura Kathleen Herrmann
2.  Laura and the Flowers
3. Laura’s Snow
4. Cancer on the Comics Page
5. One Year

When you finish, you might then want receive a free book of his in exchange for a donation (of any size; yes, even for just one buck), to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation. To make a donation vist his Books for Breast webpage.

Then live and love while the sun shines. And be glad.

You already know how I feel about writerly rules. So when I read James Maxey’s “The Only Law of Literature,” I had to share it.

I want to quote the whole thing here. But I’ll resist and quote only the conclusion.

[In response to critiquing stories that don't work for you] All the literary analysis of writing techniques, of style, of world building, of creating characters–it all has it’s place, but it’s almost completely useless as a guide to writing a good book. You are never going to be able to think or study or analyze your way into writing a book that people love.

There is only one law of good literature: Write what you’d love to read.

Not what you have read and loved. What you love, but haven’t yet read.

To quote myself from the Impish Idea thread:

Every thing you write should be a love story. Not a romance. But a story written because you loved it.

Follow your passion. Don’t worry about pleasing everyone. Fill your book with the stuff that makes your heart race and leave out the stuff that bores you. If you don’t make it into print, at least you’ll have a book you can look at with pride as being truly your own.

Once you’ve learned this secret, everything else falls into place.

Go read the whole post.

It’s important to learn craft. You cannot get away from it. But craft is only useful as a tool to tell this cool, wonderful, poignant, amazing thing we’ve invented and discovered.

Stephen R. Covey (or is it Lex Luthor?)

First of all, if I could look like Stephen R. Covey does in that picture, I would shave my head and never look back. Holy moly, I love that picture. But that’s not why I’m writing.

James Maxey is a writer who I respect and whose comments on the boards of Codex Writers often make me think or laugh. He recently started a thread about writing mission statements.

Ack!

I groaned when I first read the title of his topic. I know first-hand how useful goals are. I know how vital it is to identify what’s vital in any endeavor. Heck, I’m a Covey-lover through and through.

But every mission statement I’ve seen has either been useless corporate toilet paper (because they’re printed on stuff that’s too stiff and rigid to be of any help in the bathroom) or it’s a personal artifact that has a six week half life, after which it turns into something like that singing fish you bought and can’t for the life of you figure out why or where to put it now that you realize you could have eaten a steak for just as much money and the pleasure would have lasted longer.

And yet consciously thinking about how you want to live is so powerful. I think the corporate world ruined the term for me. I cannot bring myself to write a “mission statement.” I know what I want to do in my various roles in life. I know how I want to live. But I cannot use that label. Alas.

So here’s my “what I want to do” as far as writing is concerned. It’s not crisp and clean. And if I had to write it again, it would come out differently. But it has the gist.

—-

I want to make people fall in love like I did when I first watched the Sound of Music–that sweet, pure yearning. And when they’re out of love, I want them to see a way back.

Every once in a while I want the ground to shift under the feet of my readers like it shifted under mine when I first watched Les Miserables with Anthony Perkin.

I want them to laugh.

I want to give them the wonder and adventure that was given me when I read the Hobbit.

I want them, at least once, to shout in triumph.

I want to share my delight in people who are fascinating, flawed, salt-of-the-earth, odd, funny, strong or a hundred other wonderful things, but who show some courage, a little or a lot.

I want readers to weep at the hope of redemption. I want them to despair at loss.

I want the sun to shine. I want the world to crack.

And when my readers are done, when the book’s closed and they sit back, I want the story and people to linger, I want my readers to want to go back. I want them to feel it was, not only a surge of living, but a good thing to have once been lost in the pages of my book.