Tornado Alley Bliss

Guys. Guys. In the past 24 hours, I've driven 900 miles, given two presentations, and gone eclipsing with the hedonists of Hebron, Nebraska. Needless to say, my death is now imminent. But before I go, I need to tell you something. Come closer. Are you listening?

This. Is. AWESOME.

This tornado alley tour is barely half done, but it's already been the best, most amazing thing. I have turned tricks on Route 66. I have listened to George Strait's "Amarillo by Morning" while literally driving to Amarillo at the crack of dawn. I have been phone-coaching writers while doing 80 on highway 80 (hands-free, natch), preaching the gospel from town to town like some kind of redneck revivalist, buying gas and motel rooms with the wares I sell out of my trunk, and all of it, ALL of it made possible by one or more exceptionally generous, hard-working writer-wranglers in each of these magical midwestern metropoli. 

This photo is an incredibly deep metaphor for... something.

You know. The ones who put their own work on the back burner to make a good time happen for other people. The ones who turn a bunch of atomized, scribbling saddos into a crew, a posse, a bona-fide network of word-warriors. I tell you what: this industry is one of the most frustrating, archaic, long-odds masochism olympics out there - but Misty and Mike and Kimberly and Lynette and people like them are the lynchpins that keep the wheels bolted on and the literary world turning.

And just on the off chance that I happen to survive the night, this I vow: I am done chasing invitations to workshops and conferences. From now on, I am not waiting to be asked, much less asking to be asked: I am here for the people who are here for *their* people, and the rest of the world had better strap in and watch out!

Farm to Marvelous

The Tornado Alley Tour has begun!

And you know - there may come a day when I am sick to death of going places, but I don't think I will ever stop being bowled over by the opportunity to be a guest in someone else's life. It is just such a thrill and a treat, y'all - to spend a day living in an alternate timeline, if you will.

Like, I will never be a mother of five living on a 20-acre farm in Texas hill country - but the next best thing is getting to have a sleepover at Bokerah Brumley's place. 

It is just a special kind of magic to wake up to preening ducks outside your bedroom window, have a breakfast of fresh fruit and eggs gathered up just that morning, and then go outside to watch kids playing with plastic lightsabers on the trampoline while turkeys peck and gabble and the dogs supervise from the porch. More than that, it is just so refreshing to be reminded of the value of doing some things the old-fashioned way - whether that's letting the tots play in the dirt, being a full-time professional parent, or DIYing your Sunday dinner. 

So today's shoutout is to my fabulous country ladies - Bokerah and Amber and Lauren, Zetta and Maren and every other fearless farm-to-market-road fort-holder who doesn't brag NEARLY as often as she should about the priceless treasure-garden of a life she has quietly cultivated while people like me were stuck in traffic :) )

Fly that flag proudly, you doughty dames - this town mouse heartily salutes you!

A Brief Moral Meditation

At times like this, when emotions are running high and our national jimmies are thoroughly rustled, I find it worthwhile to ask: "What is is the hardest, bravest thing I could do right now?"

That is sometimes a hard question to answer. Chances are that this thing, whatever it is, will not win you easy backpats from other people on your team. It will not be cathartic or gratifying to even contemplate. It will almost certainly involve some kind of cost or risk to a vulnerable part of your identity. And it will be impossible to discover this thing while you are here in the midst of the public-opinion maelstrom.

So the next time you have a chance to be alone with your thoughts, I encourage you to meditate on what your bravest, most self-challenging act might be. It's okay if you can't bring yourself to attempt it right now. (I'm right there with you - sharp enough to know what I should be doing, chicken enough to not be doing it.) But knowing better - *hypothesizing* better - is the first, most critical step to doing better.

And telling other people how to act and feel isn't working.

Announcing Tex Thompson's Tornado Alley Tour!

Listen, y'all. I can get down with left-coast libertines. I love the weather - the food - the public transit - the weather - the creative scene - and the weather's not bad either.

But it's time to get back to my roots. My people. My time zone. And that's why we're hitting the road and doing it: a two-week beat-the-heat red-state road-trip - with a different writers' event around every corner, and a good time to be had by all!

Will I see you there?

Click the titles below for time and venue specifics
unless otherwise noted, all events are free or pass-the-hat!

Weds, 8/16 - Cisco, TX - No Mustard on Your Shirt: Spill-Proofing Your Grammar and Style

hosted by the Cisco Writers Club

It's a truth every interviewee knows: there's nothing more tragic than missing out on your dream job because the interviewer can't see past the stain on your collar. In this class, we'll tackle the grammar and style mistakes that even experienced writers make, and highlight winning strategies for scrubbing them out of your manuscript. Don't give your reader even one easy reason to toss your work aside: come learn how to put the "pro" in your prose!




Sat, 8/19 - Amarillo, TX - Word Alchemy Lab (Micro-Level)
hosted by the Texas High Plains Writers


If your book were a movie, it would be an instant classic. A stellar premise. Unforgettable characters. Mind-blowing plot turns. But somehow the words on the page aren't fully conveying the tension of the tight parts, or the loveliness of the pretty parts, or the shocking-ness of the shocking parts. Never fear!  In this class, we'll study the art of adapting your writing style to suit any purpose, refining each page and paragraph, and fine-tuning every line until it sings.


Sun, 8/20 - Lubbock, TX - The Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue

When it comes to dialogue, a good scene is a 'geologically active' one. Like pieces of the Earth's crust, characters clash, fold, and buckle as they interact (and yes, sometimes even bump and grind!) In this high-energy, interactive workshop, we'll analyze the features of real human speech, and how to amplify and manipulate them to suit your purpose. Whether your current scene is as subtle as a tremor or as explosive as an earthquake, we'll craft dialogue guaranteed to keep your plot moving, your pages turning, and your readers on their toes.


Mon, 8/21 - Kansas City, KS - The Seven Deadly First-Page Sins
 hosted by Lynette M. Burrows

There's no one right way to begin your story – but there are plenty of wrong ones. In this class, we'll take you on a cautionary tour through the pits of page-one hell, complete with agent pet peeves, reader turn-offs, and "thanks but no thanks" editorial dealbreakers. Don't let your manuscript suffer in form-rejection torment: let us guide you through the slush-pile inferno and lead your story toward the light!

Weds, 8/23 - Lincoln, NE - Quasi-Fictional: An Evening with Patricia Scott and Tex Thompson

hosted by Francie and Fitch independent bookstore

Shakespeare's Coriolanus becomes a high school baseball drama. American colonialism is reimagined in a world of cowboys, fishmen, and "culture magic". And authors Patricia Scott and Tex Thompson invite you to join in for a rousing roundtable conversation, in which we ask: how much fact makes for first-rate fiction - and when does fiction actually change the facts?





Thurs, 8/24 - Tulsa, OK - Dialect to Die For
hosted by Nevermore Edits

When it comes to dialect, we often hear that 'less is more'. So how do you render a good Scottish brogue, or Southern drawl – and for that matter, how can you give a non-English-speaking character a voice that's distinct but still readable?  In this class, we'll examine how to represent accents and speakers of other languages in a way that captures their voices without reducing them to verbal tics, gimmicks, or stereotypes.




Sat, 8/26 - Oklahoma City, OK - Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding From the Inside Out



It’s a hard truth every writer knows: a good story needs a great setting, and many a diligent storyteller has gotten lost in the details. But doesn’t have to be that way! Whether you’re adapting the past, delving into distant regions of the present day, or conjuring other worlds altogether, some principles of good story-grounding are universal – and you can start applying them right away. Come learn the secrets of crafting immersive, dynamic settings – real or imaginary! – that your fans will want to explore for years to come.

Sun, 8/27 - Ardmore, OK - The Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue
hosted by Arbuckle Creative Writers

When it comes to dialogue, a good scene is a 'geologically active' one. Like pieces of the Earth's crust, characters clash, fold, and buckle as they interact (and yes, sometimes even bump and grind!) In this high-energy, interactive workshop, we'll analyze the features of real human speech, and how to amplify and manipulate them to suit your purpose. Whether your current scene is as subtle as a tremor or as explosive as an earthquake, we'll craft dialogue guaranteed to keep your plot moving, your pages turning, and your readers on their toes.


Sat, 9/2 - Roanoke, TX - The Plate Tectonics Theory of Dialogue 
hosted by the Roanoke Public Library

When it comes to dialogue, a good scene is a 'geologically active' one. Like pieces of the Earth's crust, characters clash, fold, and buckle as they interact (and yes, sometimes even bump and grind!) In this high-energy, interactive workshop, we'll analyze the features of real human speech, and how to amplify and manipulate them to suit your purpose. Whether your current scene is as subtle as a tremor or as explosive as an earthquake, we'll craft dialogue guaranteed to keep your plot moving, your pages turning, and your readers on their toes.

Want to see one of these in your home town? Email me at tex at thetexfiles.com - have Powerpoint, will travel!

A Living Word for a Human Superlative

You know that thing, where somebody’s clock runs out and then we all get together and talk about how cool and rad they were, and how much we enjoyed them and what a difference they made in our lives?

It’s pretty much the most bass-ackwards thing ever, and I’m not up for it. Present tense verbs, people. We have them for a reason.

So here’s the thing. Sandy Thompson is our family’s human superlative. He is a filthy bleeding-heart hippie, an aggressively phlegmatic social instigator, a chronic iconoclast, a mainliner of books and a freebaser of big ideas, a gratuitous hollerer of inappropriate things at inopportune moments, a hot-sauce sommelier and a study in joyful cootery. He is also the most infinitely thoughtful, relentlessly generous, inexhaustibly kind person I know – and that is a tall order.

And of course he didn’t get that way without having to make some hard choices. It’s not as if we make it easy to balance being a sensitive, enlightened sapient AND a belching, snorting, unapologetic man-savage even in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Seventeen – and that had to be doubly true back in the Eisenhower days, when both parents wore combat boots and raised the kids with a strictly liver-and-onions lifestyle.

And now more than ever, I’m so glad my generation of Thompsons have gotten to grow up with his living example – because he’s spent his life being what I can only think of as a professional American – a truly artisanal citizen. He reads omnivorously, and re-evaluates his conclusions accordingly. He doesn’t buy into the “four legs good, two legs bad” knee-jerk tribalism that has so many of us treating our preferred political party like a gang membership. He volunteers at the local radio station, signs petitions and makes phone calls on behalf of his local candidates. Most importantly (and this is a mark I STILL can’t hit) he knows how to passionately, absolutely, fundamentally disagree with someone, without losing his temper, his sense of humor, or his respect for the other person’s basic humanity. 

That is so hard to do, y’all. That is the endangered art that we absolutely cannot let go extinct. We need fierce, educated, articulate activists who will go to the mat for their principles. But we also need those same people to fight just as hard within themselves and their own movements – to hold on to empathy and compassion for the people on the other side, to ask questions and listen and consider what unhealed wounds, what legitimate, unaddressed grievances, are festering underneath all the obnoxious rancor. Neurologically speaking, it is one of the hardest things in the world to critique your own team, to admit that the other guy has a point, to deliberately flunk your group’s purity test and risk being ostracized on all sides... and yet that is the test we cannot afford to fail. We can’t afford to sign away our own good judgment and let our team’s dogma machine do the thinking for us. We can’t afford to become the club that it uses to beat down our fellow citizens. Singular self-directed human beings do not trample their neighbors. Stampeding herds do.


Sanford has known that longer than I’ve known how to tie my shoes – and so much more that I haven’t even begun to clue in on. I STILL don’t know how to roll a joint or play a guitar or wear the same tie-dyed T-shirt for a funk-free solid week, and my zydeco-and-birkenstocks game is total weaksauce. And no matter how far I make it in the long run, I will never match the bigness of our Lebowski – our family’s exceptional, irreplaceable, once-a-generational gonzo-humanist Renaissance man.

But my belch-fu is at least good enough to hold the line – and as long as you and me and the rest of us rabble-rousing Yankee wastrels are willing to hang out, drink the beers, shoot the breeze, and give until *somebody* hurts, I expect he’ll be all right with that.


POSTSCRIPT: We got to enjoy Sanford for another four months after I wrote this post. It still wasn't nearly long enough.

Author to Author to Awesome

So apparently there's this rule in improv comedy: whatever bizarre scenario your partner invents, you don't refute it. The answer is always "yes, and..."

I have been getting a lot of mileage out of that idea, especially when I travel. "Hey, will you hold this snake?" "Sure thing!" "Should we head over to the Makeout Room and listen to some X-rated slam poetry?" "Uh, yeah!" "Want to shack up in my auntie-in-law's spare bedroom and then have birthday okra for breakfast?" "Boy, do I!" (It was phenomenal, by the way.)

So when a nice Scandinavian-sounding fellow emailed me out of the blue one day and said "hey, we haven't really met, but while you're in California, do you want to come down to Carlsbad and shoot an author video?", there was really only one answer - and y'all, it's been one of the best yet.
Now I have a question for *you*, friendly friends: do you want to check out my buddy Sven Davison's ridiculously kickass "Author to Author" writing/publishing video series and subscribe to his channel?

Midnight Confession II

I don't know why, but I'm having a really hard time taking off the red hat and being a real person again. It is just such a thrill to go out into the world to delight and disgust the unsuspecting masses - and SO hard to go back to all those other less-fun feelings that you just can't put off forever. Fear and sadness are dragging me something fierce today.

I tell you what, though: this weekend was just a hell of a thing. It was such a revelation to meet someone who is everything I want to be when I grow up - who has built her identity on love and realness and unstoppable charisma, both as an author and a teacher - and who is massively, awardfully, bestsellerly successful as a result. I mean, I was going to keep at it regardless... but what a blessing it is to have artisanal human proof that it CAN be done.

Tangentially: it is a special kind of shocking when you meet somebody who seems to see your entire self. We are so accustomed to spinning our hexagonal heads around to meet the world with whichever face the present audience expects (partner, employee, parent, friend, whatever) - and not at all prepared to encounter someone who speaks affectionately and directly to our raw living core. I totally get it now, and I’m sorry I didn’t before.

Anyway. Keep at that relentless, visceral person-work, y'all. Riding herd on all those stampeding feels will wear your ass right out, and STILL beats the alternative by a country mile.

Cactus and Kangaroos and Kate Forsyth!

Okay, so I just finished my first-ever "master class retreat" in beautiful sunny Eugene, Oregon. It kind of wrecked me. The students were phenomenal. I have a massive girl-crush on the organizer. And getting to spend four whole days training up a bona-fide word-slinging *squad* has ruined me for everything else. It's weird and gross and lame to admit this, but being the big name on the marquee is a whole new level of ego BDSM.

So now I'm officing out of a grocery store coffee shop, mournfully packing up my riding crop and stilettos and belatedly recollecting my own literary kink-dungeon back home. Here are the relevant points:

1. Oregonians: if you write, you need, want, and deserve to acquaint yourself with the Wordcrafters organization in Eugene. I have never met a kinder, more hard-working organizer than Darryl Lynne Evans, and ANY show she puts on is going to be more than worth your while. Next one starts up in August!

2. Texians: provided DFW is not entirely underwater by next weekend, we are bringing in Kate Forsyth (all the way from Australia!) to instruct, delight, and enthrall us. This infinitely-improbable author lays claim to 30 books for children and adults, an ALA award for Best Historical Fiction, and a PhD in fairy tales. No, I didn't know you could do that either. Booksigning on Friday the 16th - all-day two-part writers workshop on the 17th (plotting/pacing/suspense in the morning, and pan-genre research and worldbuilding in the afternoon) - and a damn fine time throughout. This is a gutsy first for us here on the back end, and one we're really excited about. If you want to learn from a one-of-a-kind special talent, pave the way for more A-list authors coming to town, and help us establish DFW as a nationally-recognized literary hotspot, please help us welcome Kate with a packed house!

And just to say thank you for reading all the way to the end of this, I won't even close with another dominatrix metaphor. You are welcome. Now go sign up!

Northwestern Imminence

Okay. I've spent a week hiding out at an undisclosed location in the Oregonian hinterlands, mending dented promises and waiting for my words to grow back. Now the results are in: Oregon is officially better than you. 

Don't feel bad. It's better than me, too. It's full of organic free-range buses, user-friendly temperatures, and Jennie Komp does baked goods drone-strikes on the weekly. Plus, the Willamette Writers have a safehouse and a distribution network in every city. Orit Ofri and her Salem WW crew will bring cookies and graciously overlook your catastrophically terrible humor. Valerie Ozgenc and the Eugene WW team will wine, dine and recline you at first sight. And Kate Ristau's Portland WW people... well, I guess you and I are gonna have to find out together, cuz I'll be doing "Auntie M's Guide to Greaseless Self-Promotion" there on the 6th. (You should go. It'll be rad.)

In the meantime, I will grudgingly consent to depart Oregon for this so-called "Montana", if there is any such thing, and bestow my presence upon MisCon in Missoula. (Apparently the town's original name was Hellgate. I'm still not convinced the whole thing isn't a geographical snipe-hunt.)

BUT THEN I am ripping RIGHT back down to Eugene, because the heartbreakingly divine people at Wordcrafters In Eugene are having me on to present their Master Class Retreat from June 1st to June 4th. Yes. Correct. You and me and a select few other of Earth's most intrepid hero-scribes, forsaking the mundane world to spend four days working microliterary miracles in the Word Alchemy Lab. Your prose will not be polished. It will be dissected, atomized, and reborn. There are three seats left, six days remaining, and one under-the-hat promise from me to you: if you do sign up for this, I will read your manuscript beforehand. (Yes, the whole thing. I do epic fantasy. Your word count does not scare me.) We will talk about it together, one on one. And I will not make you cry.

SO. Texas friends: hold that fort.

Northwesternauts: I think you know what to do.

For Eleanor - A Life Unlidded

So there was this one time when I was visiting my grandmother up in Oregon, and all of us ladies went out to lunch together at Shari's. She ordered the nachos (an appetizer) and got an ENORMOUS plate of chips and cheese - enough for any five ordinary humans to eat.

Unfazed, she ate some and then piled the rest in a to-go box. After we left, we stopped at McDonald's drive-through so that she could get a drink. My aunt Molly was very sure that Gramma needed to put the lid on the soda, and said so several times. Gramma listened patiently, and then replied, "I'm going to do whatever I darn please." At which point she calmly reached into her purse and paid with a nacho.

(Which turned out not to be the quarters she was looking for. She found the money on the second attempt.)

That's the goal, you guys. You might not get to beat her record - 96 is a hell of a number, and none of us knows how many good days we'll get. But if you can roll up to Mickey D's and tell your well-meaning friends and family exactly who's in charge of your senior Diet Coke, you are Doing It Right.
Thanks for showing us how it's done, Gramma. You didn't always know what to do with the likes of us, and we sure as heck don't know what we're going to do without you.

Eleanor Mayhugh (1921-2017)