By Brenda Marie Smith
I was sixty-six years old when my novel, If Darkness Takes Us, was published by an independent press—a day of celebration for sure, but also a day I’d often thought would never come. The book drew on many facets of my actual life, coupled with my deepest fears.
Bea Crenshaw is a grandmother who’s worried about the environment, so she secretly stockpiles food, gear, and seeds to prepare for disaster. She’s keeping four grandkids alone when a solar pulse destroys the U.S. grid, taking cars, phones, and running water along with it. Bea must teach these kids to survive before her heart gives out.
Back in high school in 1971, everyone assumed I would have a long, bright career as a writer. I was runner-up in a national short story contest, I took second place in a statewide poetry contest, I was editor for the school literary magazine and editorial editor for the newspaper. I won a full-ride university scholarship. I was also painfully shy. It was a sin in Oklahoma in those days to show your brains, especially for a girl. I hid my talents, terrified of being taunted for being uppity.
The Hippie Days
And so, I did what so many young people did back then. I dropped out and took off hitchhiking across the country with the man I would soon marry while I was still only eighteen. We visited all the hippie hot spots—Boulder, the California redwoods, the Oregon coast, Haight-Ashbury. After that, we lived with my husband’s parents in a tiny Louisiana town. I had time to write again, but I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
We moved to the Arkansas Ozark Mountains and lived off the grid, drank from an artesian spring by the back door of our tar-paper shack, and grew a garden. We read spiritual books by lantern light, and my husband burned my poetry in the woodstove, saying I needed to purge my ego. I was stunned, but I was too naive to realize what an absolute bullying act that was.
From there we moved to a hippie vegan community in Tennessee called The Farm. We continued to live off-grid and grow vegetables, and I gave birth to two sons, delivered by midwives. Because we cooked our food from scratch, hauled water, chopped wood for heating and cooking, and lived in households crammed with babies and toddlers, there was no time to think, much less write. I didn’t realize it then, but I was racking up experiences that would later fuel my writing. People often comment on how much research I must have done for my novel, but my life was my research.
Austin
In 1980 we came to Austin, Texas, and started a tofu salad business. I got involved in the anti-nuclear movement and met cool people who liked the fact that I was smart. I finally realized I was married to the wrong man, but I married a bigger bully soon after. It took me until 1990 to extract myself. I was a single mom to two sons, working a high-stress management job for a student housing co-op, and I did reams of business writing.
At last, I met the right man for me, Doug, the furnace repair guy at the co-ops, and we fled to Las Vegas to get married in 1995 on the lucky day of 7/7. My sons were almost grown by then, and Doug had three tweener sons. I raised teenage boys for seventeen years and somehow survived, though sometimes I wondered if the testosterone levels in our house might kill me.
I quit the high-stress job in 2000 and started doing bookkeeping from home. That’s when, at age 47, I finally got the chance to take fiction courses from UCLA online. I seriously believed I’d be making a living as a novelist in no time. After all, I’d been praised as a business writer for years. How hard could it be to slam out some novels and make piles of money? Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Finally, I Write
Turned out, writing a novel was the hardest endeavor I’d ever undertaken. I pumped out a tome that was 170,000 words long, not realizing that no one but Stephen King and David Foster Wallace got novels published of that length. I submitted that novel to Penguin-Putnam in a contest. They liked the book but said it needed editing—biggest understatement ever. An agent referred me to a teaching editor. He tore that novel up and scrawled across the page, “A plot. A plot. My kingdom for a plot!” Hilarious now, but I cried for a week.
Yet this editor said I had talent, so he took me to school on the craft of writing drama. He was tough on me. I cried every time I talked to him—he even critiqued my emails—but he forced me to learn to accept criticism and lectured me about stakes, stakes, stakes. He charged me a small fortune, money I had to borrow, but I chalked it up to a relatively cheap education, specific for my writing needs.
I rewrote the novel over and over. The story was still too long, and I didn’t know how to write a good query. Then I got an opportunity to make more money than I’d ever made, doing accounting for a two-hundred-million-dollar insurance claim. I shelved the book and worked 60-hour weeks for three years. I was too tired to write at night, so I read hundreds of novels, lots of classics, hoping to absorb good writing by osmosis, even while half-asleep.
I guess it worked, because at the end of it, I knew how to fix my novel. Two old friends were also writing novels so we started a writing group, and that got me inspired again. I tossed out all my rewrites, went back to the original novel, and stripped it down until I got to the actual plot, hidden beneath excess verbiage.
Publishing
I was scared of hunting for an agent, so I decided to self-publish. I raised the money with crowd-funding, where, like Charles Dickens, I pre-sold books to friends and relatives. And thus, my first novel, Something Radiates, was born, a paranormal thriller based on hippie spiritual lore. It’s still too wordy, but it’s sexy, scary, and unique.
In 2013 I started If Darkness Takes Us during NaNoWriMo. Life kept sidetracking me with money and health issues, but by 2016 I was shopping the book. I entered agent-showcase contests and placed in three of them, but got no bites from agents. Most online contests are focused on YA, and these agents weren’t interested in an apocalypse starring one old woman and written by another. That’s when I realized I was a Southern literary writer, and I‘d been approaching the wrong agents.
I kept rewriting the book. Twice, I scraped up money for development edits, and I queried more than one hundred agents and small publishers. I got mild interest but no success until…
Finding Home
I saw an ad on Twitter for a novel contest from Southern Fried Karma Press, looking for unique Southern voices. I entered the contest and actually won it. I was floored. The prize was a publishing contract. The publisher called to say, “You have found your literary tribe.” And that’s what it felt like—finally a publisher who gets me!
The editing process was hard on a partly-disabled old woman, but I made it through and have a beautiful book as a result. If Darkness Takes Us came out in October 2019. I attended my book launch event in a borrowed wheelchair—I can walk but can’t negotiate the biggest indie book store in Texas on foot. I practiced my reading for weeks. My old-lady voice is scratchy and shaky, and I was so nervous I kept losing my voice. My hubby said, “You talk loud all the time. Just do it.” The book launch was wonderful, family and friends came to town. I cried when I started reading, but I did alright. I never would’ve had a book at all without the endless help of other writers.
In 2018 during NaNoWriMo, I slammed out the first draft of a sequel, writing 120,000 words in 26 days. This book, If the Light Should Come, is told in the voice of Bea’s eighteen-year-old grandson, Keno. It’s a coming-of-age in an apocalypse story. I never knew I had a teenage boy living inside me until he came spewing out. I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with him. Now I have a contract for the novel to come out in June 2021, from SFK Press’s new imprint, Hearthstone.
My parents, who were always my biggest fans, didn’t live to see me get published, but they saw me start writing again, and they were thrilled. I only wish I’d started sooner. Now I have so many ideas and so little time. But, hey, I got published, which is a dream come true for me. My novel is out in the world with its sequel on the way, I have some fans, a big loving family, and life is good—well, except for pandemics, hurricanes, wildfires, racists, and murder hornets.
Thank you, Mindy, for giving me space to tell my story. I hope it will inspire others to get started on their dreams of writing and to NEVER, EVER give up.