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I’m writing from the end of another manuscript.
This one’s about college football, and if it gets picked up for publication, you won’t see it until at least 2025.
Things move slow in the publishing world, yet I’m always in a rush, especially when I’m nearing the end of another book. This time around wasn’t any different. If anything, it was worse.
At the start of each year, I print out a work calendar with tiny rectangles that denote all 365 days. The calendar fits on a single sheet of paper. I use it to keep up with my writing, how long I’ve been working on a particular project.
For the college football book, I worked 101 straight days, and this was after I’d already written eight different iterations of the same story over the last few years. By the end of this draft, I was so lost in the fictional world I’d created, I was walking into walls. Okay. I never actually walked into any walls, but I did get in two car accidents in the span of about 48 hours.
The first one happened on a Sunday.
The Cranor Crew was on our way home from church when I decided to check the mail. On a Sunday. I was driving my wife’s brand-new Mazda CX-90, a vehicle she’d hand washed at least five times in the two weeks we’d owned it. Our mailbox is a solid stone pillar. The Mazda was wider, maybe, than our old Honda had been.
Do you see where this is going?
I didn’t.
As I pulled my wife’s brand-spanking-new vehicle up to check the mail (on a Sunday) I scraped the passenger side down the stones. I stopped, turned, and saw murder in my wife’s eyes. There was no taking back what had happened. I felt horrible. My wife was mad and stayed that way through the night.
Then, a day and a half later, I did it again.
I was reversing my truck out of the garage, thinking about the fourth quarter of my football book, and backed straight into a friend’s car. At least it wasn’t my wife’s Mazda, right?
Wrong.
It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t a joke. This was two wrecks in less than two days.
What followed was a series of calls to our insurance agency. We filed the claims, we braced for increased rates, and we talked. Late at night after the kids went down, my wife and I sat around our kitchen table, trying to make sense of my fog.
Every job comes with occupational hazards. Teachers have to deal with unruly parents. Construction workers wear hardhats. Writers, though, writers have to battle with themselves, the worlds they create on the page, and the real world, too.
When a story is really flowing, it’s easy to get those two worlds mixed up. It’s tempting to just stay down in the office, morning and night, pushing to write “The End,” but what about everything else?
What about the pickup line at school and gymnastics practice? What about that drive home from church where my kids were rocking to “Proud Mary,” and I was so stuck on a plot point I drove into the mailbox?
I once read somewhere that growing up is like learning to juggle. Your marriage is a ball. Your kids are a ball. And your job is a ball. The first two are made of glass. If you drop them, they could break. Your job, however, is rubber. It bounces. You can always pick it up and start back over again.
In the days that followed the car accidents, I thought a lot about those balls. I remembered the sound of the side panel scraping the rock, the look in my wife’s eyes. And somewhere in there, I wrote “The End,” which, as any author knows, is just the beginning.
| Books authored by Eli Cranor |
Broiler
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The troubles of two desperate families—one white, one Mexican American—converge rest in the ruthless underworld of an Arkansas chicken processing plant in this new thriller from the award-winning author of DON’T KNOW TOUGH.
Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo are hardworking, undocumented employees at the Detmer Foods chicken plant in Springdale, Arkansas, just a stone’s throw away from the trailer park where they’ve lived together for seven years. While dealing with personal tragedies of their own, the young couple endures the brutal, dehumanizing conditions at the plant in exchange for barebones pay.
When the plant manager, Luke Jackson, fires Edwin to set an example for the rest of the workers—and to show the higher-ups that he’s ready for a major promotion—Edwin is determined to get revenge on Luke and his wife, Mimi, a new mother who stays at home with her six-month-old son. Edwin’s impulsive action sets in motion a devastating chain of events that illuminates the deeply entrenched power dynamics between those who revel at the top and those who toil at the bottom.
From the nationally bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of Don’t Know Tough and Ozark Dogs comes another edge-of-your-seat noir thriller that exposes the dark, bloody heart of life on the margins in the American South and the bleak underside of a bygone American Dream. |
Don't Know Tough
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In Denton, Arkansas, the fate of the high school football team rests on the shoulders of Billy Lowe, a volatile but talented running back. Billy comes from an extremely troubled home: a trailer park where he is terrorized by his mother’s abusive boyfriend. Billy takes out his anger on the field, but when his savagery crosses a line, he faces suspension.
Without Billy Lowe, the Denton Pirates can kiss their playoff bid goodbye. But the head coach, Trent Powers, who just moved from California with his wife and two children for this job, has more than just his paycheck riding on Billy’s bad behavior. As a born-again Christian, Trent feels a divine calling to save Billy—save him from his circumstances, and save his soul.
Then Billy’s abuser is found murdered in the Lowe family trailer, and all evidence points toward Billy. Now nothing can stop an explosive chain of violence that could tear the whole town apart on the eve of the playoffs. |
Ozark Dogs
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In this Southern thriller, two families grapple with the aftermath of a murder in their small Arkansas town.
After his son is convicted of capital murder, Vietnam War veteran Jeremiah Fitzjurls takes over the care of his granddaughter, Joanna, raising her with as much warmth as can be found in an Ozark junkyard outfitted to be an armory. He teaches her how to shoot and fight, but there is not enough training in the world to protect her when the dreaded Ledfords, notorious meth dealers and fanatical white supremacists, come to collect on Joanna as payment for a long-overdue blood debt.
Headed by rancorous patriarch Bunn and smooth-talking, erudite Evail, the Ledfords have never forgotten what the Fitzjurls family did to them, and they will not be satisfied until they have taken an eye for an eye. As they seek revenge, and as Jeremiah desperately searches for his granddaughter, their narratives collide in this immersive story about family and how far some will go to honor, defend—or in some cases, destroy it. |
| Previous columns: |
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• Writing from my back deck
• Writing from the morning of my thirty-fifth year
• Writing on the day of the college football National Championship
• Writing from the space between breaths
• Writing from 2022
• Writing from the glow of a plastic Christmas tree
• Writing on a rollercoaster of triumph and disaster
• Writing from the drop-off line at my daughter’s elementary school
• Writing with Thanksgiving on my mind
• Writing from the crowd before the start of a Shovels & Rope show
• Writing from the depths of a post-book-festival hangover
• Writing from the Ron Robinson Theatre
• Writing to you on Halloween Eve
• Writing from my bed on a Saturday morning
• Writing from my office with two darts clenched in my left hand
• Writing from the shade of my favorite tree
• Writing from my desk on a Tuesday morning
• Writing from a pirate ship
• Writing from the airport
• Writing from the hospital
• I'm writing from the water
• Writing from my wife's Honda Pilot
• Writing from my office |
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