December 2025 – John D Reinhart

Trust the Story Teller

You’re a writer, you know how it goes. You’ve got a million ideas in your head – story lines, plot twists, character quirks – all waiting to hit the page one of these days. They’re like bubbles in a stew – a thick, rich stew redolent with bits and pieces of brilliant bones and perfect plot pieces. They bubble to the top and then pop. They’re gone. If only you’d had a tiny tad of time to tell them.

Recently, I drove from California to New Jersey. My task was to deliver my Outback to my daughter in Texas, and take her Prius to my daughter-in-law in New Jersey. The Outback will handle a Texas winter better than the Prius, and the daughter-in-law just needs to shuttle her kid – my grandson – to and from daycare. Easy peasy.

I was cruising through New Mexico, dashing down long, straight roads between breathtaking mesas and canyons and passing Indian Trading Posts by the dozen, trying to figure out the sequel to my upcoming Phineas Caswell novel.

Okay, so… what?

That fellow ChatGPT has assured me, you see, that August is the best time of year to release a historical fiction action/adventure/YA novel.

Repeat: What?

See, August is still summertime, still time to pick up a beach read, but also heading towards the school year, time to pick up some history. Something like that. See?

All fine and well. The novel is a diary, written by a cheeky 12-year-old boy in 1705, taken to sea against his will by his bumbling but well meaning uncle. Pirates, spies, war – all the good stuff. That’s my August-release book.

But it ends on a cliff-hanger. So, there needs to be a second book.

Flat-topped mesas whisk by the windows, shadows shoulder their way behind the deep canyon cliffs, and the next story plays out in my head.

There is already a short story I’d previously penned that takes place in a Portuguese port. A perfect place to start the new novel.

Armed with that one scene, and with nothing to do but look out the window and keep from crashing, the story plays out in my head.

This is new for me. I usually have to write the story down to tell it. But this new story simply rolls out, logical and lovely, as I fly down the freeway like an arrow bound for Albuquerque.

Of course you can’t drive and write – the cruise control’s good, but, come on…

So it comes down to my turning to trust my inner author. Rich scenes roll before my eyes – scenes I would have to remember. Scenes I could only see in my mind’s eye, hoping they caught the attention of my thought-keeper.

Here, seven weeks later, comes the task of finally putting to paper the plans I’d poured out in northern New Mexico. The images that exploded in my eyes remained, and the story simply poured itself onto paper as real and writable as it had on the highway.

Now I have before me an outline, nothing more. Scene after scene – this thing happens, then that. It’s the structure, the bones.

It occurred to me this morning that these sentences are nothing more than writing prompts, like those offered by every website that purports to power up your inner author.

You’re a writer. You know how it is. If someone asks you to explain why the silly snowman sits behind the bush, you know you can come up with a story.

The prompts, the outline, are space-keepers, aren’t they? Here’s a whole book, complete in its condensed form. Like a suitcase stuffed with springs, when the time comes to write it, you open the case, and the prompts pop out to create a full and fantastic book.

That storyteller, aged and ancient and ever hiding inside you, will sit down by the fire to weave his words into the best book you’ve ever penned.

Because you’re a writer.

Have faith.

I See Icy Things

You’re a writer – you know how it is. You look out the window and see the same old thing every day. Some days it’s cloudy, some days it’s not. But it’s the same. You get comfortable with it. The view out your window is part of your routine.

Yes, well. Scratch that.

The house in Southern California was a low-slung, single-storey tract house from 1963 on a concrete pad sitting on a corner lot. The views out the window included the street to the east, bordered by the neighbor’s low-slung, single-storey tract houses, the street to the south with the same, the swimming pool in the backyard to the west, and the neighbor’s identical house to the north.

This house in Woodbridge, NJ, is a two-storey wooden fella built in 1936 with a full basement and more stairs that Carter has liver pills (if you’re not of an age, Carters was a company before my time that sold liver pills. I guess they sold a lot of them, or perhaps only made a lot of them. Anyway, you have to be of an age to understand that metaphor. If you’re not of an age, I do apologize).

From this house, the view to the east is the street, a variety of houses from a variety of eras, and, way off there between them, the treetops on Staten Island. Neighbors’ houses from the early 1900’s comprise the views to the north and south, while the view to the west includes a long, narrow backyard, a fence, a railway, and the town of Woodbridge spreading away in all its Old World charm.

Woodbridge received its charter, its permission to be a town, from King George III in 1669. That’s Old World!

In California today they’ll be hitting a clear, sunny high of 67 degrees. Over here we’ll be seeing a cloudy high of 42.

Here’s what surprised me: everything freezes here.

Puddles from Tuesday’s rainstorm are transformed into tiny skating rinks. When you shine your flashlight on the lawn at night, the lawn flashes a million tiny fairy lights back at you, and you think perhaps you’re looking at a miniature, very busy city.

Like the view out your window, it’s the stuff you take for granted that so radically becomes something else when the temperature falls that reminds you the world is not what it seems.

Our challenge, yours and mine, is to appreciate and embrace the temporal nature of the world around us, even when it seems to be the same day after day. To look for and understand even the tiny changes that make the world, well, the world. And to let that understanding inform our writer’s minds.

That’s one challenge. For me, the more urgent challenge is to figure out how to turn off the outside faucets so they don’t blow up my inside plumbing. Another piece of the temporal world, I guess…

Hitting Pause Again

Nobody tells you anything about anything, am I right? I mean, I asked for free advice from somebody who didn’t know anything and got a ton, but it was all, like, useless. I’m actually kinda ticked…

Here’s something you didn’t know, I’ll bet. Or maybe you did know, and I am the one who doesn’t know anything.

There’s a time of year to publish your book. Just like the little green leaves and the little buds and the birdies, yadda yadda yadda, there’s a season for your book. Can you imagine?

It’s all about the migration of people.

You don’t publish your book at the beginning of July, for instance. Why? People migrate away from book-buying and go on vacation.

HOWEVER, you DO publish your romance in May or June, because it’s a good vacation read, and you’ll catch ‘em before they migrate away. Crazy, right?

You don’t want to publish at the end of the year. It’s the holidays and nobody’s buying books, unless you’ve got a bang-up Christmas or Hanukkah book or something. People have migrated away from reading and are all about fruitcake.

But you DO publish in January if yours is a self-help book. The people have migrated back to reading again.

My book, my original Phineas Caswell novel, a piece of historical fiction, is perfect for late August/early September, when the leaves fall and folks are ready to cozy up for a good read.

Won’t take it to the beach, won’t use it to better themselves, won’t enjoy it as a scary thriller. Nope. Historical fiction – the kids are going back to school, time to read a good, interesting piece of history.

So, for all my book publishing plans, I have to hit the PAUSE button for a bit and wait for the year to roll around to the right spot.

That’s okay, because I have a lot of work to do in preparing the marketing materials. But who knew there’s a CALENDAR to this stuff?

Well, if you didn’t, now you do. I didn’t, but now I do.

Happy holidays, and put down that book.

Moving Part 3: The Pod

In writing an article, the number one, single most important, top of the to-do list thing to do is find an angle for the story. Usually it’s the lead sentence that sets up the rest of the piece.

It turns out that the same thing applies when you’re moving: How are you gonna frame this move? Is it going to be with movers, or by yourself? Is it going to be long and elaborate or quick and simple?

We had an image in our heads when deciding to move out of our family home of 27 years. On the left side of the driveway, we anticipated a pod, a long-term moving/storage device. Next to that would be a U-Haul van, to carry the short-term stuff we’d need when we moved in. And, next to that would be a dumpster – see Moving Part 1: Chuck it! We had also mentally set aside an area for stuff to be donated.

In a perfect world, this would have been absolutely ideal. No matter what you picked up in the house, it would go into one of these four receptacles. This? To the pod. That? To the van. This? To the dumpster. That? Goodwill. Piece of cake!

Alas, the world isn’t quite perfect. We got the pod delivered long before the U-Haul. We were moving so quickly, and so brainlessly, we had no clue what would we would need in New Jersey. We were just dashing stuff into the dumpster, into the pickup truck for donations, and into the pod, without any idea what we were doing.

I had the pod about 75% full when my wife called and said she needed some more checks. They’re in a folder in the file cabinet, and she needed ‘em right away.

The file cabinet. Hmmm. That thing was rusted and didn’t work very well. I tossed that out on Sunday. This was Wednesday. Hmmm. The files went into bankers boxes, which I loaded on Monday, before I shoved the dresser and the wardrobe in there. Hmmm.

There’s a slope to the driveway, don’t you see? I kind of used a gravity-assist to move the big heavy furniture into the pod. And I suspended the kayaks by ropes above the furniture. And it all locked those file boxes in place, you see, wayyyyy down there in the front of the pod. Hmmm. Bit of a problem, that.

About an hour after the phone call, and after I had the furniture hauled out, and the kayaks lowered and removed, and the file boxes exposed and open, my wife arrived. Just as she pulled up my aching fingers found the checks – success!

She looked at the mound of furniture and boats and files I had unpacked and asked “why are we taking all this stuff?”

In stuffing it all back in – having snarkily replied “because” – I couldn’t find a place for the wine-bottle rack thing we’d inherited from her brother. It’s a cheapy, with sharp-edged iron straps and oak strips. Very ‘70s. I figured I had to find a place for it, as it held great sentimental value for her. The edges on that thing are sharp, and I nearly lost a finger to it, but it was eventually wedged in there, by gum.

Now, the number one admonition of the pod company was don’t let anything come to rest against the door – tie your furniture forward and make sure nothing comes loose. If it rests against the door, you won’t be able to open it.

That advice? That’s for morons. Duh, thank you mister moving man.

I used that heavy furniture as a bulkhead, holding all our other possessions away from the roll-up door. Brilliant!

The last things to go in were a trio of floor lamps – shoddy and wobbly but useful, we figured, until we could replace them. As those could slide against the door, I took the moron route and tied them in place with a piece of rope.

In the world of pure dumb luck, we were still using our bed, our towels, and some clothes while we waited for the U-Haul. These, plus the clean dishes we’d accidentally left in the dishwasher, turned out to be the very things we needed when we got to NJ. These, and of course the bicycles, because, seriously, you haven’t lived until you’ve pedaled through the snow or the roaring wind of a nor’easter. Anyway, those came with us in the U-Haul.

The pod arrived a week after we did, and the guy sort of tore up my lawn with the truck when he delivered it. It’s okay, we signed a waiver. Oh, that covers him. Rats.

Long story short, you can imagine what came loose and wedged the roll-up door in the closed position. The rope remained tied, but the lamps had wobbled out from under it. I hate those lamps.

It took my wife, the truck driver, and my super-human strength to pry the door open enough so I could use my little-girl-skinny forearms to reach under the door and wiggle the lamp loose enough to release it.

Most embarrassingly, I prodigiously broke wind as I was lifting the door. It was one of those eye-wateringly pungent releases that causes the birds to fly south a little faster and the sky to turn gray for a brief moment. I felt bad for the truck driver (my wife’s used to them by now), but hey, that’s the risk of the job, right? He rather staggered over to the cab of the truck and hastily drove away.

That’s for tearing up my lawn, bucko!

My son and his wife helped us empty the infernal thing. When he got to the beloved wine rack, my wife told him he should just toss it out. “Cheap junk,” she said.

I could only stare at my nearly-missing finger in disbelief.

The pod is out there now, emptily taking up my driveway while we wait for a convenient pickup date.

In the end, we didn’t get the smooth move we’d planned, but we got moved.

The empty pod out there sort of stands as a testament to the extraordinary speed with which we’d moved our family and our stuff, our lives and our livelihoods, across the nation.

Is it the story I’d planned to write? Well, this story sort of wrote itself.

Now, I’ve been unnecessarily hard on the pod company, and I shouldn’t be. We used a company called PODS (portable, on-demand storage), and they have been flexible, professional, and easy to work with throughout. I do highly recommend them, should you find yourself in a similar situation.

And I do highly recommend that you avoid finding yourself in a similar situation!