Beanbag, Yes. Zombies, No

The photo is not very good. I took it hastily with my phone, but I wanted to catch the moment. That’s granddaughter Violet, who is almost three, and not the shrinking kind of violet. There she is, balanced on a stair step, in grave danger of being swallowed by her beanbag chair. Reminds of the old Pac Man arcade game. She’s engaged in the task of bringing her beanbag chair down the stairs for a movie night. You can imagine how long she stayed still in the beanbag.

The point of the photo is sometimes we all take on projects that are bigger than we are, but we somehow manage, even as we struggle to not to get bowled over by the mass of the thing.

For Violet, that evening, it was the beanbag chair. She could have just pushed it up and over the rail at the top of the stairs to drop down, or she could have kicked it down the stairs from safely behind and above. No, being in back of the action is not her way. She had to control the cushy boulder from the front as it sort of slid down the stairs step by step.

 For her granddad, for the past two and a half years, my beanbag on the stairs has been writing the three McBee novels. It’s come close to swallowing me a few times. A thousand pages, three hundred thousand words divided into a hundred and thirty chapters, slowly rolling step-by-step through three years of the Civil War, and three years of my life. And the value of the project has not been just to finish, but to make the three books historically credible “page turners,” not repetitive or boring, yet still not outlandish. There are no zombies in McBee’s Civil War.

Like Violet’s beanbag, I can’t hurry it along, or gravity and size get the upper hand. The project would simply smother me as it rolled away to crash into a tree in the woods somewhere. I’m getting there. And the sight of little Violet throwing her all into her beanbag is just the sort of visual reminder I need to get on with the last half of the last book.