Posted by Oline H. Cogdill

(Mystery Scene continues its ongoing series in which authors discuss their works, or their lives.)

Tom Pitts is the author of two novellas, Piggyback and Knuckleball, and several short fiction pieces. Pitts is also an acquisitions editor at Gutter Books and Out of the Gutter Online. His first novel, Hustle, came out in 2014. His latest novel is American Static (Down & Out Books), which takes place in San Francisco, Oakland, and California wine country and features bottom-feeding criminals, corrupt cops, and death-dealing gangsters.

But here, Tom talks about a more personal plot involving a milestone he didn’t see coming.

Life’s real milestones
By Tom Pitts
The other day I received yet another application for an AARP membership.

A laughable milestone many of us go through when we hit the top of the hill, but it got me thinking about milestones. The ones that you expect and the ones you deserve.  

When you’re young, you expect the trail of life to be littered with big moments. And life is. But those moments never come when you expect them, and they certainly don’t unfold like you want them.

Anticlimax was definitely a watchword in my nihilistic youth. You soon learn counting on life’s big moments doesn’t really buy you anything.  

So you start to look toward life’s smaller moments to mark your passage through time. Life’s real milestones. Looking back it wasn’t graduations and weddings and big contracts. More like rehabs, arrests, and broken bones.

Recently I had a tooth pulled. I’m 50 years old and I’d been lucky enough to have never lost one till now. I mentioned this to my dad—who’s 85—and he chuckled. “Never? There’s a first time for everything!”

Of course, this is coming from a guy who still has every single one of his teeth. I remember lying in the chair as four dental school kids yanked and wrenched on my sad molar, thinking about my station in life, my expectations versus life’s actual payout. It hurt more than the extraction.

As a writer you think the big markers will be the first novel published, the first time you’re asked to sit at the big table with writers you’ve read and respected, the first royalty check you cash, the first time you get the call from Hollywood telling you they want to make your book into a series….

And although all these things have happened, the outcome (or the high) is never as you’d hoped.

I think the most exciting writing milestone for me—the one that most made me feel like a six year-old on Christmas morning—was getting that first story published.  

When asked what it was like to pitch in the World Series I once heard Orel Hershiser quoted as saying it was no different that pitching in Little League, that the excitement, the thrill, was no greater than when he was a kid on the mound.

And I believe him.

I’ll do well to remember life’s real milestones: the loss of a parent, losing a tooth, colon cancer screenings, IRS audits, and all the magic moments you watch your kids go through. Knowing they may not be milestones, but they’re magic just the same.




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