The Bits You Don't Get To See

I’ve written a lot over the years, but for every story or novel or screenplay I’ve done, it seems that there are three or five or ten other things I’ve started and worked on and then left unfinished. Case in point, this is about the sixth blog I've ever started. I’m still writing one of the previous ones, just in haiku, but with the private setting enabled, so it’s just for me (all mine, all mine, muhaha).

I write however I can; I prefer to use a typewriter for fiction, as it’s less distracting that the computer, which has games and the internet and so on. But if I have to, I use the computer, and my little folder marked WRITINGS is full of completed stories and half finished ones.

According to Wikipedia there’s lots of “trunk novels” out there. Nabokov’s “The Original Of Laura” is going to be published this year, against his wishes (he wanted it to be burned). Stephen King’s got a bunch, like “The Aftermath” and “Sword In The Darkness”, that petered out or were rejected and then stashed. Herman Melville wrote a novel called “Isle of the Cross”, which was never published and then lost. I’ve lost a few works over the past fifteen years, since I seriously started writing outside of the assignments I was given at school. My favorite lost bit was one I did in eleventh grade, where I wrote a sprawling 20-page story on the path of a Bible from printing to its burning in the parking lot of a gas station in Vermont. It was an assignment for English class, and I had a lot of fun with it.

I just “took out” out of the folder and read a rough draft attempt at writing a novel based on my experiences getting sent off to a boarding school in the tenth grade. I sort of disappeared from my public school after the first quarter, and I honestly don’t think too many people noticed my absence. I wasn’t exactly in the running for most popular. More like most likely to be the person you look at in class photos and go “who was that?” or “I hope that bastard’s working at a gas station”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If I looked back at my high school years as the Glory Days, I think I’d jump off a bridge. I wrote the novel until about page 125 or 130, then lost the energy when realized I was only on the second day. If I wrote all I felt I would need to write to give the full span of the experience, I’d be looking at a two-thousand page monster, filled with bits like this:

The swings, and the surrounding wooden playground, had been built before he had come to the school, and while they showed their age they worked just fine for the kids of the day and Patrick. With his greater weight came greater speed and momentum, and he soon found himself nearly level with the top bar at each side of the swing, back and forth. The feeling in his stomach flipped around from enjoyment to a sudden irrational fear of letting go and falling. He slowed the muscle movement that kept the swing moving so fast, but just for a few seconds. When the swing was about forty-five degrees up and he felt it could and would go up further again if he continued, he let go and pushed off into the twilight. His body glided through the air for what felt like minutes but what could only have been a second or two, and then he fell to earth and the tiny gravel pebbles that the school had determined would be safe enough for the children to play upon. He tumbled, as that is the only word he could think of to describe it to himself, and his hands and knees were bit red raw by the little grains he had walked and scuffed on so many times before.

Patrick lay on the ground on his hands and knees and felt the burning increase in the parts that had made contact with the ground. Small, hot tears formed in his eyes, but with the extra years of experience he found a way to blink them back, letting only one hit his cheek and only for a brief moment before being wiped away by a gritty hand sprouting blood from miniscule fractures on the skin.

Hm. I wrote this about two years ago, and I’d like to think I’ve gotten better since then. It's almost 300 words that could be cut down to 100. It’s got sappy bits, and while I like the “gritty hand sprouting blood from miniscule fractures on the skin”, the composition feels chunky, and I’d have to rework it. “Miniscule fractures OF the skin”? “[K]ids of the day” is just a stupid way to term schoolchildren. Whatever. It was a learning process, the writing equivalent of going to the driving range or batting cage. In the folder it stays. Perhaps I could print it out and stick it in a trunk.

Driving to Sleep

I've found that one of the requirements of fatherhood is the ability to deal with a child that just won’t go to sleep. It’s a lot easier to deal with when they’re younger, as they are less mobile. My daughter is almost two, so her nighttime fussyness has made the transition from just screaming to screaming and running and throwing and out-and-out tantrums.

Last night, around nine, when she should be in or getting to bed, my daughter was doing everything she could to disturb her pregnant-with-twins mother and myself, so I resorted to the old standby of packing her in the car, putting on mellow music (classical or, as was the case last night, jazz), and driving around until she fades off into what has to be the best sleep, as it refreshes her and gives her the energy the following day to go about her day like a squirrel, dipping and bouncing and running every which way.

I like our little town in the woods, so I try to not take the same route twice when I get out with her at night (usually once or twice a week). Last night I drove up to the top of the hill that the town is built on, and as I started down the other side I saw the last layer of Pentecost red sky disappear behind the hills and mountains in the distance. In the mirror I could see my daughter in her seat, playing with her ears. That’s a telltale sign that sleep is imminent.

I took a left and drove through a rich neighborhood, one of those small, protected groupings of obese houses on lots that had once been farmland. Every lawn was perfect, two-and-a-half inches in height, and by the light of the streetlamps I could see that they were dark green and weed-free, without variation in the blades. One thing they also didn’t have were fireflies, which I have thousands of where I live just a few miles away, and which I saw many of as I passed through the developed parts of the neighborhood to the still-open hayfields that are untouched in life but divided on maps into zoned lots up for sale.

After passing through the (according to their website) “thoughtfully designed… scenic and private community”, I turned a corner and got back on the main road, a mile or two past where I had turned off earlier. Someone on the radio was doing a slow rendition of Miles Davis’ “So What”, and as I got to the top of the hill again I looked in the mirrors and saw that the sun was all gone for now.

When I got home, I took my daughter out of her seat, and she stirred a bit and patted me on the back as she buried her head in the corner of my neck and shoulder. I had been out driving for no more than fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. Before I left the garage and put her to bed I waited for the security light to click off out front, and I saw a dozens of fireflies moving through the air like the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock.

Too Fast For Fiction

When I was in high school my father, in an effort to improve my grades and possibly improve upon his own intellect, purchased a speed reading course. This was before the internet took over everything, so it must have come out of the back of a magazine. The tapes came in a large, black case, with a strange looking pair of men on the back cover. It was Howard Stephen Berg’s “Mega Speed Reading”, and the photos were of Berg and Kevin Trudeau, the Penn to Berg’s Teller, if I may sully the names of my favorite magicians by making such a comparison.

If you’ve ever suffered from insomnia, you’ve seen Trudeau playing the part of a budget Larry King on an infomercial set made out to look like an actual news program. I have insomnia, hence I’ve seen far too much of Kevin Trudeau. One commercial that comes to mind is a colon cleansing program, pushed by a man with the dubious name of Klee Irwin and a moustache that reminds me of when my daughter eats pudding.

Much of the course consisted of Berg boasting about his abilities, such as reading Howard Stern’s “Private Parts” in about three minutes and passing a test on Stern’s radio show. The basic method was sweeping your hands over the text and skimming, identifying important words, so on and so forth. The ink from some books would build-up on your hands, which brings to mind the song “Informer” by Snow and (yes, I looked it up) MC Shan:

Take me to the station, black up my hands
Trail me down 'cause I'm hanging with the Snowman

I handled the method alright, and read a few books using it, but it felt like sticking a beautiful dinner into a blender, hitting chop, and then sucking the juice with a straw. For example: the following quote from Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit:

A person who can't pay gets another person who can't pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don't make either of them able to do a walking-match.

Those three sentences consist of 51 words. Berg claims to be able to read 25,000 words a minute, or about 416 words a second. That means that someone with Berg’s amazing ability would suck down that simile, given in a dialect, in a tenth of a second.

I love reading, and I wish I could do more of it. I used to spend entire days at the library or on a sunny lawn just plowing through hundreds of pages a day, getting pale when I was inside and red-skinned when I was out. Right now I’m blazing through John Steinbeck’s “The Moon Is Down”, a rich and moving fable from World War Two that was actually used as propaganda for the Allies, passed among the resistance, and banned by the Axis (the punishment for possessing a copy in Italy was death). Blazing for me is the expectation that I’ll be finishing it tonight, or about two days after buying it at the wonderful Book Barn in Niantic, Connecticut.

If I was Berg, however, I’d be done with it in roughly a minute, minute and a half (it’s short, about 110 pages). I have a wife and kid and more kids on the way, a garden and writing and a day job, so my reading time is little now, but you know what? The minute or two or even three (or ten, if it’s Pynchon or certain Faulkner texts) it takes me to get through the back of one sheet and the front of another is a wonderful time, and I feel no desire to flap through it like I’m yanking sheets of toilet paper from a stubborn roll. Some things in life shouldn’t be galloped through to the end, and I’d like to think that fiction is one of them.

(Although I’d like to have all politicians trained to speed read. Then, maybe, if they actually read the laws they pass, they might not do so.)

Non sequitur: How my car's front passenger seat looks right now:

Back 'ta Woik

Last week threw me for a loop, and I didn’t write much. It began with my mother-in-law visiting (a good thing), stress at work (a bad thing), and then went into my birthday (good), and on my birthday I found out my wife is pregnant with twins (doubly good!). I’ll try to adhere to Elmore Leonard’s dictum that exclamation points should be avoided, but that last bit is an unavoidable target for a slash and a dot.

I don’t write for a living (yet… someday…) but I try to write everyday. I’m an adherent to the idea driven by Stephen King and others that writing and reading should be regular daily occurrences. I try, but last week I just didn’t have the time, and I didn’t have it in me. A pathetic excuse, but a reason as well. Last night, however, I got down to business, and had an explosion of productivity that I’m hoping to match tonight. I’m taking a small breather from the novel, just until I finish a short story that I started as a writing exercise and have since continued on towards an exciting finish line I didn’t anticipate when I first got down in front of the typewriter.

One thing I changed in my habit was where I write, which I have found to be very helpful. Before, I had been writing in the mud room of our house, not wanting to disturb the wife and kiddo, but it was a rather depressing place to write, full of junk we have yet to sort, right next to the washer and dryer, with the powerful odor of Tide and Bounce coating the insides of my nostrils. Biting insects are able to get in there somehow, possibly through the small space between the door to the garage and the floor, and I’d finish my night’s writing with several red pea-sized lumps on my hands and neck from the buggers I missed killing.

I wrote last night in the living room on our green striped couch that the cats are slowly destroying the corner of, and I finished at midnight with three solid pages from the typewriter. When typed out and formatted properly (one inch margins, 12 point Courier font) the three typewritten pages come out to roughly nine manuscript pages. I’m always tempted to obsess over what is the right or wrong way to format a manuscript, but it’s a distraction, a type of procrastination that feels like you’re doing something, but you’re not. I just followed instructions and watch my tightly typed pages become manuscript pages of 250 to 300 words each, with lots of extra breathing room.

Tonight I’m going back to the living room, with the typewriter on the coffee table that looks like the crate from Creepshow, and finishing the story. I hope to finish in time to spend a little extra time on the couch, finally finishing John Irving’s Setting Free The Bears.

Autumn In June

It’s supposed to get up to seventy here in my little area of southern New England, but it’s felt like fifty-something all day, and I love it. With the rain and the cool air it’s more like autumn than summer. That’s good for me, as autumn has always been my favorite season. My idea of heaven is a never-ending October, with harvests and Halloween and all that good stuff. Tomorrow is my birthday, but summer can go to hell.

One way I get into the spirit of the season we’re not actually in is by checking out the best Halloween related website, Pumpkinrot. If I had the money to spare I know I’d have one of his horribly awesome pieces staring down at me, waiting for the moment when my eyes closed for just a second too long… from a lack of sleep, perhaps, or the moment before a sneeze…

Continuing with my bizarre dream theme, which is one I can’t get away from regardless of what I do (medication, no medication, alcohol, no alcohol, going to bed early, at a reasonable time, late, et cetera), my last night’s dream wasn’t quite frightening, just strange. My wife, daughter, and I were on a chairlift at an exaggeratedly large version of the mountains of my hometown, a ski resort in Vermont. We were all dressed for summer weather, but it was perfect skiing weather: snowy, cold, blue-grey skies. Also, we were alone, and saw no one else on the chairlift or on the trails.

We got to the top and they stopped the lift for us to get off, and we were ordered to go buy season passes at an office set up at the very peak of the mountain. How we got to ride up in the first place was never explained. We went inside, and were informed that the season passes were now only $3, instead of the $1099 they usually are. We get our pictures taken with the old Polaroid four-punch setup that hasn’t been used for at least a decade, decade and a half, and soon the hot laminated cards are on breakable chains around our necks.

Back outside, we discover that we now have the latest and greatest equipment laid out for us, so we suit up and ski off. My wife has never skied in her life, and my daughter isn’t even 2 years old yet. The rest of the dream was just us working our way down the slope, but never seeming to get to the bottom, as the mountain appeared to have been growing just as fast as we were descending.

Non sequitur: Reason #1 I hate people my age to my age minus ten years:

The Tonys, Brought To You In Part By Xerox

As my wife was a big theater geek in high school and still tries to keep up on all things Broadway, and as my brother-in-law, his girlfriend, and my mother-in-law were all at our house last night, all being theater enthusiasts, I watched a good half or so of the Tony’s last night. I have limited theater experience, so my theater knowledge is slightly more than your average Joe Six-Pack, but not by much.

I’m not a big fan of awards shows, but the Tonys seem to be the most intelligent televised awards, a few steps ahead of the Oscars, miles away from the MTV Movie Awards, and a few light years from something I saw while scanning through the channels, the MTV Cribs Awards, which grants awards to famous people for having large houses, hosted by a woman whose greatest contribution to our culture seems to have been performing videotaped fellatio on another minor celebrity. Still, it was disappointing to see the wide array of unoriginal or iPod/jukebox shows that were advertised, nominated, and/or given awards. I’m talking about shows that are reworkings of movies (Billy Elliot, Shrek, 9 to 5) and shows that just slap together songs (Rock of Ages, Jersey Boys, Mama Mia). True, there were revivals of classic shows, and several new, original shows, but just like the movie industry, and even the book world, there is an infection of unoriginality that is deeply troubling.

I’ve got no problem with being inspired by past work. It’s impossible not to find an idea and grow it yourself. I’m working on notes for a novel inspired, in part, by A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. It’s mostly inspired by my bizarre dreams and my often-boring day job, and my irrational fear of salesmen, and my lack of understanding of the way mattress stores can survive (honestly, how can they stay in business? Maybe everyone else replaces their bed every year, but I sure as hell don’t.), but Twain’s work does have a special place in my mind right now. But I’m not going to do a sequel to it, or a remake, or a spinoff. Stephen King didn’t photocopy the Book of Revelations to make The Stand, Neil Gaiman didn’t photocopy The Jungle Book to make The Graveyard Book, Diablo Cody sure as hell didn’t photocopy the script to Riding in Cars With Boys to make Juno, and I’m not going to photocopy Mr. Clemen’s work.

This begs the question: are we running out of ideas? We have a world with billions of people, infinite possibilities for stories large and small, and yet we find ourselves going to see a remake of an old television show (Land Of The Losing Money It Would Seem) or read a ‘spinoff’ of a classic novel (an Amazon.com search for “Mr Darcy” results in 118 books, at least 2 of which are versions of an imagined diary). Why risk an original novel about youth and age when you can just write a sequel to Catcher In The Rye? Why test the waters of cinematic fear when you can just do-over My Bloody Valentine and Friday The 13th?

I would suggest that, no, we are not running out of ideas. Shows like God Of Carnage, movies like Gomorra, and books like 2666 show that original stories are still possible. We’re just at the mercy of writers who are lazy, and producers and publishers that are scared of anything that’s not a sure thing. And that’s a damn shame, Diane.

Fighting The Serpent

Last night I sat down at my “desk” (typewriter balanced on two Pampers boxes filled with my wife’s comics and some hardcovers) and tried to get to writing. The night before I skipped ahead in my draft and started rocking on a scene involving the narrator, his German exchange student friend who came back from Europe and is now a very proud American, Bob Dylan, and the Quechee Gorge. It was going great, and I had stopped writing that night after the equivalent of about ten manuscript pages. But last night? Stopped after a paragraph. Just had no energy at all, and while the tiny amount I wrote was good and fit in, my eyes were closing and before I gave up I started a sentence that didn’t make any sense.

I’ve had insomnia for a few years now. It’s a combination of not being able to get myself to sleep, followed by bizarre dreams and other factors waking me up throughout the night. I don’t want to take Ambien, as I have a kid and the last thing I want to do is pick her up and try to walk down the stairs while in a drugged kind-of-sleep.

The dream I remember from last night: I was sitting at my “desk”, writing on my typewriter. Nothing was being printed on the page, but I kept writing. My writing area is in the mud room where we have a red washer and dryer set, and I sit with them to my left. To my right are three stairs and the door to the garage. I was in the process of not-writing when the skeleton of a long, thick snake came out of an unseen hole in the garage door and wound its way up the stairs and into the large pile of crap my wife and I have yet to sort out and put away since moving here in December.

I’m afraid of snakes. Very.

My dream reaction is to run into the kitchen and grab a curtain rod, split it in half, and go back to the mud room to do battle with the snake. While I was gone, however, the snake has started going through changes, and when I returned it resembled a skeleton version of the serpent from R. Crumb’s Book Of Genesis in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

Apparently The New Yorker influences my nightmares. Not too many people can say that.

I woke up my wife with my thrashings, then got back to sleep, then woke again, and now am at my day job. Tonight I’m going back to the keyboard, I’m determined to finish the scene, and I’ll try to think of a better dream weapon if I get attacked again. Perhaps a car loaded with nitroglycerin…