Let Down

I always experience a big let down after completing a big writing project. You live surrounded by the project. It tugs at you at inconvenient times. It begs for your attention and your love. It’s a lot like having a dog or a stalker.

That’s just a joke. All the dog and stalker fanciers out there can hold off on attacking me. You can’t do humor without putting together unlikely pairings for comic effect. That’s how it works.

But back to writing.

This time, I’m trying to fight the let down by jumping back on the band wagon. I’ve tried this before with little success, but I think, in the past, I jumped right on another major project, something that would take weeks or months to complete. This time, however, I’m taking the opposite tack. I’m starting a second draft of a short story I wrote about a year ago and am holding an essay I wrote a while longer ago than that in reserve for polishing. I already know what my next major project will be, but I don’t want to rush into it.

Taking on another major project means making a commitment in terms of years, and I’m only looking for a literary fling. A few days here, a couple of weeks there. That’s all. since that’s the plan, I’ll probably worry over this story for 16 years and the essay for 11. Sometimes things sneak up on you.

I always think of Thomas Mann when I think about the scope of a project. He started Death in Venice thinking it would be a short story. It turned into a novella. He started The Magic Mountain thinking it would be the length of Death in Venice. The trade paperback version translated by John Woods runs to 720 pages. Sometimes things want to be something other than what you or your will would have them be.

Endnotes

Well, it is done. I wrote another five pages of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy yesterday and thought I had it finished. Except that the last sentence kept nagging at me. I ended up writing another couple of paragraphs this morning, and now I think I can officially declare this novel over.

It stands at 234 pages, which works out, in publishing terms to about 58,000 words. Quite respectable.

It all started out as an idea for a parody short story in about 1979. I then thought of it as an idea for a movie for a while. I tried writing it as a novel in the mid-to-late ’80s, but the result really stunk up the place. I then wrote it as a teleplay for a TV movie in the early ’90s, and actually got some interest from an agent. That deal fell through when she wanted me to change every damn to darn, every God to gosh, and wanted to remove every instance in which alcohol was used, which was plenty.

I then decided to try writing it as a novel as part of Na-No-Wri-Mo (National Novel Writing Month) in 2004. That November, I churned out a decent portion of a draft. That got put it aside for a year-and-a-half while I worked on radio scripts. I then started revising the chunk I had written, then kept writing more. I finished the first draft on March 9, 2007, and entered it in an idiotic contest on Gather.com. It foundered there, and I started work on the second draft, which mostly entailed rewriting the second half of the previous manuscript.

I also found out something interesting along the way: The book improved the more I took out the jokes. I had always thought of myself as a comedy writer who worked with serious themes, but it turned out that I was more of a serious writer with a well-developed sense of humor. Live and learn, huh?

I’m sure that there are parts that still need work, pages that will come back from an editor some day awash in red. And that’s okay. I’m willing to do that work. Later. Right now, I need a break. There are some short stories I need to give my attention to and air to breathe and life to live.

Writing a novel is a huge endeavor, and it mostly feels like you’re trying to swim from the White Cliffs of Dover to Coney Island. You spend most of your time alone and at-sea, and all you can do is to follow the sun over the horizon. I have now arrived, exhausted and out of breath. And by early next week, I’ll be thinking of writing the next one.

Update: I just finished rewriting the ending that I just rewrote. The book now spans 235 pages. At this point, I expect to be rewriting these last entences until the end of time.

Endgame Perhaps

Yesterday, I started work on what I think will be the final chapter of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy, and the words came out in a torrent.  At least, a torrent by my standards.  I just pasted the verbiage into a Word document to get an idea of how much I actually did, and it came out to five pages.  Now, you have to understand that, typically, one page of finished writing is a good day for me.  Five page days come at rare intervals and are celebrated events.

The story itself is also taking an interesting turn.  In the previous version, the last chapter wrapped things up in an ironic, almost actionless way.  That is no longer the case.  It’s in many ways a very traditional ending for a hardboiled tale and is kind of like the end of The Maltese Falcon and the chapter with Silver Wig near the end of The Big Sleep smashed together.  At least that’s how it’s turning out.  I honestly have no idea how it will end up.

Haiku. Gesundheit.

The following are three haikus and an acrostic that I wrote as comments on an entry on Phil Austin’s Blog of the Unknown, which is a kind of ongoing writing experiment. Phil is currently posting chapters from his novel, Beaverteeth, there and soliciting comments. There aren’t many places where one can place humorous verse these days, and the crowd who hang out at Phil’s virtual place do so from time-to-time. I just wanted to post these here because I like them and because I wanted to have them where I could keep an eye on them.

New Year’s Day haiku
is a puzzle meant for one
owning hangover.

Returning to work
is not as satisfying
as sleeping in late.

Axe me no questions
and I will write you Noh rhymes
Happy New Year to all

I have witnessed the growth of spam,
Never slowing, always arriving,
Torrential at times,
Exceptionally vapid,
Reprehensibly juvenile,
Neither stanchable nor
Easily prevented, it
Tarries in my spam folder.

Chapter 22 Complete

It turned out that I was just making the end of Chapter 22 of Michael Drayton, Detective Guy harder than it needed to be. As soon as I lightened up and let the story speak to me, it all came together in ten minutes. This is why writing is like trying to find the staircase in the dark. You’re going to bump your shin or stub your toe, but it generally works out fine in the end.

And so on to Chapter 23, which may be the last chapter or may not. The problem I’m having is that I’m not really sure what the solution to the mystery is yet. I have some ideas. I think I know. I used to really think I knew. But now it’s more bumping around in the dark.

Now let’s just hope that I don’t fall over that ottoman.

Words to Live By

Authors have traditionally used epigraphs at the beginning of books or chapters to let the reader know what they had in mind while writing it. (There are exceptions. Max Shulman purposely misled his readers with his. In his book Barefoot Boy with Cheek, he gave a new epigraph for each chapter. The most memorable one is : “Mon oncle est mort.–Balzac.”) Well, I’ve finally dived in and joined the crowd.

Last week, while reading about the great dead French filmmaker, Jean Renoir, I came across the epigraph for my novel, Michael Drayton, Detective Guy. And I came across it with the posthumous help of Orson Welles. He had written an article for the Los Angeles Times back in 1979, right after Renoir died, and the one footnote in the Wikipedia article happened to link to Welles’s piece. I well remember when Renoir died. I watched his obituary on the evening news and was interested because he was the son of Pierre August Renoir, the Impressionist painter, and because Woody Allen kept mentioning him in his movies. (Grand Illusion is mentioned in Annie Hall in one of the scenes in LA and Renoir himself is mentioned in Manhattan. The look of both films is influenced heavily by Renoir.) A few months later, I took Film as Literature at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the professor screened Grand Illusion for us. It was brilliant. I was smitten.

So, there I was, reading Welles’s tribute to his friend and mentor, and suddenly Welles quotes a well-known line from Rules of the Game: “The terrible thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons.” And an epigraph was born. Or, rather, nicked.

The rewriting of Drayton grinds on. I’m finishing up the next-to-last chapter and am preparing to begin the final installment. Only I realized today that this current chapter lays out some material that could be spun out even further. And yet, I need to finish this draft by April 2nd, just in case it gets picked as one of the ten finalists in a contest being sponsored by the Creative Writing department of the university I work at. And maybe it doesn’t need to be spun out any further at all anyway. But that’s how writing goes. You feel your way through.

Please Pass the Crow

In an earlier post, I quoted someone who commented on a blog on The New York Times website who made the claim that Hillary Clinton had only sponsored 20 pieces of legislation in her seven years in the Senate and that Barack Obama had sponsored over 800. Well, today, I actually did the research myself and found that both numbers were significantly wrong. A search on all matters both sponsored and cosponsored by Senator Clinton brought 633 hits. A similar search on Senator Obama produced 488. This is why you never take your information from some guy on the Internet without first checking the numbers yourself. In fact, you can check the results yourself by searching the THOMAS system on the Library of Congress website.

My apologies to Senator Clinton for grossly misrepresenting her record on Capitol Hill. I should have known better, but didn’t.

While I’m discussing the good Senator, though, her latest criticism of Sen. Obama, the one charging him with plagiarism, is absurd and ought to have been beneath her. However, it seems that, once again, nothing–not the Earth, not the aquifers in its crust, not the molten core at its center–is beneath her and her campaign. Senator Obama stands accused of using a couple of phrases originated by the Governor of Massachusetts with the Governor’s permission and at his insistence. Is that really the best they could do? That’s not plagiarism. That’s doing a friend a favor. I should thank them, though. If that’s the sleaziest thing they can come up with, my admiration for Sen. Obama has just grown even more.

As for Sen. Clinton, I am left wondering how she always manages to look so pristine when she spends so much of her time wallowing in the mud.

I Will Be Free

It has been very difficult to break out of the news cycle. As it stands, I’m not quite out, but I do get a lot less news inflicted on me than I did a week ago.

Of course, I canceled my subscription (which is what we did back in the days before we unsubscribed from things) to the daily newsletter from The New York Times. That, however, did not cancel my subscription to the newsletter called “Opinion Today,” which arrives five days a week just around lunchtime. I know I should, and I will, but it is functioning as something of a security blanket for me. It arrives in the early afternoon, and I attempt to ignore it, sometimes with greater success than others. Why I should give a crap, I’m still not sure, but there must be a reason. There must.

I’ve also taken to skimming the headlines from AP on the home page for my Yahoo! mailbox. The upside to this is that I only click on the headline if it is real news, such as the shooting in Illinois last Thursday. The downside is that it is like trying to get off heroin by only shooting up a milder, less murderous version. But cold turkey is scary. Just consider the song.

It doesn’t help me that so many restaurants now garnish your meal with a dollop of television news. Seeing Hillary Clinton touting her toughness on CNN did nothing to help me digest my chicken pot pie yesterday, and only served to foul my mood and increase my chances for indigestion. (Her quote was, “People say I’m tough. And we need a tough President.” Isn’t that how Mr. Bush sold himself to us? I don’t care for people who are always spouting off about how tough they are because it’s never enough to say it. They have to show off how tough they are by getting us involved in some idiotic adventure somewhere. Remember Bush Senior and “the wimp factor”? Maybe that’s why he got us into three invasions in four years. What a sad little man.)

Anyway, my point here is not to talk about the news. My point is to talk about how addictive the news cycle is. I grew up in a home in which reading the newspaper was considered to be one of the prime virtues. My mother’s evening was built around reading the paper and watching the news. She got it from her father, who didn’t think a person was truly civilized who hadn’t read the newspaper from end-to-end each day. My father, on the other hand, would rather watch a sitcom.

I find a lot of the reason why I get caught up in the news is because I’m bored, so I delve into current events as a form of entertainment. And that’s fair enough, because, as much as we’d like to think that the dissemination of the news is some kind of public service, it is, and always has been, a branch of the entertainment industry.

News exists as gilding around which ads can be sold. That’s why it tends toward the sensational. Horror and strife and evil sell papers and lure viewers. And those readers and viewers can’t help but see some of the ads, and ad sales keep newspapers and TV stations alive. This is why we get stories with headlines like “Bush Calls Dems’ Plan ‘Aid to Enemy.’” That’s not news. That’s the manipulation of news, or, as it is formally known, PR. And we get loads of PR in this country.

And yet, there is the problem of trying to be an informed citizen in an age of deception and flummery. Perhaps I am on the road past that, or perhaps I am teetering on the edge of a precipice called “Withdrawal.” A person can be a resident of a country without being a citizen, be a outside the system and not be involved at all. It’s a very tempting place to be.

Hats

I was going to write a post about The FairTax proposal that you see so many bumper stickers promoting, but I realized that I didn’t really give a crap and was too damned ignorant to truly be either for it or against. Thinking about it was making me unhappy, and I was developing my news-related scowl. That’s when I decided, screw it, I’d really rather write about men’s hats.

I grew up in a society that was nearly hat-free. One rarely saw a man wearing a hat, unless it was a cowboy hat, and few modern men can really carry that off. Hats disappear from manly styles right along about the time of my birth. No one really knows the reason, although a few unconvincing theories (including one concerning John F. Kennedy and his inauguration) exist. It was really just one of those things, something that happened slowly and over time, and by the time I made my arrival in 1959, the mens’ hat was well on its way out. In fact, womens’ hats were as well. We were the hatless, heads bared to the world.

Having grown up watching too many old movies, though, I always hankered after one. I wanted a fedora, the kind of hat Bogie always had on. On him it looked cooler than cool, and while my particular vibe might be a bit more on the tepid side, the coolness of the fedora couldn’t be denied.

I was in my mid-20s when I got my first hat, a gray job that I was given as a present one Christmas. I learned to accept the jokes about Sam Spade and private detectives and spies (mostly from women, now that I think about it) with some facsimile of grace and came to know the rewards and limitations of wearing a hat. I had that hat for about ten years, when I lost it one late night. It took me another dozen or so years in which to find a replacement, but I have done so, one made by a company called Country Gentleman. I got it at Macy’s for a mere $25, and it is a wonderful thing done in a style they call The Wilton.

On the one hand, you get protection. Hats are warm in the winter and keep the rain and snow off your noggin. In fact, with a decent felt hat and a good raincoat, I can avoid using umbrellas entirely, which sounds like a small thing, but is actually a gift from heaven. And, dammit, hats are stylish, and I do so look good in one.

On the down side, they do sometimes blow off your head when it’s windy. However, if there is enough wind to keep it scooting across across the street as you chase after it, you shouldn’t be outdoors anyway. You should be indoors, preferably in a root cellar or some other tornado-proof shelter. And believe me, as tradeoffs go, this is not a bad one.

I more and more see men who are neither Hassidic nor in the music industry wearing hats again. I think it’s a great thing. After all, Gorbachev wore a hat. what’s good enough for him is good enough for me.

Moratorium

Reading The New York Times has just about worn me plumb out, and it turns every day into an argument with somebody. So, I think I’m going to give it a rest. The time has come to walk away.

For one thing, I end up fuming and writing about that junk day after day instead of writing about something interesting. In the last week, I’ll bet I’ve had half-a-dozen interesting ideas for blog posts, and I can’t remember a damn one of them. That’s not right. And what makes it worse is how God-awful boring it all is. The same bits of minutiae get worried over day-after-day, with everyone, myself included, merely finding new ways of saying the exact same thing over-and-over-and-over again. It’s a little bit of hell right here on Earth, straight from Satan’s warehouse to you, the consumer. And so, I have put an end to it.

My next target is computer games. Now, I’m not making rules for all of society here. I just know how these things affect me and am not implicitly passing judgment on anyone else. But I need to stop. Right now, I spend too much time playing this idiotic golf game I found online, and not enough time writing or playing the guitar. There has been a movement gathering strength in my household recently to invest in a Wii, and one of the arguments put forward to persuade me is that I would love it based on my weakness for computer games. And that is probably true. However, that is what makes it so evil. With a Wii, I would probably spend hours playing a virtual guitar instead of the real one and spare moments would go to working on my virtual golf and baseball swings rather than on my novel.

I’m a lazy man by nature, constantly on the lookout for ways to divert myself that don’t involve actually accomplishing anything. As I inch steadily toward the half century mark, I feel like I have fewer goes left, fewer do-overs, fewer next chances. If I am going to move my professional life over to the path of what I have always assumed was my calling, I cannot afford to waste time in virtual batting cages or political mosh pits. Enough with the diversions. It is time to go forward into the ebbing day to spend my remaining hours in the sun.

Right after this game of Freecell.