I’m thinking I’ll call the project in question UNTIL YOU’RE GONE, but who knows if that’ll survive a full writing. Last one I wrote I came up with a title for a few pages in and never changed it from THE WAKING. But the one before that I called 600,000 DEEP IN DEAD until my agent said you can’t have a number as the first part of a title for some reason, so I renamed it ONLY THE HEADLESS SLEEP which I think is cooler anyhow. Not that any of this is really of interest to anyone other than myself as both are unpublished, but neither is a personal blog in general…

Morning after I feel a tinge of guilt that I expended the energy fixing up the house when I should have been writing. Having a pretty house isn’t going to do much for me. It’s not going to change anything like getting a more firmly established revenue stream from putting words on paper.

I was listening to the VELVET GOLDMINE soundtrack in traffic on the FDR Drive this morning. A sunny morning for a change. BABY’S ON FIRE played and made me think that a neat opening sentence for a book would be “My daughter burst into flame on the swing set in the Rosedale Public Park.” And it would be surrealistically casual. Father concerned but not desperate, daughter discomfited but not suffering. Just a thought though. Won’t stick with me. I’ve already got most of the outline of what I’m tackling next, and it’s not weird for a change. At least not that weird.

I’d like to buy a desk at some antique store in Port Jervis. I don’t have money to buy it with, or time to get it, but I’d like it just the same. It’s dumb, but I feel like I can’t ever expect to start writing again without it. More importantly, I haven’t read a book yet this year. This time last year I’d read a dozen. Kept notes on them in my journal–kept meaning to list all of them at the end of the year online, picking out the ones I liked the best. Never got around to it. SPACEMAN BLUES is sitting on my nightstand, loaned to me by a friend the day we moved into the house. I read the first couple of pages soon after, right before I passed out in bed.

Might just be that I’m having to get up at 6am after years of rising closer to 8:45, but I get the feeling that being outside of the city gives winter fuller rein to convince your body to hibernate. I’ve been going to bed early and sleeping more than 8 hours generally, and still feeling only half-awake throughout the day. Maybe I’ll get over it. Regardless, I’ve actually printed a sunrise sunset calendar and get solace looking how each day the sun comes up a minute or two earlier and sets a minute or two later.

Still no writing done. I’m hoping to have a finished outline within a week though I’m sure that’s pretty rosy. I’d like to have a polished full pitch for my agent by the end of the month. A 6 hour daily commute provides plenty in the way of motivation towards getting that big advance, but leaves time for little else.

A cafe on Main Street (A five minute walk from our door) hosted a private dinner comprised of locally grown farm foods. About twenty or thirty people there, mostly City expats with heavy wallets. The region seems to draw quite a few, scattered among the local working class. Surprised to see a well-known movie actor there. The wife and I joked about bumping into him, as he is a well-known resident of our tiny hamlet, but never really expected to somehow. Like all celebrities, he was short.

Sunday was our first service at the church right up the street from us (Another easy walk) where the tiny congregation was warm and welcoming. Being a church, it was of course bare of any former City residents… A charismatic, though slightly unintelligible Congolese minister greeted us excitedly after the service, introducing us to his brood of six children.

“You are very blessed,” I said.

“I am Abraham!” he laughed, slapping my hand for the umpteenth time in our brief conversation.

My wife, noticing that the hymns’ accompaniment had been provided by an electronic box, suggested to the preacher that I fill in as pianist. This idea was eagerly seized upon. Unfortunately, I am a rather rusty piano player. But I said that if they’d loan me the hymnal and give me a few days notice of what the songs would be, I ought to be able to get by. So we’ll see how next Sunday goes. I’m hoping they choose some of the slower more dirge-like hymns.

Spent the rest of the day sanding cabinet doors, chiseling hinge and plate grooves to put up some new doors, and venturing down to the bar for a couple pints and to catch an obligatory few minutes of the Super Bowl. Then sleep in anticipation of another week of super-commuting.

Don’t know why I’ve suddenly let this turn into a more diary-like blog. Maybe it’s because the change in my life–4 years of Brooklyn and now small town living–makes things seem novel and interesting for the time being. Maybe because I’m not as productive as I ought to be with fiction, and pursue an easier outlet. Maybe because I’m seeing the new surroundings as a setting for a new potential novel, and jotting them down helps me to get a handle on it.

The morning commute starts with NPR, which we can pick up from the nearby Jeffersonville station for the first half hour or so, before the mountains squelch the signal. Another Hudson Valley NPR station can be picked up for about five minutes after that, but then nothing. Neither my wife nor I feel very chatty that early in the morning, so we pop in an audio book and she knits. The first day or two it was DOUBLE INDEMNITY and now Crichton’s NEXT. Crap, but it passes the time.

I drive in the morning, she drives in the evening. And I think more and more that I ought to use that evening time to write.

For months I’d been working on a semi-non-fiction (Documented in most of the posts on this site) in fits and starts, winding up with several pages of notes and transcribed articles and conversations, and all of maybe 10,000 words of an opening. None of it particularly thrilling, but I was plowing through.

But then (See last post) my agent declared my last manuscript dead on arrival, and his eyes glossed when I tried to describe the semi-non-fiction in the works.

“Well what then?”

“I don’t want to dictate what you should write.”

“I don’t care–I need something. I really need to sell something.”

With unease–”Your writing’s been very noir-ish, and I think you do that well. I’d like to see something straight noir. Without any supernatural element.”

“Straight noir”. Everytime I set foot in a bookstore, the shelves seem lined with them, none standing out from the mass. I always figured it needed a solid departure to catch anyone’s attention. And there’s the challenge. Make it different without being different.

I’ve developed a bit of an idea that I’m getting fleshed out bit by bit. And if I can get into the habit of dedicating the drive home to working on it, I might be able to bang it out pretty quickly.

We did our first real commute yesterday. Left work on Tuesday night, got to the house around 9:20, worked on unpacking, arranging, etc… until after 1am. Woke up a bit after 6, dressed, and then stopped at the corner gas station on our way out around 7. It was mostly filled with older-middle-aged guys with jeans and flannel and camo-print ballcaps, looking quietly at the young couple in overcoats buying coffee and powdered donettes.

The drive in was easy enough, just long. Between the two drives, in and out, we nearly got through the entire unabridged audio book of DOUBLE INDEMNITY.

The commute put me in a weird mood. Different and new, big change, it sort of scares you. I walked to a parking garage with good monthly rates and had to pass Bellevue Hospital to get there. It was a sunny day and a bunch of crazies and cripples crowded up the big outdoor space out front. Put me in a weirder mood and I got upset. Hit me kind of hard, but I got over it quick enough. The commute will be long, and on weekday evenings, I won’t be able to get alot done, but the drive is free time with which I can do whatever I want. Plenty of folks go to work, come home, head straight for the computer or TV and plant there until bedtime. I’ll be in a car. What’s the difference? And I’m not alone, my wife’s with me. And ultimately, I own a home that I really like. And that’s worth something.

It probably didn’t do my outlook any favors that last Friday, I finally got a meeting with my agent in his office in Chelsea. He’s a nice guy and felt bad and had put off dropping the hammer as long as he could, but finally, wrapped up in as many compliments as he could summon, he told me he didn’t think he could shop around the last manuscript I’d passed him.

And I won’t pretend it didn’t get me down. But deep down, I knew he was right. I’d gotten so desperate to get somewhere, I let the weight of my impatience squeeze the words out so fast it had too many flaws. And I wound up with an overextended short story.

After enough time it’s easy to get to where you start seeing the whole industry as a lottery. You buy your ticket and hope it’s the one. BUt it isn’t a lottery. People wonder about their chances of getting published, and the odds are–despite what the spurned cynical self-aggrandized artiste might say–100% if you write something great, and 0% if you write something else.

But I’m young yet. And I’ve got another idea. And half the notion that once I coax that one out, there’ll be another waiting on deck. And in the meantime, I’m ready for but no longer waiting on the million dollar advance to start making my life look the way I want it to. I’m staring down a commute that most people wouldn’t swallow for a seven-figure-salary, but I’ve got a nice girl going along with me, a house in the sticks where I can kill animals with fewer than six legs, and, as such, it’s hard not to consider myself an awfully lucky guy.

There was a kettle on the stove that was filled with a block of ice. I turned on the stove and melted it down into hot water. Then poured a mug full and mixed in some of a little fifth bottle of bourbon I’d bought and sat sipping at it and listening to music. It’s a pretty strange experience sitting indoors with gloves and a coat and three layers and seeing your breath. I think it was about 25 degrees in there. But the boiler was successfully installed so it ought to be warm when I go back up (With the wife this time) this weekend.

But with all this going on, I’ve been too busy to write. Or when I’m not too busy, then too stressed about everything that needs to be done and seems impossible. We still have to somehow get a car in the next two or three weeks. We’ve just been renting up to now. But these things ought to be worked out by January 31st. I don’t know how, but they have to be, so I guess they will. We have to be out of our apartment by then.

So then, once it’s all finally behind us come February, I’ll be able to sit down and get back to trying to pump out a manuscript. But not really. What I’ll be able to do come February is spend about five hours every weekday commuting between the house and the city. And weekends trying to help my wife repair a house that’s been unoccupied for ten years and looks it.

Hopefully I’ll find the time. Or make the time. The whole thing is making me desperate to be able to get enough money writing for my wife and I to be able to forego 9-5s permanently. And I don’t think it requires some ludicrous million dollar contract. The big plus of the house, and its biggest motivation (Apart from getting $8,000 from the government to buy it, interest rates being at record lows, and house prices themselves hitting bottom) is that it allows for a very low cost of living. The mortgage is a quarter the cost of renting an apartment in the city. So it seemed like a good groundwork to have in place for when I am able to patch together a living doing what I want to do. But it’s tricky how the means to the end always winds up getting confused as the end itself and half the time precludes the originally intended end. Setting up a good situation for when my ship comes in, I worry I’m the guy who decides to make a movie then spends all his money making slick t-shirts advertising it before bothering to shoot anything.

So I don’t know how this blog’s going to be looking for the next few days, weeks, months. But I suppose you must be used to infrequent updates anyway, so maybe the difference won’t be noticeable.

It’s been (And I think I’ve also already shared this–can’t say for sure as I don’t ever read this blog) a real challenge. My writing’s never been limited like this before, in terms of not being able to take any plot turn I feel like, things like that… And more than anything, it’s been interesting how a true story seems to insist on its own tone. Maybe that’s more the result of a lack of ability on my part rather than any inevitable rule, but it’s been interesting.

I started by writing a page and reviewing it in disappointment and frustration because it wasn’t the tone I wanted–the tone which I’d sort of honed in on and determined over the course of my last two projects was “my style”. Sort of bleak, stripped-down, and fast-paced. This first page, on the other hand, seemed to come off as non-stylistic, or maybe even something like “home-spun” if that conveys anything. But as I kept on and reviewed and thought about it, I found myself wondering if the “style” I felt I’d honed was perhaps as dependent on and rooted in the types of characters and actions it conveyed as much as how it’s told. I don’t know for certain, and am open to either possibility. Maybe I’m just not expert enough to contort it into the tone I’d thought it wanted–maybe it just can’t be done. At any rate, it’s led me to decide to do something different than I have before:

Once I’ve completed the current opening “chapter” (Really more of a nearly-self-contained scene), I’m going to stop, go back and revise that as though it were standalone.

I’ve never done this before as I always figured it would be a momentum killer. I read some Fitzgerald quote I can’t find now and can’t remember exactly, but which I took to heart early on anyway until I’d absorbed it. Something about how the first draft should be done purely on inspiration. Get it all out on paper and then fix it. But with such large uncertainties looming about whether I’m on the right track or not, or whether I even have a handle on what this book’s supposed to be, it just doesn’t make sense to plow ahead.

Whatever my limitations may or may not be, doing a gut-renovation of a full draft that was done wrong certainly goes beyond them. But doing this also provides a secondary benefit. Because I’d considered exploring whether I could sell the thing on outline. Meaning rather than invest the time, energy, travel costs, etc… to write the full book, then cross my fingers as I have it shopped around by my agent, I would assemble a package consisting of an outline, a couple of sample chapters, etc… see if I can sell it, and then use the proceeds of the advance to get the thing written. This is only ever done for non-fiction as far as I can tell, but I don’t know if what I’m writing is non-fictiony enough to qualify. I think it’s generally meant for doctors writing self-help books. Things like that. But it gives me the option.

Well, hope you’ve enjoyed today’s installment of “Read my writing about my writing you can’t read (Yet).”

But first, I should share that I had a couple of nice, unrelated writing achievements.

–I sold a short story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The story’s called THE HIDDEN BALL TRICK. And while I haven’t been given a publication date yet, I’ve gathered from talking to some different folks that the lapse between sale and publication is typically in the ballpark of 6-7 months. So keep your eyes open at your local newsstand come summer, I guess. I really was pleased about this. It’s awfully satisfying to be able to have some small part in such a historic magazine that’s published so many of the greats.

–Secondly, and on a lesser note, my agent sent me a rejection letter for ONLY THE HEADLESS SLEEP, the novel he started shopping nearly a year ago and more or less stopped shopping not that long after (I mentioned it briefly in my very first blog post). Hadn’t heard anything about it since March, but some editor unearthed it recently and sent the most flattering and regretful rejection I’d yet received. Which was sort of nice, though, of course, the nicest rejection and the nastiest both earn me the exact same amount of money, which I find becoming more and more a concern every day older I get.

Anyway, as far as the book, I got out of bed in the middle of the night last week to try and work on it. I sat down in my study and reread the fresh start I’d gotten that I really thought I’d nailed (Little over a thousand words) and realized it was all wrong. Wrong way to start, wrong direction, wrong focus, wrong everything.

It opened on a late summer afternoon in 1932 at the Capital City Club in Atlanta. Two older men bump into each other in the practically empty dining room and start yakking at one another about something that establishes the thread of a theme that I’d wanted to have run through the book. Fair enough, but in rereading, I couldn’t see what makes anyone who picked the book off a shelf care.

Maybe I’ve become a philistine, but I don’t believe like I used to that any author has the right to ask anything from the reader. To demand they dig in and read front to back whether they’re engaged or not just because they ought to believe that the author knows what’s best for them.

So this vision I’d had of chapter after chapter of (What practically amounted to) vignettes focused on a different character whose life in some profound way intersects that of every other character fell apart. I don’t doubt that it could work. But I wouldn’t be the one to do it. If it’s not what I want to read than I’m never going to have any idea of whether it’s as good as I want it to be.

So I decided that I needed a single character’s perspective and a single character’s development and struggles to carry the story. And in deciding this, I concluded that the book had to start in Columbus, Georgia in the early summer of 1918.

That’s a nice thing about using an existing framework (Actual events). When you figure out what angle you want, there’s a very limited number of choices of where to start.

So then what? First, I needed to tack down the backdrop. In my fantasies of being a wealthy novelist, this would involve taking the train to Columbus and staying in a downtown hotel for a week or two. Long days at the historical society, library, and then walks through the main drags, the remnants of cotton mills along the Chattahoochee. As it is, I burned my retinas out staring at my laptop and clicking through the internet.

The only record I had of my family’s years in Columbus came from my great-grandfather and his brother’s army papers from when they enlisted for the First World War. It gave a home address (That no longer exists), the name of the cotton mill they worked at (Which no longer exists), and that was about it, apart from a couple pictures taken on a house’s porch that was likely in Columbus.

Googling these things gave no results, which is satisfying in a way, because one gets the feeling that anything you can find on Google isn’t a discovery. No mention even of the Meritas Mill, where they worked. But fortunately, Columbus State University had an online project of conversation with old mill workers. Reading through those, I found one man who mentioned Meritas in passing, and provided the exact intersection. Google’s street view even let me look at the remnants. An almost fully leveled city block with one great red brick chimney sticking up from the center of a field.

Looking from there, I managed to find the street the family lived on, though the numbering had changed completely. But–again with street view–I was able to find a house that bore an awfully strong resemblance to one in the photographs I mentioned. Not a certainty, but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve gotten the place they work and the place they live situated comfortably in my mind so that I feel I can paint a fully formed background against which the characters can move. And maybe one of these days I’ll even be able to take that rich-writer-fantasy-trip down and pick up the details I miss in pictures and papers to patch a final detailing of flesh onto the scene.

Boy, these posts always turn out a lot longer than I intend for them to. Likely why they wind up being so infrequent.