Ghost Rock Draft 11 Is Done

Somewhere between seven and eight years. Eleven drafts. (And three drafts of volume two, and an outline for volume three...) I ain't going over the names of the people who helped me right now, but I'm thinking of them.

I still have the delightful process of line edits and minor fixes and fussing with my writer's groups. Then? Off to the races.

There will be submissions to both agents and editors, with a particular eye cast on foreign markets.

And there will be a pre-professional edition. This is still in discussion and consideration, but tentatively? Two magazine-format volumes, illustrated, a signed, numbered limited release for friends and publicity. Most of y'all reading this will have a shot at one of those if you're interested. Just going to fish for some buzz...

Yeah, the book is an encrypted transformative ritual, a dissection of PTSD anatomized as landscape, an integration of personal, national, pre-Classical, and archetypal mythology with pop culture and genre fiction, about as thinly-veiled a memoir as you could ask, and so on and so forth to an intolerable extent. This is not a novel; it is a meme bomb in which the arts, sciences, and personal pathology intertwine to a hideous degree.

But how the fuck can I get an agent to look at the goddamned thing? Here's my first shot at a synopsis. Please, this would be an excellent time to comment -- does this make you interested in the manuscript?

Ghost Rock

If they put out a benefit calender for terminal virginity, Matt Cassad would be Mister February. Janitor Matt spends his time in his room, futzing around with his sketchbooks and his bass while pursuing his life-goal of withering into a bitter husk.

His cozy, miserable life goes all to hell with the entry of Lulu and Willy, a pair of homeless musicians. Something awakens in him, a sensitivity to an unseen world. Then a shoving match over an attempted mugging leads to a vengeful death by fire. Matt's involvement propels him into an escalating series of vividly biological hallucinations. When reality shatters, he finds himself the rescuer of a decaying afterlife – and a participant in a post-mortem vendetta as he’s pursued between worlds by the ghosts of the men involved in the mugging. (He's killed them once or twice, depending on how you count these things.)

Someone else wants Matt. Corrie. Is she the green-haired goddess of a bizarre evolutionary hothouse, an ageless siren with wisdom beyond human years, or is she "a four-hundred-year old little fat girl who talks like a cross between Benjamin Franklin and Madame Blavatsky?" Opinions vary.

The gods, guns, ghosts, madness, monsters, superpowers, and explosions are Matt’s meat and drink. Matt is ready to fight, and Matt is ready to die. Matt’s struggle is inside, where hatred of self wars with the need for others. This has always been Matt’s fight to lose. Now, when Lulu and Willie's lives are at stake, what chance does he have?

That depends on the power of love. And rock and roll.

Respect

Why isn't the novel done?

Right now, if I had two straight days of solid, uninterrupted work, I'd be done with the draft. Three days? Ready to send out to readers.

While I have been working every day -- more than three thousand words yesterday -- that statement has been true for a solid week now. If I had gotten two consecutive days of real work in the last week, I'd have finished the novel.

Why isn't the novel done?

I made plans. I declared limits. I asked for assistance.

Why isn't the novel done?

Well, it's not like I haven't been doing other things. For instance...

Shit.

When I broke it down for myself, the first layer of explanation involved other people. My momentum was broken by requests for various forms of assistance and companionship and so on and so forth.

So? What makes my work their responsibility? Most of the time, I never even hinted that people were eating time I could ill afford. And I wanted to do everything I did. And even when people were being unreasonable, I still had the option of yelling, "Leave me the fuck alone, I'm trying to fucking work here!"

The reason this is an issue all of a sudden is that I'm having a new kind of creative experience. It is now possible for me to hold the novel in my head. I understand the story, I know the page-by-page flow, the breakdown of scenes, everything down to subtle thematic issues and obscure references to science, pop and high culture, history, etc. I do this with short stories, but this is the first time I've been able to do it with a long-form work.

This allows me to do the fine manipulation that I haven't been able to do before. I can understand how specific word choices, specific pieces of information, can affect the entire work. It's a holographic understanding, and it is kind of an incredible piece of thinking. You'd be proud of me.

The thing is? It is intensely demanding of my concentration. It takes me an hour or two of fucking around on the internet and poking at the manuscript before I can erect the whole thing in my head.

Once it's up, I can work like a son of a bitch. But any confusion, any need to think about other stuff? It collapses catastrophically, and the experience of massively disorganized thought is intensely uncomfortable. Honestly, the temptation to physically hurt myself in order to restabilize... huh. I was going to say I've avoided giving in to it, but my cuticles tell a different story. (Hey, cutters! Cuticle mutilation is our version of nicotine gum.)

Blaming others is pointless. I tend not to treat my work time with respect. If someone wants me for something, they can get me. It's assumed that as the layabout, I'm the one who needs to make way.

I make that assumption as well.

This is okay when it doesn't interfere with the work. If I am working in a way that lets me pick up and put down the work at will, that's fine. But right now?

I need a higher level of respect from myself and the people around me.

I'm getting this done, and it will finish off at its own pace. But it will be done faster and be a stronger work if I am allowed a period of relative isolation in which to work.

So. Right now, the missus has her father coming to visit. It would be a war-between-the-sexes crime if I were to insist on that right now. I shan't. I'll enjoy him while he's here, shore up the missus as she's pummeled by the brutal tides of family, and then?

Well. I need to devote a little thought to it, but I will arrange my life to temporarily accommodate a period of functional insanity from me. I will need to spend a chunk of my day in isolation, and I won't be able to read or watch any stories. Words other than the novel are active enemies at this point.

I've started hearing back from the writer's groups, and the word is good. What I've got so far is doing what I want it to do, finally. Interestingly, after I resentfully lopped out most of the drug-themed sub-plots, all of a sudden a number of different readers started spontaneously using the word 'psychedelic.' About damned time -- this is adventure fantasy for people who read Hunter S. Thompson for the adventure and Carlos Castenada for the fantasy. This is me claiming Star Wars/Lord Of The Rings territory for the stoners who form their core audience anyway.

So why isn't it done yet?

Countdown: Five

Today's starting word count: 36,198

I know, the count seem puny, but what I've done the past couple of days? It's been about taking words out of the remainder of the manuscript.

Or to put it this way -- the pile of finished work is 135 pages thick, and there's only 83 unfinished pages left. There are a few scenes-from-scratch, but I'm well past the halfway mark. Regardless of whether or not I get done in time, the experiment is an official success.

And I'm polishing two short pieces, so there are three short works soon to be released into the wild. One goes into Swill, but I want to submit the sensitive story of the single mother and her raccoonabe child to The New Yorker, the puberty story to McSweeney's, and the autobiographical horror porn to Salon. I like the SF world, I will have my photo taken next to the SF world, and the SF world can come to my birthday party. But I don't want to limit my options. I'm sure you understand.

Here is one aspect of the novel that's the kind of thing they don't cover in classes or workshops. When I realized that I was writing a novel with strong horror elements and that the protagonist was strongly autobiographical, I entered into a minefield.

Many difficulties in people's lives come about as a result of falling into unconscious patterns of behavior. There is a certain point where these patterns overlap with ritual. The execution of a large-scale work of art, one requiring months or years of effort, is a ritual. It was important that I was conscious of my intended goal when I set out on the ritual of writing this novel.

At that point, writing strongly confrontational, abrasive horror was one of my primary creative goals. I was putting my rage and self-disgust down on the page as directly as possible.

Hey, I still do a bit of that from time to time, but writing that kind of material is the result of self-excoriation. If I were to do it as a career? I'd be using self-excoriation as a tool to generate material. Horror can be an emotional bitch to work with.

So I needed to make the work one that ended well for the protagonist, and as it developed, I realized that despite all the weird trappings, I had a straightforward hero's journey story here.

While that story form may have its roots in tales of ancient kings, its real strength is that it serves as a metaphor for maturity, for the process of developing yourself, taking your power, and finding your place in the world.

My thought was that I'd write the book, and by getting it finished and eventually published, I'd complete the hero's journey on my own.

But the book grew too large, was split into thirds, and so I was working toward a different end, one I hadn't clearly thought through. Where was Matt, my stand-in (or 'fiction suit,' in the terminology of Ellis and Morrison), supposed to be at the end of the first volume?

Well, he would end the first volume having had his first real taste of using his power intentionally. He'd be someone just starting to come into his own, with a freshly-minted and hard-earned sense of himself. He'd have established a small, but real place for himself in the world.

Up until the past few days I hadn't realized that I needed to reach that state in order to successfully complete the book. I thought the completion of the book would achieve that end, but it doesn't work that way. If I wrote about that feeling without having experienced it, the book would have been a lie. I would have been making a promise to the reader and myself that was not founded in truth.

I'm a lot of things, but I ain't that.

Once I processed the idea that I actually do suffer from serious psychiatric conditions, I started to realize something. I'd spent my entire life in a struggle against my own nature, trying to make myself fit in to the norm, because the norm was right, and healthy, and successful.

But an inability to plan and execute plans, poor focus, constant conflict with social norms, and so on and so forth, have all rendered me an utter failure as a child-engendering car-driving job-having regular guy.

I spoke to the missus about this, about how letting go of the idea of ever being normal has been such a relief, that the only thing I was any good at was being me. That while I am completely inadequate at the Fred-and-Barney level, I am more than adequate on other levels, and that I wanted to live on those levels and just be who I was. And she responded with such genuine warmth and support that I still feel the glow.

Regardless of whether this book succeeds or fails, or even if it's possible for me to make a living writing novels, I know that I am a real artist, and that I have acquired a substantial and respectable body of skill. I know that because of that, regardless of where I go or who I am with, I am anyone's equal.

My greatest fear has always been my own inadequacy. I'm now at the point where I am not dependent on success in the greater world to feel a sense of value in myself or my work.

A couple of years ago, I put this up on the blog.

When you're in your element you're different than when you're not, and it struck me that real confidence is the ability to create your proper place inside yourself so you can carry it around with you, so that when it's appropriate you can withdraw without feeling diminished. Ponder ponder.

I've finally done that. My faith in my ability to achieve highly in the arts has been confirmed by people who would know in terms I would pick out of a catalog if given the opportunity.

I needed that in order to write the ending of the novel truthfully. And that is the real reason the damned thing has taken so long, and so much work. It's not just a novel I'm writing. It's myself.

Of course, this has me terrified of the fact that Matt doesn't get laid until the third volume. What makes me do these things?

Countdown: Seven

If the Dizzy Toilet Devils ever finish another goddamned album, this is going to be the cover. The album will be called Girl Hammer.

Today's starting word count: 34,187

Yesterday's experiment was very interesting. The writing proved to be much more difficult than I'd thought -- I'm having to do much more from scratch than I'd thought, I'm encountering plotting and continuity issues, etc, etc. I was expecting yesterday to basically be a cut-and-paste situation, and instead I had tons of hard composition.

But did you see those numbers? Seven thousand words in a day -- good fucking words -- is a feat entitling me to a blue ox.

Interestingly, though. If you were watching a movie, and someone intentionally overclocked their brain, what would happen?

Last night, I got a nosebleed. Just like in the movies. I wonder if thinking too hard can raise your blood pressure.

Still. Seven thousand words. Damn. I said I could hack my brain and I did. Exactly when do you get to define something as a superpower?

Just remind me I'm a silly-assed fool who's been broke his entire life and has never asked a woman out if I start quoting Nietzsche.

from
GHOST ROCK
(copyright 2011 Sean Craven, all rights reserved)

The silhouette coming toward me is taller than I am and only approximately human. It has two heads, one centered on its shoulders, the smaller one back and to the left. The broad torso is made of two bodies fused together. One arm is normal, the other too big, with an extra elbow and a hand that has more fingers than I can count in a glance. It has a blanket wrapped around its waist, partially concealing three legs, and another around its shoulders.
The little head has short brown hair and a bald spot. The front head has a yellow beard on a red face.

It’s Arnie and Jeff.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Jeff says. “We don’t know him, he could have a gun or something.”

“If you’re scared you can wait for me,” Arnie says.

“You don’t have to be mean.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a little bitch.”

Fuck me. Is this Hell?

No way.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey boy,” Arnie says. “You must be lost, huh?” He grins at me, big yellow teeth. His flowing golden teeth. “I bet you got lost and now you’re scared, right?”

Jeff is just visible over his shoulder. “Hey, I know this guy.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Arnie says, then looks at me. “Hey, I do know you, don’t I?”

“Yeah, we ran into each other before.” I look right in his eyes.

“Wait a minute, it’s starting to come back to me,” the blonde head says. “I think I remember some fucking Nazi likes to beat people up, people littler than him. That’s you, right?” He steps forward. His ugly hand drags its clustered knuckles on the walkway, then whips up to stroke his beard. They look at me, Jeff half-nervous, half-friendly, Arnie just plain mean.

I’m not getting past them. They fill the fucking walkway. I step forward. He’s a fucking monster now. I beat him before and that is still there. Face still and gaze steady. Look right in the eye he tries to hide.

His eyes are primary colors, red veins, yellow whites, blue iris. They are soft. Stare at the soft eyes and think about the brain behind them. Break the bone to get to the brain. He moves once and I take his eyes I punch his throat when he’s on the ground he gets the boot. Keep staring. “Yeah. Arnie and Jeff, right?”

Arnie’s head goes to one side and he grins, looks down, slaps my shoulder. “Shit, dude, I’m just fucking with you. We’re the only ones out here, right? Got to stick together. I ain’t the kind of guy lives in the past.”

Countdown: Eight

These two are some of the most popular images I've put up on my blog. They get downloaded all the time. Recently, I did a search to see whether or not any of my art was being used on-line. I found these on some dude's site. The site was in a Northern European language I could not clearly identify, but these were in a list of images labeled WHAT I'M ALL ABOUT.

Well, all right. Providing stoners with self-image is a service I feel naturally qualified to provide.

And today's starting word count? 27,280

So. The good news? Yesterday I got a little over four thousand words down. The bad news? Two days into the countdown, I'm three thousand words down. I knew I was going to have trouble on this section, but it's done.

Three reasonable ways to look at this.

One, I seem to have set myself a difficult goal. If I keep up at this rate? My initial estimate of two, three weeks to finish the work would prove accurate. If I buckle down and try harder? Well, the work ahead of me is much easier than the work behind me. Almost all the scenes are blocked out in proper order, a lot of the writing is still functional after I pull it into the present tense. I may still have a chance.

Two, of course I have a chance. Even if I miss the ten days, I've got an extra day before... well. There's a deadline motive I haven't mentioned. I ain't gonna tell you right now, but I'll spill it in the next few days. But I have an extra day, if I stay on track, three thousand words in a day is fine.

Three. Since this stuff is going to be easier, maybe I should just break it down into slightly larger chunks and make sure that each day's work gets finished no matter what.

That certainly sounds reasonable.

I'm not gonna be reasonable. I put myself here for a purpose, goddamnit.

So what would a genius do? He would change his work procedure, rewire his brain, and clock in more manuscript pages than ever before, not just recovering lost ground but gaining a safety net.

I like that word 'genius.' I always wonder whether or not I get to self-apply it.

Here is the issue.

Writing is tremendously fatiguing for me. As I work, I have to continually resist the urge to take little breaks, and I actually do have to break quite frequently. Usually, I can only do three or four hours worth of writing in a day before my brain says, "Fuck you."

Art? Art is refreshing. I can do art for hours and hours and hours.

This has to do with level of focus on detail, and the nature of that focus. Writing is granular in many ways, focusing on individual issues in a concentrated fashion. In art -- for me -- those kinds of details aren't regarded personally, but as little dots in the whole.

This is why writing is so fatiguing.

I have a mass of manuscript that needs fucking with rather than complete re-writing. It has been line-edited -- I mean strunked, it's been strunked, and it will be getting one last strunking. So I am going to try and process writing through the section of my brain that handles rendering when I do art. That part of me is great with details, etc, but it has much more stamina than part I use for writing.

This is probably reflective of actual neuroanatomy.

So. I will work with music on. I will allow myself to lose focus and drift mentally. I will detach from the work itself, and let reflex guide me as I use the Find and Replace function until I could plotz. I will work from a meditative rather than an active place.

I will post the results tomorrow. We'll see how much of a genius I am then.

Countdown: Nine

Yes, it's true. That's the printing of Walter Jon Williams, author, bon vivant, and practitioner of the martial arts. Here is his eBook store; go buy Days Of Atonement. No fooling. I need to do a post on that one.

Jesus! He's got some stories about the industry that make being eaten alive by rats in a trench while the mustard gas rolls in sound like fucking brunch.

Today's starting word count: 23,270

Okay. Bad news? Only three thousand and some words yesterday, well under goal. Good news? This section is going to take a lot longer than the rest of the book. Totally new material.

And that leads me to today's good news. I was wrestling with the get-out-of-bed-and-get-to-work issue when I realized what had slowed me down yesterday. (Yes, three thousand words of remarkably fine prose is a slowdown for me at this point. I will have to mention hypomania at some point. I'll just say that it's the mental state to which cocaine aspires.)

The infodump scene. All of this crazy, crazy shit has been going on and now the lead and the reader are face to face with someone who has information.

This is the place where genre fiction dies. It does not die quickly; the rope does not break its neck. This is where mysteries win. They have the explanation scene at the end of the story, the story makes its unfortunately short drop and begins to strangle on the rough hemp loop, and then it ends.

With fantasy and science fiction, the explanation scene comes early, makes it plain that the author is addressing the reader, and then unlike the mystery, the poor story is left to clutch at the noose and twist, pissing its pants as it slowly strangles.

This is the prospect immediately before me.

The lead, injured and lost, has been taken in by the character who will be his own true love, and she's the one who has been in the other world from the beginning.

So if I explain things to the reader, not only am I killing the story, I'm killing my main character's love life. I kind of identify with him. So I'm reluctant to do that.

And then I realized my way out of the situation. I don't know if anyone's used this before, but.

The person providing the information is full of semidigested jargon, does not think in a particularly clear and linear fashion, and regards herself as the one who truly knows what's going on.

Not only will she confuse the shit out of the reader, she'll irritate the lead.

PROBLEM SOLVED.

Here's your taste for the day -- now the title will make more sense.

from
GHOST ROCK

(Copyright 2011 Sean Craven, all rights reserved.)

“You got me curious,” I say. “Can I have a listen?”

“It’s not ready.”

“Play the fucking song,” Willy says.

Lulu shoots her elbow into his ribs, then leans over the laptop, goes through a menu and hit the space bar. The music starts. It’s funny, her saying that she was trying for a Beach Boys sound in such a dark song. I can hear what she meant but the sound of the traffic is too intrusive for the music to really work.

Willy plays for a while, just matching the melody, then hands me back my instrument. “Man, I should play more bass. I always forget how much fun it is.”

“We’ll have to redo all the vocals.” Lulu stops the song.

“Hey,” I say, “can I tell you a stupid idea?”

“Sure,” Lulu says.

“What if you started off with just one vocal track, then pulled them in one at a time? So the traffic sound sort of builds up slowly?”
Lulu’s fingers flick over the laptop’s keyboard. “Let’s see what …” She starts the song without the vocals. As it plays she adds the vocal harmonies one track at a time. The muddy noise of the traffic builds up slowly and becomes part of the music.

I can’t help messing with my bass as I listen. It’s as though my ears and hands operate independently of my brain.

Lulu looks over at me, sideways.

“Sorry.” I stop.

“Don’t stop.” She goes back to the start, and fades the tracks in instead of popping them into place at full volume. I start to vary what I was doing, build some hooks, sort of surfy, James Bond-y sounding stuff. Not what the rest of the song sounds like, but it’s coming out that way. Lulu stops the music. “What you did, the last verse? Could you just do that over and over?”

“Okay,” I say, “but gimme a second.” I fumble around until I figure out how to take the pattern through the chord changes. “Okay.”

She starts the song. This time there’s something different and it’s not just the bass line. As Lulu brings the vocal tracks in one by one the sound of the traffic builds up and up until at the end everything else is covered by the sound of engines and horns and tires. I play softer and softer, then stop one verse after everything else had been swallowed by the sound of the street. I’ve never done anything like that before. Hell, I haven’t done anything; it just happened.

“I really liked that.” Lulu leans forward and smiles. “Can I ask you a big old big old favor? Would you let me record that sometime?”

I grip the neck of my bass. “Sure. We can give it a try.”

\Lulu starts unplugging the laptop.

“Hey, can I see that for a second?” James reaches out to Lulu. “I just want to check something on line real quick.”

Lulu pauses, then slowly passes the laptop over to James.

“I thought you liked playing bass on the keyboard,” Willy said. “You keep telling me it’s part of our sound.”

“Will you please go fuck yourself, William?” Ouch, Lulu’s actually pissed. “You could try playing bass yourself, you say it’s so easy.”

“It is easy. It’s so easy bassists do it all the time. Sorry, man.”

“I’m good with the stereotype,” I say. “Play a G, play a C, play a G, play a C. It’s pretty much all my tiny mind can handle.”

“They finally put something up on the police blotter,” James said. “Shit.”

I go to read over his shoulder.

Shit.

Deirdre says, “What?”

“People died,” I say. “I think that guy I fought died.”

Countdown: Ten

Sigh. This is the cover I used to use for reader's copies, way back when...

And the day starts with 20,182 words in the bag, 30-40,000 to go.

So, this last week a number of things came together and I found myself working on the novel again. I feel better about it than I ever have, completely confident as to my control over the material. A number of recent realizations have allowed me to see the full shape of the story in my head at one time, the story now has the shape and feel of a conventional story despite its fucked-upedness, and everything I've been trying to do seems to be happening.

It's short as hell -- gonna be in the Animal Farm/Brave New World range, but given the way it reads, that's a very good thing.

So here's the deal. I looked at what I've done over the past nine days, and I look at the manuscript, and if I double my speed?

I'm done in ten days, tops.

After some seven or eight years, the idea of doing the finished version in eighteen days seems brilliant. Impossible of course, but that's what I've needed all along. An impossible deadline.

Today is the do-or-die day. The next section is entirely new writing, and it's very tricky stuff. If I can finish it today, it's relative cake from here out. If not? It's a maaaaaybe.

I also have a bit of extra motivation, which I'll tell you about later. But first.

I've decided to post samples of my work while I'm engaged in my hysterical fit, just to keep my spirits up. Here is how it starts:

GHOST ROCK

(Copyright 2011 Sean Craven, All Rights Reserved.)

“You’re going to find a girlfriend.” Why would Deirdre say something like that to me? I bet she tortured bugs when she was a kid.

I had to say, “Prove it.”

Shoulder the door open, hands on the mop handle. The mop bucket rattles across the parquet floor, then up and over the ridged metal and rubber strip marking the entrance to the main women’s public restroom, set discreetly to one side of the Lingerie department. Textured yellow linoleum, beige stall dividers, brown tiles up to four feet, apricot walls above the tiles. What do the colors say? Hygenic but human, feminine but disciplined. That’s what the colors say when they’re clean.

Prove it. Oh, that was clever, oafboy. May I have more trauma, please?

“Katie said she wanted to sleep with you, but she knew you’d take it too seriously.”

“I take everything too seriously. I mean, that’s what I do. I mean, fuck. That’s enough to do it? It’s really that bad?”

“Cut it out! I’m trying to cheer you up.”

“I like Katie.”

“She likes you too.”

“Thanks. I think I’m going to go lay down with a damp towel over my face in case my head just fucking explodes or something.”

I still feel shitty. Katie’s nice. And smart. Nice people shouldn’t get near me.

And now Deirdre’s friend Lulu is coming to visit. That should be just ducky. I hope she’s not my type. Of course she is, she’s a composer and I am a sucker for talent. She’s from Tennessee, Deirdre says she’s from the hills.

Dolly Parton, dude.

Quit torturing yourself. Fill the bucket with hot water and pine cleanser and sniff the disinfectant scent of artificial Christmas. Dust the tops of the stalls and the vanity lights around the mirror. Always work from the top down. Gravity is the main force that distributes filth. On to the sinks, and the water in the first sink does not drain.

Take the needle-nosed pliers from the bucket, dig between the sodden fiber and the side of the drain, grip tightly enough to hold, not so tightly as to tear, and pull. The tampon slides out slow and steady, the irregular perimeter of the maroon stain edges up past the chrome and hey, this is my Arthurian moment; Matt Cassad, you have cleared this drain and shall henceforth be King of the Third-Floor Lady’s Room. There’s another tampon in the next drain, and the next, all the way down the line. How does this even happen?

Maybe it starts with cool white walls, small minimalist prints modifying the arctic curse of the room. A little girl tosses her bangs out of her eyes and sighs with dramatic intent. “Mother, I’m bored!”

Mother, angled and elegant as a carpenter’s ruler: “Well, when I was a little girl, your grandmother used to take me to Sharpe’s downtown, the nice store where we get your ski clothes, and we’d go to the lady’s room and play special games.”

The worst things in the men’s room are stray pee or a diarrhea blart. I’m not sure if the nightmare in here is a matter of sexual politics or just the convenient supply of used tampons. Pull a bag out of a tampon bin; oh, God, that’s a couple of pounds, when I open it I’m going to see a miscarriage, a translucent doll’s hand slicked with blood, beckoning…

Dirty diaper. Why the hell isn’t it in the trash? And the next bag is half-full of pee. I picture a woman hanging from the stall divider like a treefrog pissing, I picture a woman bailing away with a cone-shaped paper cup as the tampons swell and float. No, and no, and Jesus I hate my brain.

Women can’t possibly do crap like this, right? Whoever does this is a male employee with off-hours access to the bathrooms. Has to be.

Oh, shit. From that perspective everyone I work with looks like a pervert.

Don't worry about Matt, kids!
He's going to Narnia!
Or the equivalent.

Ghost Rock Lives

So. I have a few pieces of work to do before I set in on the main task, but the time has come to start working on the hopefully-final version of the novel. I honestly do not know if this is the ninth, tenth, or whateverth draft -- there have been so many fucking fractional drafts it's a meaningless question. The collected manuscript would only have to be dropped about five feet to kill a mule.

The thing to keep in mind is that this novel is how I learned to write. It has been my schooling. And now it's time to finish it off. I am grateful for all the assistance, advice, and criticism I've received. But it's time to stop relying on on other people's opinions.

I write one draft, aiming for three thousand words a day. Write in the morning, revise the previous day's output in the evening. Do one draft, wait three weeks, give it a once-over, send it out to two readers, one last combing, and off. Be a pro.

This shouldn't be that hard. I've written the damned thing nine or ten or eleven-point-eight-three-four times already.

So. To prepare, there are a few things I need to change in the outline.

First off, I need to track all the major incidents in the plot and make sure the lead character responds appropriately to them. Some of the high points so far are his realistic reactions to events that are taken for granted in adventure fiction; I need to make sure that happens throughout.

I need to go through and show his feelings toward himself, and how they change in specific reaction to those around him. I need to show him working and preparing as an artist throughout the book.

Right now the most dramatic, important event in the book happens in the third chapter, and neither the reader nor the protagonist have any idea what's going on. That must change -- the big event goes to the end, and when it comes, everyone knows what it is.

I need to plot the changes in the supernatural world more visibly. I hint at things in the last draft that I need to state clearly -- things which will reinforce deep thematic issues. I'm going to try and and make a serious point about materialism in a seemingly supernatural situation by using the evolution of vertebral pneumasticity in giant cattle. Essentially, each time the protagonist shows up in the supernatural world, it will be as if that world is in a different geological epoch, with the environmental changes relating to plot issues. Fun times.

And I need to make the supernatural elements completely consistent. Right now, there are still some key events that seem to happen without reason. I need to fit them in or eliminate them. Which would be a bitch, because one of them is everyone's favorite scene.

Finally, once that's all done? I'm going to do a plot breakdown of the novel, analyzing each scene for its contribution to the story and making adjustments to smooth things out.

When the time comes to actually write, there will be a few fairly major changes in approach. I'll be going from first person, past tense, to first person, present tense. I'm doing this because the story is a stream-of-consciousness piece.

Given that, there won't be chapters any more. I'll hate to say good-bye to the chapter titles, but losing the artificial breaks and cliffhanger chapter endings will be a real relief.

Rather than the speed-loaded start from the last draft, I'm going back to a plodding, stolid, "Here is the man, this is his world," approach, letting there be a nice long stretch at the start where it isn't clear whether it's really a book about a crazy person.

I get to do some prose skylarking. I get to have a miserable, fucked-up protagonist. I get to be hard to understand.

Most importantly, this gets to be flawed. This is such a strange, twisted, inadvertent piece of work that there's no way to expect it to be perfect. It wasn't planned. It grew. Like a fungus. So it is going to be organic, gnarly, and weird. Most people won't be able to read it. It might not be as bad as, say, Pynchon. It might be worse.

That's fine.

I just want to get this over with!

Alert! Alert!

The Missus read this and she was very upset that I implied that the novel might be difficult to read -- "It's incredibly readable!" was her indignant statement on the subject. She's a big reader in the Holly Lisle/Robin Hobb/Mercedes Lackey section, so I figure the crossover potential is going to be through the roof.

A Little Ghost Rock

Hey, all. How about a taste of the novel? Here's the first couple of pages. This is, of course, copyright 2010, Sean Craven, etc. As if I had to say.

Lemme know if it works. I'm feeling the fear. Yes, this is a bit pathetic, but right now that's where I'm at. I have worked so hard on this that it's lost all meaning and I have no judgment and I want to get it the hell off my plate. So I can write my sleazy unicorn princess novel.

Gracious Lifestyles of the Golden West
from
Ghost Rock

San Costas was a California paradise, bikini-clad and fragrant with coconut oil, and it made my ass tired. Coming back from the afternoon run to the post office, downtown was packed. I took little steps through the crowd, white plastic bin held in front of me. It was filled with mail addressed to Sharpe’s, the department store where I worked as a janitor. It was hot late autumn, the sky full of sun, so a lot of people were tourists, here for the boardwalk and the surfing. Others were students from the university. Everyone was pretty. I felt like a slum on legs.

As I crossed the street, I heard a young woman’s voice – voices? – raised in song. It caught me, made me feel short of breath. It was one voice singing two notes, or two voices harmonizing with inhuman perfection. The voice grew louder, the air thick and too clear, as though I was embedded in glass. I couldn’t see who was singing; traffic blocked my vision. I stepped up onto the curb and set the basket down. My hands shook so badly I might have dropped it.

I stared down at the mail in the bin as every sound but the voice grew distant, dug my thumbs into the hollows between jaw and ears, felt an itch burn and vanish as something inside shifted with an intimate gurgle, drained down the back of my throat, made me cough.

Once I got back to work, I went to Deirdre’s office to tell her what had happened. “It was intense. Total vertigo. I thought I was gonna pitch over into traffic.” We were in the shadowy narrow end of the display department in the basement at Sharpe’s. I leaned against a pillar made out of concrete and redwood gone black with age. Deirdre’s drafting lamp lit up a row of decorated coffee cans that held hundreds of felt-tip pens. “You know how it is when you’re on a long drive and you’ve been doing a slow rise and all of a sudden your ears pop?”

“And you realize you haven’t heard anything clearly for miles.” Deirdre snapped her nicotine gum. She didn’t smoke at work. Dressed in a pair of black-and-white check clamdiggers and a vintage Star Wars T-shirt, she was neither thick nor thin. Her build was a reminder that regular girl was a damned good idea. With her pale skin and freckles she looked as though she’d been carved out of vanilla ice cream and sprinkled with cinnamon. We’d been friends for three years, shared a house for more than a year, and it still killed me to look at her.

I pushed off the pillar. “Exactly. My ears are still real freaky. I swear, I feel like I’ve never heard anything before in my life.” I grabbed my hands behind my back and stretched until my shoulders cut loose with a pair of nice gristly pops. I could hear the meatiness, the flow from muscle to tendon to bone. It was a new sense, sight and touch at once. “It’s like there’s some sound under everything else, and I keep listening for it. It’s gonna drive me nuts.”

“Matt, why didn’t you go and see who was singing?”

“I wanted to, but when I checked the clock on the bank I was twenty minutes late. I’ll go look for her after work. Speaking of which.” I lifted the lid of Deirdre’s garbage can. A multicolored wad of construction paper gave off fumes from Spray-Mount. I sealed the lid carefully. “’fore I take off, what’s up with Lulu?”

Deirdre spun in her chair. “I haven’t heard anything since she told James she was in Berkeley. She should be here by now.” She dropped her voice, put a sexy huskiness in her tone. “You’ll like her. She’s cute.”

Whenever she told me about a new woman in our circle of acquaintance, Deirdre always said, ‘She’s cute,’ in that eager tone, cheering me on, letting me know she had faith in me, that it was time to give a hundred and ten per cent. So as not to let down the team. I just wish I knew what the fuck she expected me to do. “I’m looking forward to meeting her.”

“Thanks for being cool with her staying.”

“It’s your and James’s house,” I said. If Lulu was as cute as Deirdre said, this was going to be fucking torture. She’d be sleeping in the living room, sharing my bathroom… “Y’all can do what you want.”

“You pay rent, you get a say.” Deirdre stopped fidgeting. “Matt, I really am worried about her. I can’t get her cell. And she gets into some flakey stuff sometimes. Jesus, you should have seen her last boyfriend.”

“Well, that was back in Chicago, right?” Lulu and Deirdre had met when Deirdre studied sculpture at the Chicago Art Institute. Lulu was a composer and electronic musician from Tennessee. Given this information, my mind constructed a composite of Wendy Carlos and Dolly Parton, a brilliant artist with a sweet nature and a figure ripe enough to be a little silly. She made an excellent imaginary potential girlfriend. “Listen, you can’t do anything but wait. She said she’s coming.”