The Damned Novel, part Four.

I'm getting sick of this image and yet here it is again. At least I've got something to bitch about.

So at that point I started writing the last volume. And I got a good ways into it and trashed what I'd done.

Twice.

What had happened was that I'd set up some situations and characters that weren't gelling. Large chunks of classical and Scandinavian mythology were crowding their way into a one-room unfurnished cosmos.

So I tried something that had blocked me every time I'd tried it before. I sat down and started working on an outline.

There's a dispute regarding outlining and both sides of it are dead right -- in a limited way. The outliners say that it's stupid to start a trip if you don't know where you're going. The free writers say that outlining is for hacks. There are even rumors that some people will mentally outline a story and then claim they'd written it without a plot. I ain't got the balls for that.

My position has come to be an ecumenical one. I free wrote at first but then when I was totally, utterly at sea I sat down, reread everything, took notes, and made a list of all the dangling plot threads. Then I figured out how to tie them all together.

And then I had a solid outline for the third volume. At which point I realized that I'd save myself a hell of a lot of revision if I went back to the beginning and made the first and second volumes line up with everything that was going to follow.

More than two hundred manuscript pages of notes and outlines later I started in on the job. This was the point at which the setting and characters really congealed; the mythological characters were transformed into my characters, the workings of the fantastic elements became thoroughly locked into the story...

I just hit the sixty-thousand word mark this week; I'm aiming for a hundred, since I read on John Scalzi's blog that Tor likes their manuscripts to weigh in at a hundred thousand words. Fine with me; that's about the length the work seems to want. Volume three is solidly outlined; volume two has a solid ending but the story still needs some massage.

When the first volume's done I'll give it one more massage (compress chapters two and three into one chapter, finesse the details foreshadowing Matt's metamorphosis...) and then send it out to fresh readers. After that it'll be one last line edit and off to the rounds of agents and publishers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you say. But what's it about?

It's about rock and roll. It's about what it means to be working class in America. It's about art and artists. It's about friendship, especially the friendships between men and women. It's about both mental illness and visionary spirituality.

It's about the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. It's about love and anger and self-destruction and how people need each other, help each other, and use each other -- and how these categories tend to have blurry margins. It's about the nitty-gritty details of drug use and cleaning toilets. It's about uninsured trips to the emergency room.

It's about life after death -- and how the afterlife is affected by the population boom. It's about monsters and roaring ghosts, farm animals and parents who are becoming quite strange under the influence of Lamarckian evolution. It's about the cosmic being whose duodenum is Heaven's waiting room. It's all about the valve.

But it turns out that if you ignore all the knobs and doohickeys the story itself is an old and familiar one.

"A troubled young man falls in with roguish and unpredictable companions. Through them he leaves his old world behind and travels to a new one, a world full of visions and wonders. While in this world he finds love, undergoes transformations, gains strange powers and in the end uses them to save both worlds."

One Last Thing...

The Damned Novel, part Three.

Here's one of the original images that I composited for the scratch draft cover. I'll probably recreate the whole thing in color for the next reader's draft.

Things were getting more and more awkward, more and more cumbersome. What the hell was going on? Characters from myth began showing up and just standing around, blocking the flow.

And whenever I tried outlining it just kept me from being productive. It didn't work. Nothing added up properly -- lots of individual scenes worked and they didn't go anywhere.

So I decided to take a break from writing and printed up what I'd done and passed it out to the writer's group and some pals of mine.

But the manuscript was too cumbersome. I split it in half, had the halves bound separately at the copy shop.

And while neither was an entirely complete story, the two halves each had their own distinct narrative line with a solid start and end. The second volume was weak in the middle but the first actually read like a novel.

I was writing a trilogy. God help me, a fantasy trilogy. Tolkien casts a long shadow.

To Be Continued...

The Damned Novel, part Two.

So as I worked the novel became more and more autobiographical. I lost sight of what I was doing and started to think I'd finished it long before that was the case.

And the writing was a bitch. As I mentioned in the first post, I found that if I was writing other things it screwed with the novel. And I'd frequently get to a place where I was stuck, had no idea where to go next. My mom, Zoe Bishop, died during this time and that didn't help in the short run.

As an aside, after her death I helped my sister and her husband clean out her house. And when I saw her work space I realized that she was a serious writer-in-training. She never told me... That was a bit of a shock.

(Rest in peace, Mom. Next weekend when the missus is out of town I'll get a pack of Kools and some Budweiser and toast your memory.)

As I struggled with the story I found that a good way to get past the sticking points was to just have something happen. It was the old Chandler approach -- if things get dull have two men come through the door with pistols.

Not only did that give the individual slow spots a little excitement, it also gave me questions. What is that snake thing? Who's the Deacon? How does the Limbus work? What is the anatomy of a soul?

Questions are the heart of story. What if? Why?

I also began sticking figures from classical and Scandinavian mythology into the works on a similar basis. And when I did that they insisted on bringing the other characters from their dramas with them. The novel began to drift away from autobiography into fantasy.

And the damned thing kept growing...

To Be Continued.

The Damned Novel, Part One.

Here's the retitled cover of the

first reader's scratch draft.

" The first time I saw Lulu and Willy I thought they might be twins, two skinny little white kids dressed all in raggedy black with so many rings in their ears that you could have hung them from a curtain rod. The only difference between them was that her hair grew down in a greasy fringe that hid her dark eyes while his hair was swept up in a bulb like an onion.

They were sitting on the sidewalk on the mall with an empty quart-sized yogurt container on a piece of cardboard in front of them. There was a dollar sign, an arrow, and the word ‘for’ on the cardboard, the arrow pointing to a red circle with an inhaler sitting in it..."

It started out as a horror novella about a garage band's haunted album. When I took it into the writer's group, I was told that the reality and the fantasy were both fine but they didn't work together.

I'd set it in Santa Cruz in the mid-Eighties and used an airbrushed version of my younger self as the point-of-view character. As I worked to fix the problems in the novella it turned out that I couldn't ignore my own story in favor of Lulu and Willy's. What started as a sort of punk rock M.R. James piece was twisting in my hands.

See, during the time the story is set in, my life was...

Well, it was nuts. In every sense of the word. I had everything happen to me from mental illness -- which, depending on your belief system either did or did not include a classic Whitley Strieber-style abduction experience -- to losing my home and winding up living with a bunch of junkies for a month. If you meet me, ask me about the Hell's Angel with cocaine psychosis who thought I was a deaf mute -- whenever he heard me speak he thought it was the Devil speaking through my mouth... That situation came close to getting ugly.

Let's just say that my life started demanding a place in the story.

To Be Continued...