AMAZING MENTAL GYMNASTICS, KEN KESEY

Facebook informed me last night that everyone was waiting with bated breath for my next entry. Also, nowadays, Facebook keeps inviting me to boost my blog entries with dollars. I have refrained from that thus far. Is boosting worth anything? I'm not going to pretend I don't want people waiting for my sci fi novel to come out.

My last entry, if you recall, was about all the balls one must keep in the air—the memory required—to write a novel, specially a detective novel with many mental mazes included within its pages. Sometimes the thing to be recalled is quite simple. Just this morning, my character, Charley Manning, was recalling his last meeting on the sidewalk before his apartment building with Misty Frampton. Then I had to recall whether or not I'd removed that meeting for some other important reason. At last, not able to find the meeting, I kept in his thought about last seeing Misty [for romantic reasons], but I removed the reference to any specific place. That's a simple example how things must be juggled. An example of why Ken Kesey quit writing.

PS: I keep extensive plot notes, but, then I make changes and don't update the notes. The notes become as much of a distraction as the novel itself.

BEATNIK BOOMER GETS OIL AND PROJECT CHANGE

Here I sit at McCord's Toyota, getting our Yaris an oil change and tire rotation. Here's my next set of writing tasks. A movie script. I've got a good central idea, and I picture Morgan Freeman in the film too. It'll be science fiction, and, of course, that means some technical problems and plot difficulties to overcome in order to create plausibility. What I'm doing now is writing down ideas and problems and certain interesting moments in the plot and asking myself questions like: "Why does X kill Y?" "What is Morgan Freeman doing in that town?"   "Where did he come from?" "How do I show the viewer this complication?" This is the fun part for me. For Ghoul World, I was aflame with imagination for about 3 days before the hard work of writing came into play. Then it took 2 years to get 555 pages done and rewritten three times. Photo is me in McCord's. 

OLD SILENT BEATNIK ON TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN

Joy! Joy! Not much to say today. About to go get Mertie for lunch. The writing went very well this morning as I created a scene between Manning and another being in which much was revealed and much hidden too so that the whole scene is rife with double meanings that the reader will understand later in the novel, and I don't mean double entendres either. It was great fun, but, Jeez, I wish I were younger. This writing would go so much easier and be fraught with much less worry if my brain were only 15 years younger. But, today, the hell with it. I feel joyous.

SILENT BOOMER GIVES UP KNIVES FOR BARBITURATES

The photo is of the first four issues of Eastern Washington University's biannual literary magazine, Willow Springs. Richard Le Compte, John Naccarato, Miriam DeShazo, Tom Smith and I founded the magazine back in 1977. The others were in their 20s, I in my 30s. We had dandy battles about content. A long time ago that was. All the world of art and literature lay before us to conquer. I'm far inland of the invasion beach, and the enemy shows no sign of surrender.

Making fast progress on the rewrite of Angie's Choice. Into Chapter Seven and liking what I read. Good structure, suspenseful elements, solid characters—this is a publishable novel, certainly. Made another intelligent change. At novel's outset, Angie's suicidal over recent SIDS death of infant daughter. Originally I gave her suicidal thoughts about a butcher knife? This rewrite, I thought, "What yuppie woman plans to slit her wrists with a butcher knife?" Now Angie's suicidal thoughts concern prescription barbiturates. Naturally!

Women (and men) do think about butcher knives when they're fighting with a spouse. A Vancouver man is presently on trial for killing his girlfriend with a knife. One of my ex's snatched a butcher knife out of a kitchen drawer and threatened me. I laughed. I knew she didn't have it in her to harm anyone, but it was admirably dramatic. Much of my life was painfully dramatic in those days. Wives had to amp up their own gestures in order to share the stage with my grandiose performances.

SILENT BOOMER BEATS THE BUSHES FOR MARKETS

market research

As I continue to rewrite Delinquent Lives, I find the novel has a tighter structure than I thought. Close reading reveals chronological details I thought were missing, phrases like "three days later" or "last night" that I missed when I skimmed through. Like improving dialogue, finding the skeletal structure takes attention to detail.

This morning I sent off one of the essays that my local paper rejected to another market exclusive to the Pacific Northwest. I devoted four hours to discovering the new market, rewriting the essay to make it more market correct, and carefully following the submission guidelines. 

head shot

I found the new market by gathering up all the newspapers and magazines on the free literature rack in the lobby outside the Cascade branch of the Vancouver Library and studying them to see what to my wondering eyes might appear. I found a new age production which pays with a year's subscription. Again...no money, but isn't that all part of getting things published and building reputation? Submission guidelines also requested a head shot. See photos. 

Finally, I've not heard back from the senior publication which asked for writing samples and this blog address. Perhaps I'm  75 years too young (or immature) for the target audience these senior newspapers seek out. That's a definite possibility.

REAL BEAT BOOMER PLOTTING ALONG HIS WAY

the whole scene

Of my four completed novels—The Man In The Mirror, Delinquent Lives, Angie's Choice, The Porno Writer—the book I'm currently rewriting, Delinquent Lives, is the most difficult to disentangle. I've been forced to sit down and graph the plot. 

a detail

When I wrote this book, I didn't rely on plot. By switching back and forth between two limited points of view, I saw the book as developing by giving the reader bits and pieces of information about each of the two main characters that would add up to a full psychological profile of them and justify how they came out as the novel concludes.  

Delinquent Lives does develop along a chronological order, but I've used so many flashbacks, I can see where a reader might be put off from reading to the finish. Continuity is problematical. I was letting my love of Fellini's "8 1/2" influence me. Fellini believed his audience had the knowledge to understand what he was doing, but reading a book is different than watching a movie.

I can see the psychological rationales to most of the decisions I made about scene placements, and I tried to make each event have it's own intrinsic tension, but as I rewrite all these years later, I discover scenes and information whose necessity I have to question. Again and again I learn that an old cat can learn new meows if he's motivated enough.

BEAT BOOMER PLOTTING ALONG

I got a surprise yesterday when I realized that Delinquent Lives, the book I translated with Readiris OCR software was missing chapters. I feared I had many more pages to translate one page at a time in a very slow process, but, then, among files dedicated solely to my creative work, I found the missing material already translated in a subfolder under the novel's title where I had not expected to find it. I was relieved because this meant I didn't have to translate all those missing pages. However...in my rewrite, if you recall, I have already caught myself being too clever for my own good. 

Looking at this new material, I see that my cleverness must be corrected again and, this time, thoroughly. My chronology has always been twisted in order to maintain what I've thought of as my clever opening. My plot has to be repaired. A complete rearrangement of early material is called for. O, no! The Nightmare Rewrite is upon me, the kind of complete rewrite that at my age (feeling rushed as I am by the grim reaper) I shrink from, but if this book is to be the one that somebody other than myself publishes (and it could be this book), then I will have to rearrange several early chapters and fragments of chapters. I will have to put my chronology in order.

I take a deep breath. Where will I find the time to keep rewriting Delinquent Lives, making these blog entries, court agents for Angie's Choice, attend the writer's group I enjoy, send off short stories and poetry to competitions, cook suppers for wife, read a book now and then, do the laundry, keep the house straightened up and manage to write fresh material at the same time? And what...if...after all this time and effort, nobody likes the book?