The Plight of the Mired Novelist

 

 

Ending with a sentence which I think may turn out to be the besst in the book, I finished Chapter 25 late Friday morning.  IT was one of my really good days, full of spirit and flow, the secret liquors with which I water my garden. 

 

Naively, I expected that this weekend would be a mad frenzy of writing as a consequence, but it seems that novels don’t work like that: at least mine don’t.  I write a chapter full of juice and later on, two days or two weeks later I know exactly what it points to, but the day after, I always have a creative hangover:  I can’t find the sense of the chapter, I can’t find the write words, I can’t even find my socks. I suppose I should just roll over and play dead, read a book or something, but like I said here yesterday, I feel the mass of this project growing within me and it wants to be out in the world where people can read it and I can move onto the next project, God be praised.

 

So I’m sitting here staring at the screen, which I remember now is how a lot of this writer’s writing time is spent, and writing a blog entry which is probably a little silly and probably a little obvious, but which keeps my fingers moving and the birth pains from being quite as sharp.  It all puts me in mind of the bit from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”:

 

Eric Idle:  I want to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  You can’t have babies; you’re a man.  What’s it going to gestate in, are you going to keep it in a box?

 

Eric Idle:  I want the right to have babies.

 

John Cleese:  (Outraged, the way only John cleese can be outraged)  What’s the point in having the right to have babies if you can’t have babies?

 

 

Well, I’m telling you that this man can and will have a baby, and the sonogram says it looks to be about five hundred and fifty pages from head to toe.  I just wish the miracle of childbirth were happening TODAY.

Pregnancy

 

 

I’ve been fretting for some time now that, although I write for four to six hours five or six days every week, I’m not making the progress on the novel that I would like to.  With Word 2003 set at a 12 point Times New roman font, I had only written, or seemed to have written around 230 pages after some one and a half years of work.  It is good work, but it seemed to me that there wasn’t a lot of it for the time invested and I began to feel depressed and rather hard on myself as a lazy slacker.

 

Then my dear friend Kevin reminded me that book length isn’t determined by number of pages as shown by Word for Windows, but by word count.  And when I applied the word count utility, the novel I’ve written so far is no 230 pages but near twice that in length.  Needless to say, I am very, very pleased with myself and take the title of slacker Prince as a badge of honor.  The truth is, I’m kicking ass novelistically speaking and am probably between three quarters and four fifths of the way through my first draft.  The second and third drafts, I expect, will go very swiftly as I already have a pretty good idea of the alterations which need to be made before the book is totally coherent.

 

But even though it turns out I’m writing an ox-stunner rather than a slim volume, there is still a certain amount of suffering involved at this point.  I began to feel this about seven years into my first book, “The Apocalypse Hilton”.  I describe it as a feeling of wanting to give birth when I still haveanother trimester to go.  I have all these characters and situations and they want to be in a published book, not next year sometime and certainly not five years from now, but today or tomorrow.  In fact, I think I feel, as much as any man can, the way a pregnant woman feels when she thinks to her unborn child: “Damn it, baby, I’m tired.  ARRIVE already!”

 

 

In Case of Falling Astronauts, Break Glass

 

copyright William L. Houts 2010

United States of America

All Rights Reserved

 

 

I.

 

o heavenly desert for a wandering tribe, nazareth to astronauts;

cradle of prophets with mirrored faces, our mystics of absolute zero,

striding through hells of kelvin heat or leaping lead-footed for joy.

we knew no domes of glass nor wise antennaed

mayors would meet our traveling boys, flown so far

from the roiling blue, flung so far into darkness and dust.

but if a desert, still a place of birth, you anvil moon: like silver

minted fresh, we’d shine our lives by the pure silent hammers of sol.

this was our dream, our all-american dream of astronauts

grave and poetic: faces full of infinity, minds on plans

for compassionate cities, angelic hands at work in the vine-

yards of science. the rocket packs and rayguns were toys,

dolls in the hands of scheming boys we never thought they’d keep.

what we were after, as always, was space: another place to go

when nowhere was left

a heavenly desert to a wandering tribe,

second bethlehem to a dream.

 

 

 

II.

 

I wonder what plagues we gave to the Indians of the Moon,

I struggle to remember which treaties we broke with the Lunar Sioux,

the precise year of that famous ambush so successfully sprung by

the cavalry of the American Third Orbital Marines upon the Lakota

living by the shores of the Sea of Tranquility.

And I forget exactly how many chiefs we lashed to the coils

of fusion drives, or swung from rocket gantries

or tumbled into void with a one two three.

I get all the dates mixed up, but from where I’m standing

I can still smell the silicate smoke of tipis burning on lunar prairies.

 

 

 

III.

 

When I still played hopscotch,

when i knew just how to throw the stone

and what these lines are for,

I read about Laika, the dog in space,

How the Russians loved their doggy cosmonaut

(a snapshot from some grade school primer:

white coated men and a scrappy mutt

with a lolling tongue) and how she loved her cozy Sputnik, just enough room for her race.

I imagined the husky steering her tiny craft:

Adroit Captain Laika, the dog between worlds,

equal parts Egyptian goddess and loyal pet;

the constellation, drawn in the sky with

stars of chalk, the constellation given life,

the Hunter’s Dog unleashed to gambol and howl

fully enfleshed in the backyards of night.

When I still played hopscotch, and knew

the counting rhymes, and how to get through the game

without hitting the lines, I read about Laika:

but not how her husky fur must have burned

in a blaze when her tiny cage returned to earth,

nor a word for her terrified yawp as the Sputnik

crashed through a ceiling of air, splashed down

in the southernmost part of the Indian Sea.

I know she died before I was born, and how.

But I learned it late, and now I call her:

here girl, come on down now and lick my hand;

and brief me on dreams brought low,

dogs in space, these chalk marks

whose use I used to know.

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: William L. Houts,Laika,Sputnik,dogs in space

The Finale of Seem

 

I just made a fool of myself with someone who used to be a close friend.  He moved away, went back to New York and has a busy, satisfying life there.  It’s been about a decade since I’ve seen him, but somehow I had still reckoned him among my friends.  Last night I sent him an email apologizing for things I had done in the admittedly distant past and received a response this morning.  IN the email, he said that he wasn’t angry about the things I had mentioned, which came as a relief.  But he pointed out that those things had happened a long time ago, that he had moved on and that I should probably do that too.

 

His message came both as a relief and as an acute embarrassment.  I like to think, as most people like to think, that I’m infinitely adaptable towards the conditions of life and that change doesn’t make me sad or confused.  In reality, though, what I find is that I’m somewhat stodgy and sentimental.  I remain loyal to friendships which have changed irrevocably into something lesser or worse and all unconsciously, I expect other people to do the same. 

 

I like to say that I am the closest thing you will find, this side of the cartoons, to a talking dog.  I guess I mean that, with regard to people,  I’m a creature of habit.  I expect friends to remain friends unless something terrible or irrevocable happens, even if we don’t see each other for years.  But, as Stephen King says in his novel “The Gunslinger”, the world moves on and you find yourself happier if you learn to move on with it.

 

This sounds like I’m completely at peace with what this person said to me, but that would be untrue.  He more than implied that I was being silly or worse, that our lives had changed and that I wasn’t paying attention to that fact.  Well, that’s a little bit true, but it’s not close to the whole truth.  Ten years ago, my life changed drastically when I went blind, and with a lot of suffering I adapted.  I have also adapted to HIV and poverty and I think this old friend really could have been a lot kinder to meon that basis.  I am not, as he implied, a pathetic man living on delusions of the past.  I’m writing novels now, they will eventually be a success and I will move into yet another phase of my life.  I am not a ssad stick in the mud, I am all about change.  I have my nostalgias, but so does anyone who lives forty years and expects to live another forty.

 

Okay, I’ve got it out of my system.  He’s an unsentimental New Yorker;  I’m an emotional Seattlite. We’re both moving on, in our own ways.  We could have met up through my email and had some good talk about personal history.  This guy doesn’t work like that.  I’ve got friends now who do.  Let be be the finale of seem, as Wallace Stevens says. Peace!

Another Reboot

 

 

I’ve done several reboots of this blog over the last five years or so, and I’m sure there are more to come.  It may just be that I don’t have the temperament to be a blogger, even though I write almost every day.  But that’s writing a novel, not tellling the world that I bought a Subway sandwich today.  Okay, that’s a little snarky.  Many blogs are about much more than the writer’s daily ephemera, what he ate, the annoying bus passenger, or name your poison.  But I think, this time around, I’m going to concentrate on talking about writing, with some of the ephemera that gives it context.  Also, probably stuff about living in subsidized housing, my thoughts and feelings about “poor punk” and the book I’m currently reading or which I have stopped reading because it bored me to the point of melting away.  Also, I will be posting excerpts from the novel, whose title, I establish with great fanfare, is “The Prisoner of Tallgrave”.  I’m very proud of this book, having, at page 220, written more than half of it.  It’s a great whacking slamdance of a fantasy novel, with two dragons, a witch, a saint, high priestesses galore and an eldritch god from a fallen world.  I’m afraid they all speak like Somerset Maugham, especially my first person protagonist, but I think that’s one of the novel’s little charms.  It contains a world of articulate people who prefer to say exactly what they mean.  The diction is nearly contemporary, but it’s a reflective, Jane Austeny sort of book with closet poets around every corner.

 

By the way, today I bought cold cut Subway sandwich off their Five dollar menu.  Scrumptious!

 

Technorati Tags: novel writing,Jane Austen,poor punk,Tallgrave

Tonguespark

 

Strike the tonguespark wild, writer:
lick with hand and eye and ear the sea, the mindfire  blazing white.  Write all stagger wide your cucuru against the
dismal wrigglers.   It's time!  It's time!  Rev the rhyme and sling it down
the orange tracks.  It shines with racy tastings.  Buckle down
and crack the plastic street with flames of metric feet
Fruit the blue with heartful rains, the sea
with gleeful fishes hear them, even wicked fishes sing for
glory then and glory now and glory ever-be.  Taste! Speak! Awake!      

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: writing,inspiration,poetry,just do it

Iovarre

 

 

Constant Reader,

 

I’ve started a Yahoo Group (email discussion list) for discussion of the novel I’m writing, a literary fantasy called

“Dragons & Angels”.  If you like what you read here, you may enjoy my effort at fiction.  I won’t give away the plot, but it involves a maker of toy automata, an imprisoned archangel and an ancient dragon.  Sounds like the usual fantasy ingredients, but I think you may find otherwise.

 

If you’d like to join the growing community of readers and critics, just send a blank email to:

 

iovarre-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

 

You will get a message from the Yahoo server asking you to verify that you’re the one requesting to join.  Simply send a blank reply to this and you’ll be sent a message welcoming you to the group.

 

I’ll be making reposts over the next couple of weeks so people can get caught up.  I’m also posting the chapters in a folder in the Iovarre area at Yahoo Groups,  so people can read the chapters at their leisure.

 

Anyone who participates in this forum is assured of being mentioned in the Acknowledgments when the book is published.

 

 

Technorati Tags: online novel,Yahoo writing groups,Iovarre,work in progress

Missing the Bus

 

 

I have written almost 140 pages of my novel, “Dragons and Angels”. My hero, Pol Dairre, has discovered the terrible secret on the top floor of Tallgrave Prison. After having his shop confiscated, he has fled the city of Iovarre on the good ship

 . There, he has joined Captain Belias Varney and his crew in their search for the mysterious sea monster known as the Harrow. It’s a book of magic, romance and philosophy, and I feel lucky to be tuned to this particular cosmic channel in order to receive this very strange and wonderful broadcast.

We Americans are very keen on distracting ourselves from the important stuff –whatever that means to us. We watch TV and play World of Warcraft and generally do everything we can do to keep from doing the stuff which really fulfills us. Now, I’m nopt knocking World of Warcraft. If I could see, I’m sure I’d have an account and play a Tauren shaman or something. But my situation has brought me a particular grace which I’m not sure I’d give up, even if offered the return of my eyesight. The thing about being a writer is this: when it’s going well, there’s nothing better: not sex, not food, not the ten thousand attractions of the Web. When, at the end of the writing day, I’ve completed my one or two pages , I do a little dance at my desk. I am creating this wild aromatic world for others to live in for a while: to solve its mysteries, to hunt out its dragon, to conquer its grave malevolent king. Hang onto your lids, kids, because this book is going to be Godzilla in four hundred pages.

I live on just over $1200 a month. I mostly wear T shirts and I have to ration how many bowls of pho I can afford during the week. I can’t see and I have incipient diabetes, among other things. But I still count myself among the luckiest people in America, and certainly in the world. I had to pay a high price, to be sure, a nearly disastrous one. But can you say it’s too high a price when I’m actually content --will grow more content when I start receiving royalty checks-- and almost everyone elseI know is basically just struggling not to throw themselves in front of the number 10 bus?

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: writing a novel,World of Warcraft,poor Punk,living

A Season in Dell

 

 

It’s been three months since I ordered my Studio desktop system fromDell computers, and, friends, it continues to be an ongoing catastrophe. First, they sent me a computer which had a few different flavors of not working. Then there were the countless calls to Dell ordering the replacement, including some software which I had not ordered originally. Then there was the return of the defective computer, during which Dell repeatedly asked me to quote tag numbers to them when I explained to them that I’m blind and can’t scan labels like that. This is the thing with Dell: doing business with them requires that one keep track of a whole handful of numbers. There are customer numbers, order numbers, dispatch numbers, service numbers and on and on. And no two departments ask for the same numbers if you call them for different reasons.

 

After many troubles and dropped calls, I was finally assigned Varma, a service recovery agent who told me that he was going to handle all of my service requests from now on and that I could trust him. Sucker that I am, I believed Varma and agreed not to return the new computer and take my business to Frye’s.

 

Now I’m trying to get an invoice --a simple invoice!—which I need because a foundation for the blind is helping me to pay for the system. I sat on the phone for the better part of an hour while a customer service rep did a conference call with a rep in their billing department. The billing rep vowed to me that I would receive the invoices in my email within 24 hours. But 24 hours have come and gone, and the invoices are yet to make their appearance.

 

The thing is, there hasn’t been just one problem or even two. The whole Dell system seems to be rigged against the ordinary customermaking any headway. Calls consistently get dropped, and when they aren’t dropped they are often not returned either. I don’t know how Dell survives. I only know that the next time I buy a computer, I’ll be going to Frye’s. Constant Reader, I advise you to do the same.

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Dell Computers,customer service,failure,curry

Out of Egypt

 

 

I’ve been reading Anne Rice’s first person novel about Jesus, “Christ the Lord, Out of Egypt”. Though I don’t have any investment in Jesus from a religious standpoint and Rice aggressively does, she is a gifted writer and the narrative is compelling. The Jesus of the novel is a young boy who occasionally manifests remarkable, sometimes terrible powers and is troubled by the fact that his family seems to know more about his true origins than he does.

 

Jesus is a very likeable character here, humble and intelligent, and Rice’s descriptions of first century Judaea are riveting. Through the eyes of the young unknowing messiah, we see the great city of Alexandria with its temples and philosophers, and Nazareth with its dusty roads, strict Pharisees and Roman soldiers. I am especially pleased with the way Rice handles the latter two. Her Pharisees, while demanding are not cardboard villains, but a crucial element of Jewish culture, the final arbiters when some really knotty problem must be resolved. And the Roman soldiers, most of them, are not vicious animals but these poor bored bastards who are charged withkeeping the peace in a hot unyielding land many miles from home. Sometimes they do it with ruthless dispatch, but just as often they are seen struggling with dominion in a land whose people hate them passionately.

 

Finally --well, not exactly finally, as I haven’t finished the book --the Devil makes the first of what I assume will be several appearances. He is a beautiful but miserable being who seeks to draw Jesus into his circle of despair and emptiness. Jesus does not hate him in some gross operatic way, but recognizes that this is a treacherous spirit who must be refused at every turn. It’s deft writing, and like the rest of the book, enormously entertaining. You ask me kids, I say: check it out.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: Anne Rice,Egypt,Christ the Lord,religious novels

We Be Jammin’

 

 

It’s a couple of weeks late, but I’m making my New Year’s resolution now. I know my blog maintenance is more than a little erratic and I hereby vow to change that situation. From here on out --well, at least for the next couple of months—I intend to write a blog post every day. It’s good for warming up my chops, and maybe someone will be intrigued enough to stick around Cinema Nocturne and tell me what they think about what they read.

 

I know that we have a number of regular readers here, though all of them are on the shy side. I switched to Blogspot precisely because it provides a more robust platform for discussion, in my opinion, than did the old Workpad site.

Also, I find that my thoughts lately have more to do with writing than they do anything else, so you may be in for a taste of the writerly consciousness. I don’t know what to say about this, since this will clearly interest some while boring others to tears. I can only ssay that my approach to writing is an essentially mystical one, and I think the things I have to say about it are anything but dry.

 

Finally, I am eager that some people should read “Dragons and Angels”, or part of it, at least, and I wonder if anyone would be interested in following a blog which consists of chapters posted from the first draft, in which I am still engaged. Just drop me a brief note if you would and I’ll be thinking about it seriously.

 

Thank you for flying Air Nocturne.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: novels,writing a novel,blogging,Cyrano de Bergerac

riting and the Loa

 

 

If you haven’t cribbed the knowledge from William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”, the loa are the spirits manifested by the adherents of Voudoun. When they take possession of a worshipper, they are said to ride him or her like a horse.  David Byrne refers to this phenomenon in his song “Papa Legba”, which as you might have supposed, is the name of the chief loa and the opener of communication with the spirit world.  When the voudounsis is mounted by a loa, she takes on the physical attributes associated with that spirit.  Worshippers of Baron Ghede, for example often speak in a nasal tone and have a marked fondness for rum and cigars.  while the love goddess Erzulie may demand the worshipper’s total devotion.

Not to drag the comparison out too much farther,  possession by the loa seems to me to be very much like writing a novel.  In fact, without thinking about the similarities at all, I’ve evolved a kind of mystical language around the process of writing.  It seems to me, having written one book and being about a third of the way through my second, that working in such a long form isn’t principally an act of will.  It seems to me, rather, that it is guided by a spirit I refer to as the Genius.  Each novel has its own demands, its own moods and colors, and its own gifts, and they seem to come from the spirit of the work itself.  Different Genii feel different, but they all seem to require of the writer that their gifts be accepted and cherished.  This means that when the Genius tells you that your protagonist must go on a sea voyage and encounter a mysterious sea monster, you bloody well had better listen or find that , after many such refusals, that the source of inspiration has abandoned you altogether.  I call this “pissing in the Well”:  profaning the mysterious sources of your creativity.

 

Now, having said all that, it’s important to make it clear that the writer is not the slave of the Genkius.  The Genius is a source, a wellspring, an advisor.  You must use your own craft and cunning to work and shape the material given you by that source.  sometimes, you find that the idea offered belongs to some other work altogether, something to be honored but set aside for a past or future  project. The important thing is that the writing flows through you like a live current, rather than being forced out of you by some constricted notion of artistic will.

 

I feel that I have a balanced, wholesome relationship with my Genius.  Some artists, though, seem to have a toxic tormented relationship with theirs.  I suspect that some Genii are so demanding and their gifts so great that their hosts turn to drink or drugs to drown them out.  Or maybe the truth they bring is too painful, maybe they seem too unstinting in their role as couriers from the world of ideas. As far as I can tell, the Genius is a reality and if you’re an artist you ignore it at the peril of your sanity.

 

I don’t mean to be so dramatic about it, butI’ve come to these conclusions because I’ve done a lot of a certain kind of suffering when I’m not working on my current book or short story.  For instance, I’ve been stuck at a certain point in “Dragons and Angels” because my protagonist Pol Dairre has to make a sea voyage of some kind and I know very little about sailing vessels.  With the rest of the book so far, I’ve known enough about London in the 17th century and the character of Henry VIII, on whom the wicked king in my novel is loosely modeled, to write certain scenes to my satisfaction.  But except for “Moby Dick”, my reading in such things as the difference between a topsail and a spanker are woefully limited.  And yet, there has not been an hour since I began my break from writing a couple of months ago that I haven’t worried at the problem like a dog with a bone.  The Genius is a benign force, but it is powerful and it is persistent and it can make you more than a little bit crazy.

 

And yet, I accept the yoke cheerfully. How many of my countrymen, I wonder, are driven by nothing more interesting than a demanding spouse, a wretched job or a need to pay last month’s extorionate phone bill? I write with the aim of creating a world which others may inhabit; a world of angels and dragons, of fiercely noble toymakers and malign and gentle-spoken kings. I am blessed, and I am not even remotely tempted to drown the blessing with whiskey and despair. Writing is prayer, it is communion, it is joy. How many great artists have died not knowing that? Not me, Bubba.

 

 

 

Technorati Tags: loa,Voudoun,Papa Legba,the art of writing