Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 121

Work begins again, after beginning again, before...

 The last three days I've been working on book 3 of A Place of Safety, when Brendan returns to Derry in April, 1981, while the hunger strikes are underway. All hell is tearing loose, despite the peace movement, and he's dealing with his mother dying of cancer and having to keep a low profile because he snuck into the country using a friend's name and passport. Naturally, it doesn't quite work out.

I really need to reread the first two parts to remind myself of what has and hasn't happened, and what may need to be added in, thanks to how things are going in this book. There's a lot to digest and discuss, and having it told in first person means no omniscient author to explain it all. It has to be from Brendan's perspective, consistently.

That could be a limitation in deepening the book and its meaning, but that's how Brendan wants it. I discussed shifting to third person, with him, and he was adamant it be his story and his alone, with others there to provide background and life. And so it is. I'm now pushing to find a style for him to tell the story in a way that provides more than just his limited perceptions.

Okay, they actually aren't limited; just not as complex as I'd like for this. While Brendan didn't finish high school...he has no formal education much past his 16th birthday...he's not stupid. And while I have to be careful not to make him too erudite, he's read books and newspapers and letters from his sister in Toronto and been around educated people, so at least a little of that would have rubbed off on him and his vocabulary. It's finding the balance that will be the problem.

But never let it be said I wrote easy books...

Finally back on track

 I have my new book, Hunter, set up in Ingram (paperback due out November 6th, $14.95), Smashwords (the whole story, with an additional bit, in ebook, also on the 6th), and Kindle Select (Book 1, "When I go Hunting..." available now). We'll see how these work. I guess the next step is to update my website, even though no one pays attention to it,

I also wrote some on A Place of Safety book 3 -- Derry '81, for NaNoWriMo. 2160 pages. A good start...and getting a hint better. Brendan is en route back to Derry in the middle of Bobby Sands' hunger strike. Not exactly the best time to return to his home, but his mother has cancer and is supposedly fading fast. He uses a friend's identity to pass through Customs Entry, and when he gets there sees he's been mislead about the seriousness of her condition.

Now he's got to worry about the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the IRA, PIRA, the British Army and past acquaintances in the Protestant world swirling around him, threatening to take a bite the moment they realize he's back. They know he witnessed a bombing and believe he knows who set it.

What I have is still too easy and surface, but it's laying down the basic storyline for the remainder of the book. I started re-reading the opening part, which goes from 1966-1972, but I kept stopping to make changes and correct typos and it was putting me behind.

Didn't help that I started the day with a niggling headache. I didn't sleep well, last night, which was part of the problem, so it took me hours to settle down and focus on the writing.

With me, there's always an excuse...

National Novel Writing Month begins tomorrow

 I am finally getting back to focus on A Place of Safety and using NaNoWriMo to do it. Book 3 -- Derry '81 -- needs a lot of work. It's trite and glib and shallow, so I'm making it my November project. It's a bit of a cheat, but only to me; I don't win anything. All I get out of this is a new draft of a book I've been avoiding for too damned long...and this gives me extra motivation to get it done.

I used NaNoWriMo to work up Book 1,  eleven years ago. I should have used it during the following years to get 2 & 3 set, but I didn't. It's a scary story to be working on, for me, and I just wasn't ready. Wasn't confident enough. But having worked on three books now set in places other than the US, and seeing how they came together and how the characters worked with me to make those other worlds realistic, I'm now set to dig back in.

I'll try to do a post a day as I go along, but no guarantees. I'm headed down to NYC on the 8th for a couple of jobs, and am set to go to West Palm Beach on the 16th, for another one. That one...I'm not totally comfortable with. But I learned long ago being afraid of traveling somewhere is not in my nature. I can get nervous and unsure, but I also take precautions and go with the flow...and it usually goes okay.

The one new issue is that WPB is where the GOP is doing its damndest to convince people there is no Covid-19 or that it's only as bad as the flu. Which is bullshit. So I'm set up in a hotel room that has a microwave, have several N95 masks, and I'll hit a grocery story and do no dining out. Zero. Zip. Nada. And soon as I get back I'll get a Covid test. I'll need one, anyway, since I'm having a colonoscopy on December 4th and it's required.

Of course, all of this is happening after an election that promises to be hell on earth, thanks to Republicans.

I so love living in interesting times...

Lost in another book...

Got busy writing and neglected my blog, like a bad boy.



I'm down to the last part of the book that took me over, Hunter, and I'm fighting myself over what to do. I can't figure out the ending. I've come at it from several angles and none of them work.

What it boils down to, however, is me wondering just how far I can go with this character and story. How amoral can I let him be to make my point?

Let him be...that's funny. I don't "let" my characters be who they want. They do as they please, and if I don't go along with them, I churn out crap. Stories unreal and nonsensical. But does that matter when the story is over the top, like this one is?

Hunter is a beast. The whole point of the story is he has become the perfect capitalist. He's found a venue for making money and is fulfilling it. That it includes ruining the lives of others, well...them's the breaks.

I think the middle class puritan part of me wants him punished for this, as I've had done to other characters in my books...like Curt in HTRASG and Antony in RIHC6, both of which were banned due to the intensity of their MCs' actions. I've also done it to Devlin in UG. He committed many evil acts before saving Reg's life, almost at the expense of his own.

So I wrote a portion that had Hunter beaten...except it felt wrong. Next came a bit where he figures out he's being set up...except that was just too easy. It's like I don't want him to go through with his plans because that makes him irredeemable. But maybe he is...and maybe he should be to the end.

So maybe I'm caught in my own limited morality. Good is rewarded, finally, and evil is punished...eventually...and we all have the capacity for decency in us.

Something I don't really believe, anymore.

Scaring the devil?

I’ve been trying to read some books that claim to be evil and dark and all that stuff, but I’m finding they’re just gross and irritating. There’s a wall between them and me, and I don’t know if it’s my sensibilities or if the stories are just not what they claim to be, but I have a feeling what I think is evil is too real for those who are making movies or writing fiction about it.

For example, almost everyone I know has seen The Silence of the Lambs and think it’s a good scary movie about evil. I found it overwrought and silly…and I was shocked it got 5 Oscars. For years, I explained that away by thinking the movie had suffered because I saw the French/Dutch version of The Vanishing the week before, and that one had cut deep into me. It showed how simple evil was. How casual. I didn’t think any film could compare, so I shrugged and used that as my excuse to not be impressed by SotL.

But the books I’ve read about evil being perpetrated brought back a memory of going to see The Exorcist and laughing through it. I thought it was silly while the people I went to see it with were scarred by it. A girl seated next to me actually bruised my arm, she grabbed it so tight when Linda Blair’s head twisted around. I chuckled at how obvious the effect was.

But something I’m finally realizing is, the vast majority of books and films using evil as a premise put a layer between the viewer/reader and what’s going on. It’s depicted way over the top. Not real, just pretend. You know deep down that could never really happen the way they’re showing it…and that’s what wrecked me about The Vanishing. I could see it being real. A man who is the epitome of decency and humanity commits an act of the purest evil just to see if he can. That’s happened, in life. That is terrifying.

And he does it not just once, but twice. And you know he will, again, because no one suspects him capable of it. That, to me, is the truth of evil…that anyone can commit it with nothing more than a hint of reason behind it.

I can’t say I’m innocent of layering in that wall in my writing. I’ve come close to depicting evil honestly, in my view, but there’s always a bit of an explanation behind what is being done. Evil committed in the name of religion. Or for power. Or revenge. Even my latest book, The Beast in the Nothing Room , uses a bit of the fantastical to make the evil being perpetrated palatable.


The book I’m working on now, Hunter, has an amoral capitalist at its core. I intended to keep him as such, to make a point…but he’s suddenly doing something to make himself likable. I wonder if I can make him banal enough to be terrifying in his evil?

I wonder if I can make him scare the devil?

Easily confused and distracted...

Well, setting the story in 2008, just after Prop H8 in California was passed, works a lot better. It still takes place in Fairview, Washington, but now it's not a wedding happening, only a commitment ceremony between Dair and Wallace, the lawyer who handled his defense against lawsuits put forth by Adam's parents.

What that did, however, was kick out some cultural references I'd made that were too recent, and it's making me adjust the technological capabilities of everyone concerned. At least iPhones were around, and since Jackson, Wallace's best man, is coming from Tokyo, he'd have the latest version. That plays into it.

Unfortunately, this led me into a problem. The characters' ages and whether Dair is younger or older than his brother, Gareth. Initially, he was younger...but I thought it might be better to make him older and maybe an early baby...except that didn't really work. It changed the dynamic between Dair and Gareth (not to mention his bitch of a wife) and truth is, I like Dair being the second son. He's got a much freer attitude about things and Gareth can have issues with things Dair gets to do instead of him.

Fortunately (or UN-fortunately, depending on your bent), the conference I was going to use to launch the book was just cancelled. That's my third trip dumped by C-19. I now have travel funds with Southwest Airlines, Air Canada and American, all with deadlines as to when they can be used. Crap.

Anyway, that means I can work up the story at its pace. I have over 400 pages and am closing in on 90,000 words, and I'm letting it play out so I expect around 20,000 more words. No push to get it done. I'm also giving Wallace more background; he was something of a cypher and that's not acceptable. I want him to be seen as a decent match for Dair, who's an artist and can be demanding, often without intending to be.

One unsure part about this is, the more I write of the story, the more Kyle Krieger is my image of Dair. I really wish I knew I could use his face for the cover, but I can't get him to respond to my queries.

Maybe I'll draw or paint something in a stained glass style and send it to him; see if that gets a reaction...

Aaaarrrrgh!

I've got 372 pages and more than 83,000 words done on Dair's Window, and I'm at a fork in the road that I can't seem to get past. All of the action till this point, except for memories and background, takes place in the week before Christmas. In one direction is playing out the rest of the story in a straight line, which would take it all the way to Easter. The other direction is truncating it to end on New Year's Eve. But I feel like that's kind of rushing it...even though it makes sense, emotionally.

I've spent hours trying to figure out which way to go, and I'm stuck. I could kill off another character in a tragic accident but that's so trash-TV, it makes me laugh. I halfway think it's the original script dogging me, here. That was set between Palm Sunday and Easter, which was not at all realistic.

I tried watching some of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries on Acorn but my mood wasn't great so I got all nit-picky. They're set in the 20s in Melbourne, and production-wise they're really good; the clothes look right as do the cars and locations. But the mysteries are simplistic nonsense meaning to have meaning, and the modern sensibilities shoved into them creak. I do like the casting, though. Essie Davis does well as a flapper and looks the part in many ways, but her coy back and forth with a married Police Detective is getting old. I'm liking the slow-budding romance between her lady's maid and a constable a lot more, since the main barrier there is her being Catholic and him being Protestant.

But it didn't blank my mind out enough to let things settle, and I'm still at a loss. Dammit. One thing I did decide to do is set the story in 2008, and that's when a number of details worked in to make that the right choice. Proposition 8 (AKA: Prop H8) passed in November 2008 and legal challenges were being begun. Washington state had only recently passed Civil Unions for same-sex couples and Referendum 74 was another 3 years away, to legalize same-sex marriage. This plays a lot better into the background of the story, so at least I got that settled.

I dunno...maybe I'll try reading a book.

Logistics

Spent today clearing up the places and things in my head over Dair's Window. I'm making up a town for this to take place in and got totally lost as to who was where and what, so worked up a map. I also did a timeline for the two main characters -- Dair and Adam -- so I could keep things in order...because the book is working out to be rather non-linear.

On the map, Dair's house is the lower right. It actually used to be a ski lodge owned by his father, who signed it over to him when he went to live in Nepal and contemplate his navel. Dair set his studio up in it and was living there with Adam as he created his stained glass artwork.

Dair's mother, Marion, owns Tidwika Lodge, at the top of the map, and her main competition is Tomika Ski Resort, operated by her other son, Gareth. They don't get along well.

Dair's grandfather is Reverend Samuels, whose church is to the middle left. Dair's working on a massive window for the church, as well, but having trouble with it.

The Pink Forest in the lower middle has a number of GBLTQ people living in it, and the South Town, to the lower left, is the poorer section. The wealthy area is west of here and not really referenced in the book except in passing.

The town is nestled in a valley in the Cascades, east of Seattle.

This has helped so damn much...

Working on a new book...

To clear my brain so I can come back to the first rough draft of APoS, I'm adapting one of my screenplays into book form...and finding the script was crap. It's called Dair's Window and is about Adair Llewellyn, a stained glass artist from a small town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. He's trying to get his life back on track after the death of his lover, Adam, and suffering through years of lawsuits by the man's estranged family, who insisted Adam was responsible for Dair's growing fame and increase in financial worth.

But now the lawsuits have been dismissed, thanks to Adam's family having disowned him when he came out, and Dair just wants his life to get back to normal. He's getting married to the lawyer who took over his case after his first lawyer died, and he's moving home, again, after being forced to stay away by court order. But things are different, and people in town aren't happy about two men getting married, and the pushback results in Dair's home being firebombed and him almost beating the main suspect to death.

A nice quiet family drama.

I wrote the script during a writing workshop at IFC in LA, and got decent feedback on it as we went...but now I'm seeing I didn't pay serious attention to the story or the characters. It had lots of Hollywood moments in it, done to music that made them oh-so-elegant, but there was nothing honest or real about it. Things happened because they had to happen, and I just today realized having Dair wait till the day of the wedding to cancel it was unrealistic. It made him cruel, doing this to his potential husband in front of their guests. NOT cool.

So by writing the book, I'm finding the story and realizing what a crap screenwriter I was.

But maybe...maybe...I can be a really good novelist...

Other books, dark and scary...

FWIW, I've written a number of other books that are dark and filled with sex and violence. My latest, The Beast in the Nothing Room , is SF-Horror-Suspense with romance thrown in and is getting good reviews. So if you're not faint on heart, this one shows just how deranged I can be when writing.
http://www.kimmerseroticbookbanter.com/2020/02/25/review-the-beast-in-the-nothing-room-by-kyle-michel-sullivan/
It's available in ebook at Smashwords only. Amazon will only carry it in paperback.

It's my hope to make APoS as intense as this without veering into depravity...