Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 160

Half done...

Still cleaning up bits of The Alice '65 and moving right along. I got rid of a couple of awkward structurings by just switching around the sentences and they're smoother, now. I'm also finding more typos that weren't notice the dozen previous times I've been through the story. It's embarrassing...and yet, I'm finding them before they get through so...

Truth is, I like the novel a lot more than I did the script. When I wrote this as a screenplay, it was fun but a bit clumsy and felt incomplete. Now? Everything is working, finally. The flow of Adam's character arc from wounded creature to a free soul. Casey's secretiveness revealing a deep hurt and anger at being abandoned, again. Patricia's loneliness. It may still tie up too easily at the end, but considering what all the characters are going through they are worthy of a HEA ending.

I actually thought about ending the story with Adam back in the Dark Chamber, for a while, facing his new uncertain future with ease and grace. Surrounded by silence and shadows, like his beloved books. Part of me still likes it, but Adam's not so sure. "It's too French of an ending," is what he's telling me. He wants a clearer vision of his future...and I agree.

There is darkness in the story, but there's also sunshine and light. And Adam was already hiding in shadows when the story begins. To bring it full circle means he should now be in the light. Meaning end it like like a true romance...and I like the idea.

Of course, this is one of my danger signals -- liking my work. When that happens someone or something usually comes along to kick me in the balls and remind me I'm not that good...that I'm getting too full of myself.

God, I hope that's not true about A65, now...

A65 will be finalized this weekend...

At least, the editing will be. I'm not going to just sit and wait, anymore. If I don't hear back from the LoC by Wednesday evening about correcting the title, I'll send in a new request with another ISBN. Considering how squirrelly the government's been, lately, I may not get an answer from them for months, and that's not happening. I want the book out and available.

So first comes finalizing the form and details of it, so I know the page count. Then prepping the dust jacket for the hardback. Then prepping the e-book, which doesn't need the LoC number, and finalizing an image to use for its avatar. I can release that, first, if need be. Last comes a proof of the book to make sure it looks decent and then...release...

I guess this also means I'll need to start promoting it, so it's better known. See if I can get a review out of Publishers Weekly. A lot to do in little time, this being book fair season and me already pushed to finish what needs doing at work.

I'm also pulling together 3 quotes for packing jobs -- 1 in NYC, 1 in Indiana, 1 in England -- on top of having quoted for 2 others in New Jersey and NYC. And then there's Tokyo and the NY Book Fair and London's Book Week coming up. It'll be fun.

God...such fun...and what's funny is, I'm not being facetious.

Indecision...

I wound up sitting at JFK till 9:30 waiting on a 6:30 flight, so managed to do a bit of editing on A65...and suddenly I'm unsure about my grammar in the book. Mainly commas. I tend to use them more than other writers, I'm sure; it's the Victorian aspect of my learning...that and I want to indicate pauses and make certain some phrases are separated. I thought I'd done a decent job on that, but one dealer raised questions about some "errant commas" and now I'm paranoid...

I started taking a lot of them out...then changed my mind and put most of them back in...then decided I'm going to reread Strunk & White and go with that...tho' I suppose I could do the Chicago Tribune
Manual of Style. Hell, I don't know. I just felt comfortable with the ones I had in the story and think maybe I'll put them back in and if anyone wants to bitch about them, let them.

I'm still kind of shaken up by that dog trying to take a chunk out of my face. I'm sure part of the reason I can't shake it is because I'm tired. I wound up doing 4 jobs in these 7 days, one very last-minute and a couple under very trying circumstances. Plus I've strained my left arm in some way so it's achy and irritating. There's not enough Icy Hot to handle that...or this kind of weariness I'm experiencing.

And I am weary. Today was a vicious day at work. American Airlines in Miami decided they would not accept a rush shipment for specious reasons and it wasn't resolved until after 7pm, so I ate late. I've got a possible gig in Oxford, England...where I've never been...but I have a feeling I won't get to go, if we do get the job...or if I do it'll be so short I won't have a chance to check out the Bodleian Library and such.

I'm also having an issue with the Library of Congress. I stupidly made a mistake in the title of The Alice '65 and am trying to get it fixed and getting no response from them short of, "It's under review." I don't want to finalize the copyright page till I know it's okay...and I'd really rather not resubmit the book for an LoC number because that means getting a new ISBN, but if I have to, I will. I want A65  to be completely legitimate.

At least, as much as I can do for it.

A day of a first...

Well, maybe not exactly a first...but close. I was picking up some archives in NYC...and the client's dog lunged at me, trying to bite me in the face. I slapped her away and she backed down with a yelp. But I was freaked out. Shit, I felt her teeth brush against my skin, next to my right eye. Not a word of apology from the owner, though they did put the beast in another room. So nice of them.

I understand the dog's reaction -- we're taking things out of the boss's apartment and she wanted to protect her territory -- but shit. She wasn't a young dog or a puppy, so they must have known she'd be aggressive. And to just see it happen and not say anything? In fact, I wound up apologizing for hitting the damned mutt. They shrugged that off, too.

I've always said dogs are fine so long as they're someone else's, but what that really means is I don't want them around me much. I think that's mainly because I was bitten by a neighbor's dogs at the age of 4, when I lived with my grandmother. Two of them. The neighbor hadn't had the dogs vaccinated against rabies and refused to let them be tested because it meant they'd have to be euthanized. We were outside San Antonio's city limits and the county didn't require it, so I got rabies shots. In the stomach. Had some lovely flashbacks to that.

This came at the tail end of me working my ass off and getting little sleep. I took a nap after arriving in Miami off a red-eye flight, Sunday morning, before heading down to handle the Map Fair. That move out was work but done in a decent amount of time. Next morning, I was up early to help our trucker pick up the dealers and take them back to the warehouse, where I weighed and separated them according to where they were heading -- home or the California Book Fair in Pasadena. Then I zoomed back to Fort Lauderdale to catch my plane to JFK...only to find it was delayed by an hour.

I didn't get to my hotel in NYC till nearly 1am and had to be up at 8 to make it to the location, where we were being given grief by the building's manager over a Certificate of Insurance...only to find the number of cartons to be picked up were 20% more than we'd been told...and there was a dog that wanted to tear into me, even though I did all the things you do to show the foul thing you're not a threat.

I'm too old for this shit.

Posting from a plane...

The San Francisco job is done and gone, and I'm now on a red-eye to Forth Lauderdale. I'm scrunched into an even more space seat because the guy in the seat next to min e is asleep on his tray and pushing into my area. It's irritating, but not impossible to deal with.

I watched Dunkirk (2017) and it was fascinating. I started to watch 3 Billboards outside Ebbing, Montana but the version they're showing on the plane was edited for content, which means I'd miss some of it, I'm now seeing bits of the new Murder On the Orient Express on someone else's screen and am even more certain  I was right not to check it out. It looks silly. Lots of overhead shots for no reason.

We're now about an hour and a half from my destination, where I'll rent a car and head to Miami for my hotel, where I already have a room. I'll be ready for it.

I did more on A65 but not a lot. I'm fuzzy brained at the moment and not able to focus right.

Think I'll doze, now.

Ch-ch-ch-changes keep coming and coming...

Instead of flying to Miami on a daytime flight, I'm headed over on tomorrow night's redeye. Again. My boss's flight from London was delayed by hours so he wouldn't have landed until the dealers were slated to have been moved out from the book fair's venue...so I get to handle them. Such a pleasure.

I don't really mind; I now have justification to get an even-more-space seat on JetBlue so I can work on A65. I got the last set of notes from a British book dealer and hers were golden. For example, I thought archivist and cataloguer were used interchangeable in the antiquarian world, but it turns out that's mainly the American side; in England, Adam would be a Rare Book Librarian or Cataloguer, not an archivist. So that's getting changed.

She also raised issue with my use of commas...as in, I'm too prone to them. I can see that; I do use the Oxford Comma and can be absolutely Victorian in how I slam them in wherever I want a pause of hesitation or change in thought. I'm not as bad as Dickens, but still...it's too much and if cutting some helps the flow, I'm all for it.

So I've gone through and corrected the first four chapters, and once I'm done with this pass I'll go through once more...then that should be it. I'm debating having another person proof it...someone who hasn't seen the story yet...but I'll wait till I'm done to decide.

I spent a good portion of today plotting out a couple more packing jobs and finalizing the one I have in NYC, next week. I've been asking for several days for some information and didn't get it till 4:30 pm New York time so had to scramble to handle it. I almost went to do the Alcatraz tour but just before I bought my ticket is when I learned I had to change my travel plans, and then the rest of the day was gone.

Oh, well...it was just something to do...

More crap WiFi...

The La Quinta I'm staying in is undergoing renovations so it's not very quiet and the wifi is sloooooow and difficult. I could barely do anything, last night, and it took me most of the afternoon to catch up on my emails and complete work that needed doing. That was after moving in everyone for the San Francisco Book Fair. We were done by 10 and lunch done by 11.

Of course, I also had a headache, yesterday, that started during a long flight and even longer time between meals -- I had an early lunch then didn't have dinner till the equivalent of 10pm, thanks to Southwest's first flight being late and them giving me less than an hour between flights to get from one end of a terminal to the other. I made it just as they started boarding, which probably added to the headache.

Anyway, this thing built into something vicious. Not a migraine; I had one of those once many years ago and no way do I ever want that, again. But with this kind of headache, I become a snarly beast willing to tear the throat out of anyone who crosses me...so that didn't help. I did manage not to piss off a possible client I had to call, and I was smart enough to wait till today to contact someone else about next week's packing job in NYC.

I'm staying on East Coast time while I'm here, so it's closing in on bath and bedtime, even though it's only 8:30pm. But I'll be back in Miami on Saturday, so it's better to just maintain and get up at 5:30 am...something I normally hate to do.

I did get the notes from a British dealer input into A65. They weren't as extensive as I thought they'd be -- just reminding me of things like, a white trash bag is a bin-bag to an Englishman, and an idiom I'd used (veddy) was coined in Hollywood, not London, so made no sense. Of course, he also wanted to correct pissed, because in the UK that means drunk and not angry, but it's in an American's dialogue so has to stay.

Something else he helped with was questioning a couple of sentences where I'd gotten too cute in my use of syntax. I have to be careful about that; just because it makes sense to me doesn't mean it's easy to understand by someone reading it for the first time. And...he found a couple typos.

Who knows, by the time I get done editing this book, it will be perfect -- HAH!

Working on it...

First British notes back on The Alice '65 and a lot to go through. Nothing major, it seems, just details mixed in with the bits and pieces of the story. I'll have to read through it to find them all, however, because he input them into a Word copy, in red. Like hide and seek.

One embarrassing bit is someone pointing out my misspelling of dummkopf. If I'm going to use words from a foreign language, I should verify they're correctly spelled. That's another step in the process, now.

Something that's interesting is when a correction is suggested because the reader misunderstood what I was getting at. That means I need to find a better way to lay it out so it's not confusing. Clarity is the essence of condescending obnoxiousness...but sometimes it's what is needed in an off-beat story like A65.

I had another reader so identify with Adam, she never was able to see the humor of what was happening. Maybe I should stop calling this a romantic comedy and just a romance...of a sort. It doesn't really fall under those parameters. Romantic farce, maybe? Dramatic farce? Hell, I don't know; I just hope it's readable and sells well.

Tomorrow I'm off to San Francisco for a couple days and then Miami and New York City. A whirlwind 8 days of book fair move ins and map fair move outs and collections of archives and all that jazz. So I'll read the notes on the plane. I'm too backed up from work to do anything more. I was there till after 7 getting things settled before I go.

Now my brain is drained and ready for bed...

That was quick...

I sent in an application to be allowed to apply for a Library of Congress number, yesterday, and I already got the OK! Didn't expect it for a week. So I sent one in on behalf of The Alice '65. And got a notice back they had "The alive '65" under review. I nearly fell over. I checked every part of that application before I hit send, and I'd have sworn I had everything correct. But I can't find out till they issue the number; then I supposedly can make changes.

I'm finding my typing and ability to catch my errors is getting worse. Like I have minimal control over my fingers and my brain doesn't connect with my eyes, sometimes. I like to blame some of it on this laptop's slim keyboard, and that is part of the issue...but I do still have some of the same trouble on a regular keyboard, at work. I have to proof my emails three times to make sure they're right, and sometimes I still miss things.

I had myself checked for Alzheimer's and dementia, since those run in my family. But I didn't score anywhere near what they say indicates either illness. I also asked about dyslexia becoming more pronounced as you age, but the doctor shrugged that off with, "You either are or aren't, and since you've never been diagnosed with it..."

I dunno...maybe I just need to stop pushing so hard and kick back a little. Maybe I'm just more hyper-critical of my work so more aware of the errors I'm making. This is why I now use editors for my work; they can catch most of my fuck-ups...but then again, they don't catch all of them.

Just glancing over A65 to add in a change I wanted to make about Adam's stylish redo, I found a couple of inconsistencies -- noting he's not supposed to have a belt, for example, then a paragraph later, he's slipping a belt on. It was like that two drafts ago.

Oopsie...

I should have reposted this, yesterday...

This is from when I was in Munich and went to Dachau, on July 25th, 2013 in the middle of a vicious heat wave. I'm reposting in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
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So…yesterday I went to Dachau Concentration Camp. It’s only about 20 minutes northwest of Munich, on the S-Bahn #2. Then you hop the 726 bus to pass through a pleasant little town and around to the main entrance.  It’s not a very large bus and has no AC or even decent air flow, and mine was crammed with American students chattering about where they’ve been, so far, and how awful or lax airport security is, and yap, yap, yap. Irritating…but it’s Europe in the summer.

Right by the entrance is the well-kept information center and cafeteria, then comes a short stroll down a gravel pathway of lovely foliage and neat benches, all very innocuous...until you get to...



...a couple of rails left from where the trains used to stop. Then across a little creek is a plain-looking building with a simple iron gate. Beyond that is a massive parade ground. Acres of smooth, white gravel, with tiny buildings to the left and the museum to the right.



In front of this building is a wrought-iron sculpture symbolizing the pain and suffering of what happened at this camp.

I entered the museum first, winding my way down polished floors and clean white walls and perfectly laminated posters with well-crafted explanations of the events from 1933-1945. Some of the photos are very intense, and a sign at the main entrance even suggests the museum is not appropriate for children under 12. People were mostly quiet and reading and thinking, some chattering to each other, some being led by tour guides...like this was the latest collection at a gallery.



It used to be the processing center, where prisoners were stripped and forced to take showers, then were shaved of their hair…each step done in the most humiliating manner possible.

When you exit the building, to the right are guard towers and trenches and electrified fences.


Across the wide expanse of blinding white gravel are two barracks that neatly show the living conditions...


...and beyond those are line after line of gravel rectangles elegantly symbolizing the 72 other barracks that made up this part of the camp…each precisely numbered.


There’s a beautiful promenade between tall, whispering trees that leads to a Christian memorial to the dead; the Jewish one is smaller and to the right of it. To its left is a building that deals with racism of all kinds.
People stroll about and chatter and talk on their phones and German students sound just like American students, except for the actual words, and I heard this Daft Punk song I loathe blasting off someone’s iPod and dogs are led about on leads, sniffing and pissing as their owners complain about god knows what and it’s all so wrong, wrong, wrong.
You don’t smell anything there. All you hear is nonsense and the noise of idiots. The gravel is kept perfectly in place. The floors are so clean you can eat off them. The walls are painted white or are polished wood. Behind the Christian memorial is a Carmelite convent established on what was a playground built by slave labor for the camp commandant’s children. It all looks really, really nice, but it’s all so antiseptic and clean, it’s not real, anymore. It’s just a thought.
What clarified everything was when I was walking down the promenade towards the memorial and a woman passed me with her happy, sniffing dog as she chatted to a friend. I actually got so fucking angry when I saw that fucking dog and that stupid fucking woman chattering in what I think was German, I had to walk away from her. All of a sudden I was weeping…not crying, just tears streaming down my face at the blithe disregard for how vile and animalistic humanity has been and can still be. Granted, hers wasn’t the only dog there, but it drove the point home.

This was a park, now. A playground for puppies to play and piss and poop, and for people to stroll around on a warm summer day. The exquisite symmetry of it all has minimized the hell this place became for god knows how many men, women and children. It’s all just history, now. All just a memory...if even that.
Humans have been practicing genocide since we began developing separate civilizations. “Mine is always better while yours is unworthy.” Even the US was built on genocide and slavery, and around the world hate and fear are, as usual, being used to solidify political power in Russia and Afghanistan and countries in Africa...hell, it’s still happening in America.
We always do everything we can to minimize the true atrocities that can be unleashed by human beings – not just at Dachau, but against Armenians in Turkey, and Kurds in Iraq, and Native Americans in the US and on and on and on. It’s always "them" being the worst and only barely ever "us" when it comes to the horror that's part of nature; not human nature, just nature in general.

The planet don't give a damn about our ideas of morality, one way or the other. It does what it does. We, as humans, claim we want to rise above that…but we always drop back to the slime pits the second we have the excuse.
Because we never remember; we deliberately forget. And clean, beautiful, antiseptic memorials like Dachau will always be there to help us do exactly that.
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It's nearly 5 years later, and the world is racing to another catastrophe, just like this one...and that motherfucking son-of-a-bitch in the White house is leading the charge.

God damn him and every one of his cult-like followers.