Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 216

A bit of lightness...

It's interesting...well, to me...that by cutting back a little on Jake's moralizing and anger, the story's become more open to adding some humor. When I changed why Dion's sitter crapped out on him, Jake popped in by remembering his own crush on a high school quarterback and how silly it made him. It's also made him more confused about Tone's shifts in mood and contradictory actions instead of being pissed off.

I guess I got way carried away with using the story as my soap box, something no writer should ever do...unless he's heavy into philosophy and wants to contemplate the universe, or something. Navel gazer, I am not. I know just enough about that stuff to make me dangerous. I used to like Kierkegaard and his existentialism, but now I think it's because he was somewhat accessible with his parables and metaphors, and he's a bit too geared to religion for my current tastes.

But then, most philosophy is kind of silly to me, these days. Religions are used to control and destroy people, even by the Buddhists, sometimes. So are political philosophies. I'm a screaming liberal, but not to the extent where I want to tell people I don't agree with to shut up. I prefer to know when someone's ideas differ from mine, even if I wind up thinking they're stupid and harmful. Better to have it out in the open where it can be seen than hiding in a shadow festering into a plague.

To me, it doesn't matter if you're left wing or right...if you want to force people to live by your precepts, all you are is a fascist. I don't care how noble your intentions are, fascists need to be fought. And while there are a lot more of those types on the right, the left has its share. Sometimes it's a bit more subtle, like condescendingly telling you you're being childish for supporting this candidate instead of that one, and if you don't stop you'll help the enemy. Like you're too stupid to think for yourself, so I will think for you. Very Orwellian.

Or like going back 20 years to things someone said or did and using that to attack them as a way of forcing them to back down from their current position, never even thinking to acknowledge that people change over time. Proof of that is me -- until 1980 I was a Republican in Texas, but then Ronnie Ray-gun got the nomination and I could see the writing on the GOP's wall that it would soon be the party of Christ. That's when I shifted to Democrat. Things I believed back then would come across as completely contrary to what I believe now, but that doesn't mean I'm a hypocrite; it just means I've grown. And if I can, why can't others?

Well...according to today's political and religious philosophies, you can't unless you think like them...and that's why it's all so silly.

Back to the way I was...

On this go-through of OT, I find myself cutting out the proselytizing Jake keeps falling into. Commentary that explains what he's thinking instead of having it just happen. That's a film concept -- show don't tell -- but it makes for a much better read if he doesn't stop to point out the obvious. I mean, I don't mind a little of it, but I can see where there's too damn much and it's off-putting. I guess I was trying to figure out what the story was about and using his voice to lay down the foundation.

I've also toned down some of the anti-gay stuff...and it actually works better. For example, I had a babysitter quit on Dion and Kent because her father ordered her to. The beta-reader suggested it was a bit much and thinking about it, it is. So I shifted to her canceling on them because she got asked out by a boy she has a crush on, and Dion's rolling his eyes at the silliness of teenage girls over jocks...and Jake's remembering his own crush on a jock in high school.
I've also cut a character because he was proving to be superfluous. Not sure how this will play out later, but combining him with one of Owen's old friends clarifies things a lot and makes the story less cluttered. I'm even considering pulling back on Lemm's situation a bit...but that still needs some thought.
Shiner Bock's helping...or maybe it's just my placebo, giving me the excuse to sit down and get into it. Doesn't matter; I like the beer. It's not as rich as Guinness or lively as Amstel Light, but I don't care; it's hitting me just right and went well with the Fettucini Alfredo I made from a packet for dinner.
Overall, a productive weekend...and I probably shouldn't have said that...

Got my structure mojo go-going...

It took a while, but I finally have a good restructure on the first hundred pages of The Vanishing of Owen Taylor. Easy, it was not, and somehow in cutting out the unnecessary stuff, I added three pages. Don't ask me how; I have no idea. But that's how it seems to work; the more I cut, the more I add. It's the same with my finances or weight -- the more I try to control them, the more out of control they are.

I'm a lot happier starting out with the question, but I did shift Jake's concern about Owen's disappearance into the first chapter. I then wrote a two-page synopsis of what happened to Jake and Tone in Rape In Holding Cell 6 and plugged that into the beginning of chapter 2. Works better. I do need to go back over pps 81-101 to make sure I didn't cut anything out that's needed or mess up my rearranging. I have to do these checks a lot because I tend to drop words and letters as I go.

What's helping is some annotated feedback from a couple of beta readers. They went through the story for free and made notes where things were problematic or needed correcting, so I'm first going through each chapter and making those corrections, then noting their comments and deciding whether or not to incorporate them. So far, they've had some very good suggestions, and I'm not above claiming them for my own.

I also sent some of Place of Safety off to a man who lives in Derry, Northern Ireland to see if it's working as a story told by a boy from that area. It's time to start shifting my focus back o Brendan Kinsella. It's been too damn long since I last worked on his story...and it's time to get it done.

I really like this as the cover. I think the photographer was Eamon Melaugh, but I'll need to check into that.

Something that struck me is how much Donald Trump is like Ian Paisley, the Presbyterian minister who worked up as much sectarian hatred and distrust as he could in the 6 counties. He made ludicrous statements and played on people's fear of Catholics to a huge extent, just like Trump and his use of undocumented workers as the cause of everything wrong in America. Evil is as evil does...

I once read that back at the beginning of the 19th Century, Catholics and Protestants were working together to form trades unions in hopes of getting better treatment and wages. The rich men of the time got the unions banned by law then spent years in a whisper campaign to turn the Anglo-Irish against the Celtic-Irish by saying they were out to take their jobs and establish rule by Rome. It worked so well that by the time unions were allowed to form, again, the Protestants refused to let Catholics be part of them...for the most part.

Sounds to me like history's repeating itself.

Life's intrusions are a pain in the ass...

The last couple of days have not been good for writing. I got into a hassle with the NY State Tax agency, who claimed I owed back taxes from 2014. I paid them back in April and can prove it, but it took me two phone calls and way too much time on the phone. I finally got shifted to a guy who knew what to do and where to look and saw the payment was never processed. It was still sitting there, waiting. Got a nice headache off that.

And then my car decided it needs $800 work of work, and I'm doing the Miami Map Fair, again, instead of the California Book Fair, and I got bawled out for trying too hard to help a customer, and my iphone almost did a crash on me (the screen went black and I have no idea what I did to make it work, again). And finally at 4:45 today I got a call about possibly transporting some objects to London by hand-carry, which I've done a few times, but they have to be there by Wednesday, next week, and I can't do it. I'm the only one in the office Monday and Tuesday.

I would kill to get back to London, right now, so the fates or gods or whatever decided to have some fun at my expense and dangle the hint that maybe they'll let me...and then snatch it away like the assholes they are. But then, that's the story of my life. Always almost and never all the way. Be it career, money, life...

Small wonder my work is so hesitant; I've got nothing to show I can be all I can be...

All Hail Shiner Bock...

I found some in a grocery store, here. It's a dark Texas brew that's actually good, and it's helped me finally get to where I can move past the first chapter of OT. I wound up adding a 2-page bit of background to the beginning of chapter 2 and now can move forward with the story. I've established there's tension between Tone and Jake, that Jake's parents are up to something secretive, that his uncle's missing after having asked him for help in a way that worries Jake, and his father's second wife is trying to get him to leave Tone to live in Denmark.

That's a lot to pack into a first chapter, but I sliced out names of people who no longer mattered to the story and got rid of a lot of chit-chat. It's moving the story along a lot faster. I can only hope it's going to work out as I go along...but at least now I can go along.

The last couple days have been difficult for me. I'm still affected by that mood I got into this weekend, and I'm beginning to see there are three things I want to complete as soon as I can. First, of course, is The Vanishing of Owen Taylor. Second, the beginning of Darian's Point. Third, Place of Safety, my Irish novel. I've futzed around for way too long on them and it's ludicrous.

I know what I want to do with DP, and it won't be all that hard to pull together. I'm doing it as a screenplay, since parts 2 and 3 are. And with P/S...I'm just being cowardly. I'm afraid I can't make it work well enough for someone from Derry to believe and that's stupid. And wimpish. Just write the story, Kyle; it will come together.

It usually does.

My brain scrambles countries...

This is a Swedish folk song, but when I listen to it for some reason I think of my Gaelic horror story, Darian's Point, and when the story begins 3500 years ago in Eire...during a conflict between the Tuatha de Danann and the original Celts over a girl misused by the Dagda.


It's on an album titled Mythos Hildebrandslied by a group named Duivelspack. They claim it's the music of Germany, but I really think it's more Viking...

Lost in silence...

Amazing how silent the world can become without you noticing. It can surround you like a cold blanket and make everything still and meaningless. The deaf have an advantage in that they know they cannot hear, and they have tools to supplement that even if they are not perfect replacements. Sign language, lip reading, a heightened sensitivity to the emotions of others, these help them communicate around their limitation. But what tools do you have to combat the quiet when it's self-inflicted in such slow steady steps you don't realize it's enveloped you until there is nothing else?

This weekend I spent in my apartment. It was wet and rainy, outside, and I'd look out my window every now and then at the rain and think, "I should go walking in it." But I didn't. Instead, I worked on OT. And today I finally caught on to how disconnected I've become from everything that matters to me except my writing. I used to sketch or paint to keep me grounded in something other than words, but now seem unable to. When I can't write, I can't do anything except nonsense stuff.

Something vaguely like this happened to me in Santa Monica in 1983. It was before the storm that destroyed the pier, and I was visiting my folks in Glendale while trying to decide what to do about Graduate School. I'd completed the coursework but needed to submit a thesis, and this one professor was being difficult about it. I'd written a couple of short scripts dealing with simple human emotions, including an adaptation of Chekov's short story, Champagne, that everyone seemed to love. So he wanted me to do a script along those lines. But I couldn't. I had no idea what to write to fill 100 pages.

I'd done a first draft of an action-thriller, Delay En Route, about a fighter pilot who stops in Paris to buy a car and gets caught up in terrorism and love. He'd trashed it by pointing to one bit of dialogue in the script -- where the lead is drunk and seated by his plane and sees a bird flitting in and out of the intake duct, so he pulls the twigs out and covers the flap and says, "This is no place to build a nest" -- and he told me, "That is the only line worth keeping." Devastated me.

So I'd come out to LA to ponder my next move and went down to the pier. It was a funky place, then, with bait shops and souvenir shops and cold and wet, but I like it like that. Some people were about, even though it was late. I felt peaceful and easy. I walked around and then down to the end of the pier and gripped the railing and looked out over the black water to listen to the surf roll in. No horizon was visible.

The breeze was gentle. Quiet. My mind went blank and I just enjoyed the moment...until a fog rolled in that was so thick and complete, I could not see or hear anything. Nothing. Not even my hand in front of my face. All I could feel was the icy railing and all I knew was that I was standing on the wooden planks. Otherwise, total sensory deprivation. I freaked out. Panicked, totally. I dropped to my knees and tried to find anything in the way of a light, but there was nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Just cold icy black, everywhere.

I finally regained some control and felt for the railing I'd been holding, found it, remembered the beams of the floor were set lengthwise to it so if I just backed up over them, I'd be fine till I hit one of the shops. So I crawled until I caught a glimmer light from a lamp. When I got to it, I stood up and could must make out another lamp so headed for that and finally found my father's Chrysler and got in and could not move for ten minutes. I had this sick feeling I'd just glimpsed what death was going to be like, and I shook from it.

I can't say I really learned anything from that experience except that's when I started to focus on writing instead of art or directing. I blew off the Master's Program and moved places that would present few distractions and worked at becoming better. I took jobs that would be easy yet comfortable -- in book stores, usually. I felt comfortable being surrounded by authors. I think I became a bit too comfortable, because I sought out jobs like that, culminating with Heritage Book Shop and its focus on the glorious writings of the past. Even now I work with books of all kinds.

Anyway...today, rather than fight with OT, I transferred old files from old Zip disks to a thumb drive...and going through them reminded me of how little I've progressed even as I've worked at improving my ability. I'm still filled with self-doubt and can be my most severe critic, but I'm a hundred times improved from when I was in Grad School. I love my characters, even the vile ones.

And yet, I feel nothing but silence around me now. It's an odd place to be in. This is no rut; the best analogy would be me caught in a neverending trench between bombardments.  I listen to music. I watch movies. I talk to family on the phone. I surf the web and research stories...and I'm caught in stasis. I've lost track of who I ever wanted to be. If I even knew. All I know is I write and work to improve my writing...and now that's not enough. I need to take it up to a new level beyond just writing.

But what that is, god only knows...and only god knows how I'll be able to do it.

Psycho Kyle?

I spent all day working on the first 20 pages of OT. Rewriting and revising and rearranging and combining and adding and shifting and adjusting and on and on and on. They need to be better than the best I've got, since they establish the tone of the book and what it's about, and I've almost got it. Almost.

There's a funny story about a writer who spent half the day deciding whether or not to remove a comma from one sentence, then once he'd removed it, spent the rest of the day deciding whether or not to add it back in. I wound up doing something like that, but trying to figure out if but is better to use than except. It's maddening, but it's necessary.

I'm not like Earl Stanley Gardner, who could spit out Perry Mason mysteries to his secretary off the top of his head. To begin with, I don't have a secretary or assistant; can't afford one. Second, when I do stream of consciousness, I wind up with chaos and scattershot ideas in the story...tho' that is sort of how LD comes across...I guess. I'm more of a deliberative writer than a quick-word artist.

So now I have it down, I think. Jake's tense because he's gotten odd messages from his uncle, and his stepmother is adding to it with her cryptic comments and observations, and the seed of distrust has been planted in his mind concerning Tone as well as his folks being up to something. It's been a fight...but I do think it's set well enough for me to advance to chapter 2. I'll reread it in the morning and decide then.

And then do another rewrite, I'm sure.

Bizet, Nijinsky, Van Gogh...and me?

I was listening to WNED en route home and they played several parts of Georges Bizet's Carmen. It's a classic opera about a prostitute who's the downfall of a decent man, and it was severely criticized when it premiered in Paris in 1875. It's widely believed the reaction to the opera was the cause of Bizet's heart attack 3 months later. He died thinking it a failure when it turned out to be anything but.

This reminded me of a Radio Eire broadcast I was listening to as I drove from Derry to The Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, back in 2006. That program discussed the critical reaction to Carmen and pointed out many artists have been rejected only to wind up celebrated after their deaths. People like Nijinsky, who choreographed Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and was driven insane by Paris's rejection of his brilliant dance moves. Same for Vincent Van Gogh, who was never a successful painter when alive, but whose works now sell for tens of millions of dollars.

In the more grandiose portion of my brain, I like to see myself as similar to them -- a misunderstood artist who will be discovered after he's dead...but then I think, What the hell fun is that? I won't know about it, and that's anything but gratifying. Yes, Shakespeare is the Immortal Bard, but is that any comfort in the grave? Is he getting chits from Heaven for that? Doubt it.

I guess I should be happy that I'm proud of my work, even if it's never going to sell a million copies. I wrote honestly and followed my characters and let them be who they were, be they good and bad or just plain crazy as hell...or even vile.

Curt, in How To Rape A Straight Guy, is an asshole who leaves a path of destruction, thinking he's the wounded one...and I let him be that without any (overt) qualms. Eric, in Bobby Carapisi, is so self-absorbed in his pain he inadvertently initiates the actions that lead to Bobby's suicide, then as a form of atonement gets Alan to tell his self-centered story...revealing he's also a victim of a hateful society. Alec, in Porno Manifesto, lets a girl's rape happen so he can use it to turn his gay-bashers against each other, and winds up hurting even more innocent people, yet he winds up in love at the end. Antony, in Rape In Holding Cell 6, slips into a psychotic need for revenge that only hurts himself and nearly destroys a man who cares about him. And then there's The Lyons' Den, which is told as if Daniel's chaotic mind is having a nervous breakdown, which makes it hard to get in to.

Now I'm working on The Vanishing of Owen Taylor...and getting careful. This book has been a constant battle over whether or not I will take the better road or the honest one, which will make it harder to sell. I've been working on it for nearly 2 years and I'm still fighting myself over it. And I've begun to wonder...is the work I've done over the last few weeks me playing it safe? Or me trying not to.

I don't know...and for the first time in a long time, I need a drink to deal with it...and we ain't talkin' beer, baby.

Caught in my own little loop

I worked on the opening chapter of OT, again, tonight. Seems I can't go any further in story until I get this to where I'm happy with it...and that's proving to be difficult, at best. I'm happier...but still not there. I've added more emphasis to the lunch conversation between Jake and Mira in Paris. She's trying to warn him without being able to tell him what she's warning him about because it falls under doctor-patient privilege.

We're having fun at work thanks to our computer system being down. I took my laptop in and managed to still get a fair amount of work done, including a couple of quotes. It's looking pretty solid that I'll be in NYC the week of September 28th, and tomorrow I find out if I'm going to Calgary. That one doesn't look too likely, though.

I've been following the nonsense about Kim Davis refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples due to her religious beliefs, and the howling from both sides is ludicrous...though not as much on the left as the right. People on the left are making fun of her looks; she seems to be patterned after Kathy Bates in Misery. Which doesn't help one damn bit. The best argument that comes from our side is, she's refusing to do her job. If she can't do it in good conscience, she should quit, because she took an oath to do it when she was elected to county clerk. We're also pointing out that she's something of a bully and using the bible to excuse her bullying.

The arguments on the right are that she's being jailed for being a Christian and it's one step closer to gas ovens for the followers of Jesus, and on and on. They're an embarrassment to everyone but themselves. What makes it beyond ludicrous is the number of GOP candidates who have taken her side, suggesting it's perfectly okay to ignore laws you don't like and flat out lying about what the law means. Mike Huckabee even went so far as to say the Dred Scott decision of 1857, where the Supreme Court said that Africans could not be citizens, was still in effect. As if we hadn't fought a civil war over slavery and the 14th Amendment meant nothing.

The GOP is going out of its way to prove itself to be the party of the stupid.