Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 233

Lost in Lisbon

Twice. Once trying to leave the airport to head for Cascais. The street names in Google Maps do not match up with the signs posted. But I lucked out and wound up on the A5 instead of the A16...until I got to where I needed to turn to go down the remainder of the A16. I had to double back to work my way down to where I needed to be. Did it by the number of traffic circles I had to go through then followed a winding street with no name that lead me to my hotel. I now have a decent idea of how to get around in this town, and hopefully back to the client's home.

I've already packed some of the materials but there's another 75% to go. No time to really look around, yet, but the view from the house is lovely. Even my hotel -- which was new in the 60s -- has a nice view of the ocean. Food's only been okay.

Lisbon's a big town that happening. Lots of new construction and new buildings up all over the place. Recently paved roads. Highways as good as anything California has to offer. And drivers who've never heard of a car's personal space. I hoe to get some photos, tomorrow. Tonight I was just too tired.

Missed the Oscars...but I hear I didn't miss much.

Don't rush, dammit...

I made it to NYC, but only after waiting...and waiting...and waiting...for the plane to first take off, then land, then get to a gate, then for the AirTrain to come. Turns out the train to Jamaica isn't making the terminal rounds; you have to take the Howard beach train to Federal Circle and transfer to the Jamaica Shuttle train. Are there any signs or is anyone around to tell you this? No. I finally gave up and decided to take the Howard Beach train, even though it meant using the A subway train to get to the F to get to my hotel, which takes twice a long. but when I got to Federal Circle, I heard some guy say that the Jamaica shuttle would be there in 10 minutes...so I got off and got to take the easier route.

That "easier route" wound up taking twice as long, anyway. So I didn't get to my hotel till 1:30am, and got up at 9:30 to finalize my calls to Lisbon to make sure everything was in order. Turns out one hotel I'm staying at is going to be a pain about changing my reservation from 2 to 1 day. Of course, it's an American chain hotel -- holiday Inn Express -- so I'll be mean about that, later.

Right now I'm in Penn Station waiting for a train to Newark's Airport. For this, I'm in no rush; my flight doesn't leave till 8:20 so I'm having lunch here and using the free WiFi. Not even thinking about rushing, right now.

What this trip has done is point out to my conscious mind that I spend most of my life waiting. On the rare occasions where I've pushed to get things done now, I've fucked them up. Wilderness Rule comes to mind. Waiting on people I'd aligned with to get things going for a script of mine also comes to mind. An occasion where I decided to buy a new car based on an ad in a paper without really thinking it through damn near sent me into bankruptcy. I can think of a hundred other times to go along with those.

Maybe I should re-ead Waiting for Godot and find out what it did to scar me.

United is anything but...

United cancelled all flights out of Buffalo...and didn't bother telling me till I was at the airport. After much strum und drang, I dumped the Buffalo to Newark section and am flying down on Jet Blue...which is about to board. I had to grab my bag, go back through security, and find a hotel to stay in that wasn't going to be $300 a night...but there it is. I'm set, now. Who knows, I may actually make it to Lisbon.

I'll need to call some people in Lisbon to let them now I was delayed, but I can do that later tonight. I've already rearranged my hotels and rental car. I'm still coming back on Friday...maybe. Depends on what United pulls, next.

I should have gone out of Toronto on SAS, Lufthansa or Air France. Needless to say, I will not fly United, again. Don't care what the big boss wants. It cost more than Toronto to Lisbon and is a hell of a lot more trouble.

Oops...they're calling my flight.

Different tone for "Carli's Kills"

I'm digging into CK to figure out what I have that's usable and what needs to be added, subtracted, divided by and multiplied over. The first thing is making sure the structure works...meaning figure out how I'm going to start this book. I know the ending, it's how to slip into the story and keep it running that's hard for me.
So on the plane trip, tomorrow, I'm going to focus on re-outlining the story. Working out what the characters are about. Who did what, when, where, how, and why. I've already got a script version of the story, so it's not like I'm working blind. I just need the back story to make it all work on the page.

I'm already seeing changes in Carli and Zeke. In their stories. Same for Cas, the main guy Carli's after. He's not full evil; he brings damaged veterans into his gang and makes them feel important and necessary.

And I'm throwing in some of the amazingly stupid comments made by elected Republicans about rape -- like it has to be legitimate, and if a girl gets pregnant from it that's a gift from God, and crap like that. You have to wonder at anyone who would dismiss rape so easily.

For some reason, sleep is becoming a leitmotif in this story. Zeke has a hell of a time sleeping...until he meets Carli. Carli's sister, Lara, is in a drugged sleep when she's raped. Someone's going to talk about sleepwalking through life. Haven't figured out the meaning, yet...but I will eventually.

I hope.

50 Greatest Films...

Every 10 years, Sight and Sound Magazine takes a poll to find out what films are the greatest ever made. The last poll was in 2012, and a big surprise was that Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo beat out Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

Surprised me, too, because Notorious is my favorite Hitchcock film, followed by Shadow of a Doubt. That's not to say Vertigo isn't great; it's like a slow-building dream wrapped up in a nightmare and sprinkled with the heartbreaking perfection of Kim Novak and quiet decency of Jimmy Stewart...but it doesn't make a damn bit of sense. Which is not a complaint. Dreams never make sense once you've woken up.

I've seen 31 of the top 50 films, and would rank some of them differently -- I prefer Ozu's Late Spring to Tokyo Story, for example, and think The 400 Blows and La Dolce Vita belong much higher in the rankings -- but that's my opinion, and this is more of a fun exercise than anything else.

A short run-up to Oscar night.

Robert Frost on writing...

The Figure A Poem Makes
by Robert Frost

Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day. Why can't we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in thought. Then it will go hard if we can't in practice. Our lives for it.

Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre are not enough. We need the help of context- meaning-subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with metres-particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience.

Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound to being a poem's better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a Poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as aberrationists, giving way to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper. Theme alone can steady us down. just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as metre, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unex pected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may Want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material-the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic. More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

CK's the one...

Carli's Kills is the next thing I'm working on. She's begun her tango with Zeke, and he's open to it, so I'll be plotting out the new version. I have a first draft of the script, but it was really more of a placeholder till I could figure out the story. Now that I know what's going on with Zeke and how he fits into Carli's life, I can dig in. Everything else is cascading from that.

Hmm...his revelation has changed the story more than I thought. I mean, I sort of had an idea about what was going on between those two, but it never really made sense to me. Too arbitrary and Hollywoodish. Plus, having Carli as a sniper just didn't work. It was more of an excuse to show her ability to shoot a rifle...and there are better ways to handle that. More honest ways.

I'm going to be too busy the next couple of days, getting ready for the Lisbon trip, to do any serious writing. At least CK is a manageable size as a printout, so I can deal with it on the plane trip. Right now I'm trying to get packing material set up for the job, and Staples Portugal is being a pain in the ass. They won't take a credit card, and the info they sent us for a monetary transfer isn't correct. Dammit.

I'm holding off on OT till I get back because I want to go through it in detail, distill what's in each chapter down to its simplest form, and have that to cross-reference what's happening when, why, how, and to whom. I've already worked out how to combine two characters into one, and I'm looking at another pair as a potential combination. Plus there's a secondary character I either need to do more with or get rid of...and I halfway think I may know how to manage that.

Maybe I should have started out knowing this story's details before I wrote it; mysteries are far more demanding than mere novels. You've got to have the clues set up without them being obvious or simplistic. You've got to have your red herrings. And once the thing's explained, it has to make sense. So far, I've either got too much of it all or not enough; can't decide.

Except for the ending -- that's now exactly like I want it...finally...

A revelation for CK...

Zeke and Carli revealed a moment from Carli's Kills that sets up the ending, perfectly. And, as usual, even though I planned to write a simple revenge story/script...I find myself working in a question about morality and guilt, adding a lot more context to the whole situation. Carli's out for revenge, still, but is it to seek justice for what happened to her sister? Or is it guilt over how she did nothing to help her? She didn't realize her sister was suicidal, the last time she spoke with her, but that means nothing after someone's death.

Same for Zeke. He's faced with the harsh reality that a man who saved his life did something vile and vicious to another human being...and he did nothing to stop it. Now he feels responsible for another person's death, even though he had nothing to do with it.

So the story's about guilt, I guess. And how it rips apart common sense and replaces it with the idea that had you done things differently, events would not have gone the way they did. Which is nonsense. Yes, if you had done X instead of Y, then Z might have turned out better. Or...it might have been worse. You don't know. 20-20 hindsight is a fallacy perpetrated by fools who think the world is understandable and operates according to their interpretation of reality.

You'd think that people would catch on -- today's facts are tomorrow's old-wives tales, because no matter how much we know, today, evidence may come along to reverse everything we think is true. Look at what's being bandied about now. "There never was a Big Bang to start the universe; it's just always been." Rather different from the one-time belief that the world was flat and rode on the back of a giant turtle.

But that was once considered fact.

Intimidation, extreme...

I've got a printed copy of The Vanishing of Owen Taylor put into a notebook to begin clarifying and notation-ing and all that stuff...and I haven't had the nerve to start it, yet. I want 3-4 days to be able to go through it in one line instead of dealing with bits and pieces, like I have been...because it's massive.

I did work up a first rough of the cover I'm after, using Josh Wald's face instead of Jordan's. Don't want to mess with the karma of that one. It's not quite there...I need a better silhouette and a better image of Palm Springs lights, and the proportions are off for a book...but it's enough for now.
I've separated each chapter -- gray strips are parts 1 and 2, colored tabs are parts 3 & 4. One good thing about keeping it all together is, I can jump back and forth when I see places that need setting up or clarifying. Another good thing? I can now see for myself that it's the same size as Bobby Carapisi's 3 volumes, and that's not good. I'm already contemplating combining a couple of characters to shorten it, some.

Tomorrow I'm driving down to Dayton, OH if the weather will let me. It was about 2 degrees, today. I'll be there a couple days then come back...and Saturday I head for Lisbon. Still a lot to do for that. So I doubt I'll be able to do anything about OT till I get back, a week from Saturday. I'm not taking it with me; the damn thing weighs 10 lbs. and opens out nearly 2 feet. I can just see me trying to work on it during my plane ride.

I may start plotting out the novel transfer of The Alice '65 or Carli's Kills. I'm leaning a bit towards the latter because it's going to have some serious sex in it (heterosexual, this time, but with Carli the aggressor against Zeke) and I'm feeling the need to be a bit prurient, right now.

A bit? Hell, I want to write something that'll show those 50 Shades of Dull readers what's really hot. I'm not into girls, but the sex scene near the end of Matador jolted me into contemplating them, at least. It's obvious even though Amoldovar is gay, he knows how to make it steamy between a man and a woman.

Of course, he started out directing in porn; I only snuck into writing books with confrontational sex in them.

Memories...

Once upon a time, I was in the scouts. Started as a Weblo and graduated to regular scout when I was eleven. I joined a rag-tag troop at this Presbyterian church we'd attend, at the direction of my mother and step-father. I think they were afraid I was getting too lost in books and needed more interaction with other boys.

We met every Tuesday or maybe Thursday, and the minister was our scout master. He had an assistant who was in the Air Force, who'd usually handle the meetings. He was married. Had a baby on the way. Seemed very mature, even though I'm sure he wasn't even 21, yet.

We'd do campouts, which I never liked. I'm not the kind of guy who emjoys outdoor living and sleeping under the stars and shitting behind a bush and all that crap. I want a bed, a book, and either a cup of tea or a bottle of some soft drink; I was alternating between Big Red (AKA: Liquid Bubble Gum) and RC Cola, which had a nice bite to it. Of course, those were not allowed on the campouts; just canteens of water or drinking from a brook. Total roughing-it.

I liked the assistant, though I can't remember his name. Abernathy? Anderson? He was patient with me, even though I had two left thumbs and minimal willingness to remember how ropes are tied. Hell, I couldn't even do a square knot until I'd tied it wrong, first (I still have that habit). How I got that merit badge is beyond me.

After about a year, we went camping at Cypress Cove, outside New Braunfels, TX, where Canyon Lake now is. It was acres and acres of tall cypress trees around wide streams rushing over non-stop rocks or into cheerful eddies that tried to lull you into joining them. This trip, I started to enjoy. Not because of the woodsy stuff but because it was just plain beautiful. I hated the idea that there'd soon be a hundred feet of water covering it all.

There were about a dozen of us, and all the other boys went swimming in a pool at the end of a creek that was half rapids and all sun. The minister was down with them. I was sitting on some rocks up the creek, watching them goof around. I had on a pair of cutoffs and was using a bandana soaked in the cold water to keep my blinding white skin wet and cool, trying to cut down on sunburn and freckles, since I'd forgotten to bring sun-tan lotion.

I was really enjoying the solitude when the assistant jumped up onto a boulder across the creek. He had just put on a red Speedo, and for the first time I saw what he looked like, nearly undressed -- which was a lot like this guy, just clean-shaven and no hat. This was back before Speedos became identified with gay men, and his was more like what we'd call a square-cut, today.

Jesus the picture he made, standing on that rock -- his tan golden and his smile bright, like a young cougar surveying its domain. Without thinking, I blurted out, "Mr. Anderson, you're gorgeous." He grinned at me and said, "Thanks."

Suddenly, I had to sit myself in the cold clear water, because I was feeling something I'd never felt before in a place I'd never even thought of, till then, and it spooked me. I was afraid I'd hurt myself, somehow. I spent the rest of the day sneaking looks at him but afraid to say another word. And that night, I couldn't sleep. The next day, we went home, and I rode in the minister's car instead of the assistant's.

Not that my sudden silence or wariness mattered. In that space your voice carried, and my comment was heard by a couple of the other boys.  They mentioned it to the minister, and at the next meeting, he asked me to withdraw from the troop. It hurt...until I learned the Air Force was transferring the assistant to Germany, and we were about to live in El Paso for a year. Then I didn't care. I was only two badges short of gaining First Class Scout, but one of the badges was swimming, and I can't swim. Period. So I'd never have made it, anyway.

The memory reared up because the above image was posted on a friend's website -- Yummy of the Day (there's a link in the blogs I follow list, bottom right) -- and for a moment I couldn't breathe. It was like I'd suddenly shifted back to being 12 years-old and getting an honest taste of what my life would be like. Not my first brush with the harshness of the world, and nowhere near my last...just one of those pivotal moments.

Thing is...I still have a thing for red Speedos.