Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 50

Sixth Official Draft Begins...

Over the last two days I've dug into 3 chapters in A Place of Safety-New World For Old -- Nothing Things, Breaking the Surface, Moving On. Aside from some minor reconfiguring in the placement of moments, everything in is there that should be. Brendan joins reality, again, thanks to eating a tuna fish sandwich and having a coke. It's slow, but he begins to connect with his cousins and forces his way out of his shell.

It is a bit like watching a butterfly breaking free of its cocoon then staggering about, flexing its wings before it flies off. Everyone's being very low-key and casual. He doesn't know how he wound up at his aunt's place, yet, or that her children think he's a third or fourth cousin from the South of Ireland.

I've tried to keep the writing as much like someone waking from a deep dream as possible. And the way he finally does fully rouse himself is to be drawn outside the house, still in his pajama bottoms, only, and fix a car his uncle needs. That startles the man, who said his mother never told them he was capable of things like that. Brendan's response is, She thinks me simple. Then he goes back inside to make a sandwich, for himself.

There's a certain flow to the story that Brendan has laid down for me. And maintaining reality and honesty is my problem, not his. A real dilemma. But since it's all from his perspective, I have some leeway.

One constant will be conflict over his best friends, Colm and Danny putting the car bomb where it was. He wonders if Joanna's father's shop was chosen because of him. He beats himself up for not keeping her at the back door, when he came to say goodbye before leaving Derry. He fears his passport may have put a target on the back of his brother, Eamonn.

Lots of turmoil in him, even as he's fighting to regain his footing in this world and maintain a semblance of sanity. One more draft and maybe I'll ask for feedback and proofing.

This is my new anthem...

 I made it through the first night of writing my Irish opus and this reaches deep into my soul, at the moment...

Made me strong enough to face the next night, and the one to come with volume three of A Place of Safety.

Repetition for a use?

I have two separate spots in NWFO there Brendan is told how he was brought across to Houston after the bombing. My initial thought was to cut one...but now I'm thinking I'll just change them, a bit. The first one's being told by Aunt Mari prior to Brendan being seen by a cardiologist. The second by Mairead when she comes down from Toronto to visit, with her family. That's 3 years after Aunt Mari's version.

I need to solidify this and make it believable. Brendan was badly hurt by the explosion, so the most logical thing to do would be for him to die and be buried, in secret. It can't be known he was there, a Catholic lad near a Protestant's shop just before a bomb goes off. It would like the attack to his family and into the leadership of PIRA,, so he has to be done away with.

It's Colm who scrambles to get Bernadette and she pushes back against him dying, hard. Something else he doesn't understand, since he thinks she hates him. I've already had him work out how the bomb was transported and set, and that it was just bad luck that it blew early. If all had gone according to plan, Brendan would have ben on the train to Dublin and Joanna nowhere near the shop.

This feeds into his growing belief that we only have the illusion of control over our lives, and that shit happens to everyone, no matter how careful you might be. I had a bit of this in Bobby Carapisi, where Eric tracks down another man who was raped by Alan and his buddies and finds him at peace with what happened. His comment on how he chose to be that way instead of angry and bitter stemmed from a therapist who told him...

If you're driving to work but get broadsided by a drunk and wind up hurt and hospitalized, are you going to sit around and mope and cry and curse your fate? Or are you going to call work, tell them what happened, get yourself healed, realize it was not your fault, and rebuild your life?

It helped Eric grow a bit more understanding about his situation and begin to listen to Alan's version of his attacks...and slowly come to realize the man is just as damaged as he is. With that understanding, he began to heal.

I'm not doing that with Brendan. Not even sure it will be his final understanding. But it's a good stepping stone across a rushing brook.

Good thing about the internet...

You can find anything you want, practically. When Brendan is working on that Peugeot, I want him to go into as much detail as possible, showing how deep he gets into things when he's doing a repair. So I checked to see if I could find a Chilton's Auto Repair Guide for one...and did. Through Ebay.

Not sure how this will work out, yet, but it's opened up a lot in that area of the story. Brendan made friends at a rooming house he moved into, when he cut off his aunt and uncle, and they become like his family. What helps is, one of the tenants is a language maven who can learn languages with no trouble.

His name is Eldon and he's got emotional troubles, so is on disability. Very shy. Very quiet. Very unsure. But when Brendan mentions his younger brother, Rhuari, is learning Gaelic, Eldon learns it in a flash and Brendan gets the two of them corresponding in the language.

It's through Eldon and those letters Brendan keeps up with his Derry family. He learns Rhuari's set up at Queen's University, in Belfast, is married, and they're living with his wife's aunt. That his little sister, Maeve, is beginning training as a nurse. And that Rhuari's soon to be a father. He's also working in a late night convenience store so is vulnerable to Protestants going after him.

But Brendan also gathers enough from the letters that Maeve has connections within the IRA and they've made deals with the UVF to help each other's protection rackets. If this store's paying us, leave them alone and we'll do the same for you. And Rhuari's working at one that's paying. So he's somewhat protected.

Until Uncle Sean demands Brendan return to live at their home. Brendan refuses, preferring to live off on his own. The man winds up threatening to get Rhuari killed if he doesn't, which sends Brendan into a clash of fear and fury.

The man wants this because someone's notified the FBI that Brendan's an illegal alien and they're after him to talk with him. Which Uncle Sean does not want because it will hurt his businesses, so he's using his connections to stop that and make Brendan a legal resident. But that won't work unless he's available. And the only way they can make sure he's available is if he's living in the pool house.

It's a bit convoluted, but next draft I hope to simplify and clarify.

I hope to...

Getting there...

I'm expanding a section of APoS-NWFO, where Brendan find his way back to himself by repairing an old Peugeot 404 convertible. It's in a junkyard where he gets parts for his Montesa motorbike and is just wasting away. He convinces the owner of the yard to let him exchange fixing it up for parts for his bike. His main intent is to save money...but he gets deep into it and for a few hours a few days a week, it's like he's found a moment of peace.

He already knows his mother has cancer and is being dragged to treatments by his sister, Maeve. But word is, it's going well. He tells himself he doesn't care. He's been proclaimed dead and thought it would be a relief to be cut off from the family, only it's not really working out that way. Though he won't admit it to himself. He still keeps up with everyone in every way he can.

Meanwhile, his uncle has shown hostility to him and wants him gone, but cannot send him away until he's no longer a legal threat to the Houston family. He overstayed his medical visa by a year, so would be deported if caught. Even worse--he was brought into the US on a false passport, and its date has expired. So it's useless. They have to go through the whole mess of working up another to replace it, and that is taking time. But it's that or all kinds of legal hell.

So it's rebuilding that car that brings Brendan his feeling of zen. As Joanna once mentioned to him, that's how he copes with issues. And he becomes so involved in it, that when he learns his mother's cancer, once thought ended, has returned and she's given a short time to live...he's able to accept it.

That means he's being called back to Derry, but has to go as Brenna McGabbhin, his new name. It's been more than eight years since he vanished from the city, so it's hoped no one will notice who he really is. Wishful thinking.

And that will be volume three--Home Not Home.

So I'm not crazy enough...

Stole this from the Spring 2023 issue of Getty magazine, written by Elaine Woo: 

The Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness...

What makes great artists great? 

The eminent art critic Clement Greenberg jotted down his theory in a 1961 diary:The best American artists + writers of my time = alcoholics or on the verge of alcoholism; or megalomaniacs; or hysterics. Pollock, Faulkner, F. Lloyd Wright, Still, Newman, de Kooning, Rothko. On the other hand, the manic-depressives: Cal [Robert] Lowell, Delmore Schwarz . . . . 

David Smith a hysteric? Ken Noland a manic-depressive like me.Greenberg’s suggestion that exceptionally artistic people tend toward mental disorder is deeply embedded in our culture, traceable to the ancient Greeks and Romans and lent credence over the centuries by creative geniuses as different as Robert Schumann, Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, and Robin Williams. 

“Madness,” according to Socrates, “is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings.” 

The notion of the “mad genius” is, however, as controversial as it is persistent.In the curatorial world many people shy away from it, leery of reducing great art to the sum of a creator’s neurosis or psychosis. Yet in the scientific world, the possibility of a link between mental illness and creativity has inspired researchers for at least 70 years.Some experts, such as Johns Hopkins University psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison, find strong evidence that mood disorders, such as depression and bipolarism, are more prevalent among artists and writers than in the general population. 

The “mad genius” trope has endured, Jamison said in an interview, “possibly because there’s a real element of truth in it.” 

That view is echoed by USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. “The experience of suffering that is a hallmark of mood disorders may well stimulate creative endeavors, especially in the arts,” says Damasio, who is known for his work on the role of feelings and emotions in decision-making.But, as he notes, these disorders represent only one major category of mental illness.

Research into madness and creativity ranges across a broad spectrum of complex psychopathologies and creative pursuits, making comparisons difficult and consensus beyond reach.“I believe one thing is certain,” Damasio says. “Major forms of psychopathology are rarely compatible with major creativity.” 

The Big Cs

In a 2019 study, researchers at UCLA investigated the idea that psychopathology is more common in “Big-C creatives,” artists and scientists whose rare talents have earned international renown. “We found more of the opposite in some ways,” says Kendra S. Knudsen, the study’s lead author. “We found that individuals without a lifetime history of a psychiatric disorder scored higher on a test of creative thinking relative to those who had at least one lifetime diagnosis.” 

The study also found, though, that the visual artists had a higher incidence of “schizotypal” personality traits—behavior that is often described as odd or eccentric, such as nonconformism and receptivity to unusual ideas and experiences, but which does not amount to full-blown mental illness.The study emerged from the Big C Project, which is using neuroimaging and other methods to investigate how the brains and behavior of ultra-creative people may make them outliers compared to the rest of us. 

Robert M. Bilder, the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Chair in Creativity Research at UCLA and Big C Project director, puts it another way. “What we see is that the people who are most identified as being creative achievers may have certain traits that overlap with those of people with certain kinds of mental disorders, but they usually do not have mental illnesses as we define them today.” 

Bilder suggests that asking whether genius is associated with mental illness is the wrong question. “I guess the right question is, what is the nature of the relationship between creativity and emotional and psychological adjustment and well-being? Because I think it’s important to understand that both of these things occur on a spectrum.” 

The Tortured Artists 

Looking back through history, it is impossible to separate some of the world’s greatest artworks from the tortured psyches of their creators. A sublime example is Van Gogh, the beloved Dutch artist whose 1889 painting Irises is one of the Getty Museum’s greatest treasures. The painting depicts in thick, swirling brushstrokes of violet, green, yellow, orange, and blue a tightly cropped view of irises in bloom. 

Scholars and critics have praised its exquisite composition, while Getty visitors have found Irises mesmerizing for a variety of other reasons, seeing joyful exuberance in its intimate view of nature or sadness in the solitary white blossom the artist placed amid a swath of purplish ones. 

It may surprise some museum-goers to learn that Irises was one of the first works Van Gogh produced at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France, where he voluntarily confined himself for a year following an act of self-mutilation. How could someone so ill as to slice off his left ear (and subsequently present the chunk of flesh to a brothel maid) produce such a masterpiece of form and color? 

Irises was far from an exception: Van Gogh completed more than 150 paintings at that hospital, an astonishing output that included his most famous work, The Starry Night. 

Jamison wrote in Touched with Fire, her 1993 book on manic-depressive disease and the artistic mind, that Van Gogh’s paintings from that period “reflect lucidity of the highest order,” which is not to say he didn’t have problems. Such clarity of mind “is not incompatible with occasional bouts of madness,” she wrote, “just as extended periods of normal physical health are not incompatible with occasional bouts of hypertension, diabetic crisis,” or other kinds of metabolic disease. 

It may be that many creative geniuses thrive on the border between mental order and disorder, “the edge of chaos,” where novel ideas are born, Bilder says. “The balance of stability on the one hand and flexibility on the other hand is critically important to be able to do anything.” 

The nature of Van Gogh’s illness has long been a matter of debate, with diagnoses having included absinthe poisoning, schizophrenia, syphilis, and borderline personality disorder. Today, it is generally believed that he had bipolar disorder, which is characterized by extreme fluctuations in mood, energy, activity levels, and concentration. The symptoms often emerge in step with the seasons. 

“Irises is a good example of when his mood swings were under some control,” says psychiatrist and author Peter C. Whybrow, who was director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute in the late 1990s when he first delved into Van Gogh’s career and medical history. 

Van Gogh worked frenetically in late summer—“in spasmodic fury,” as an art student once described his process, Whybrow notes. But his mania tended to recede in the winter, when depression set in, leaving him barely able to lift brush to canvas.

Mental illness “embellished his creativity and gave it tones, to use a painterly metaphor,” Whybrow surmises. “But it is not correct to say that his art was driven by it. Mental illness shaped some of the work but doesn’t explain his brilliance as an artist.”

Another example is the 18th-century German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. He is best known for a series of more than 60 busts, called Character Heads, which are admired by scholars for their stunning realism and modernity and fascinating to viewers because of their sheer weirdness.Far from models of gentility, the heads have, variously, wild eyes, jutting necks, comically arched brows, and mouths agape as if in a scream.

One particularly riveting piece is The Vexed Man, on view at the Getty Center. It shows a middle-aged man with a face screwed up in a deep grimace. Beholders of these sculptures may disagree on the emotions portrayed, but it’s hard not to regard them as deeply unsettling.

In an account left by Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, a bookseller who visited Messerschmidt at his studio in 1781, the sculptor confided that he was tormented at night by ghosts. To exorcise them, he pinched himself in various parts of his body and repeatedly modeled the resulting facial expressions in front of a mirror until he could capture them in metal or stone.

Some experts postulated that Messerschmidt had Crohn’s disease or lead poisoning, both of which can cause severe pain. But one of the most-cited posthumous diagnoses came from psychoanalyst and art historian Ernst Kris, who concluded in 1932 that Messerschmidt had paranoid schizophrenia.The death of his patron and whispers of his “confusion in the head” apparently led Messerschmidt to break from his life in Vienna, where he had been a sculptor to the royal family, to spend his last years as a recluse. He produced the final bust in the series the year he died, 1783.

Art Reflects Life

Glenn Phillips, senior curator and head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), thinks it can be valuable to understand the psychological dimensions of an artist’s life. 

“Sometimes you really need to know the artist’s story to understand why they’re making the things they are, because it comes so profoundly out of their lived experience,” he says. “It’s kind of a first way into the work.”

The art world has recognized the contributions of people with mental illness. Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who is often described as the 20th century’s most influential exhibition maker, “had a whole group of artists with mental illness that he worked with at various points in his career,” says Phillips, who organized Harald Szeemann: Museum of Obsessions at the GRI in 2018.

In a groundbreaking 1963 exhibition, Szeemann showcased the work of psychiatric patients, including Adolf Wölfli, an artist diagnosed with schizophrenia who became an emblematic figure in the Art Brut movement for the thousands of fantastical drawings and illustrations he made during three decades in a Swiss psychiatric hospital.

Szeemann championed art by people with mental illness, writing in a 1963 essay that while such artists realized their talent “only with the onset of mental illness,” their work should be judged as art and not merely the “results of art therapy.”

But don’t knock the power of art as a medium for managing mental and emotional health.At places like Painted Brain, a peer-run mental health nonprofit in the MacArthur Park neighborhood near downtown, and the Los Angeles–based Creative Minds Project, people with mental health challenges come together to express their inner thoughts and feelings through art.

“I think it’s healing to access different ways of thinking to understand our world and the world of others,” says UCLA’s Knudsen, who founded the Creative Minds Project more than a decade ago through a partnership with UCLArts & Healing. “I think there is a bidirectional relationship, where our emotional experience can shape our creative thinking and our creative thinking can also shape our emotional experience.”

Van Gogh understood the connection.“The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher,” he once wrote, “by so much more am I an artist—a creative artist.”

And back to work

The nice thing about whining is I get my melancholia and frustration out of my system and kick myself back into working. Which happened today, thanks to yesterday. I reworked a section of NWFO where Brendan is brutalized for dating a Cajun girl, in Houston, and realizes his uncle...well, if he wasn't part of the attack he knew it was planned and let it happen. Same for one of the girl's brothers and, possibly, her father.

Brendan had been thinking of asking her to marry him, eventually. Thing is, she's learning Russian because she wants to join the State Department. She sees that as her future. Her father points out that she loses any opportunity to be employed with them, if she marries him. So that night he breaks a date he had with her and a couple of friends to see Jaws, wanting to think about it, but winds up being jumped and seriously hurt.

Then as he's recuperating, the girl comes to visit and he learns she would never have agreed to marry him. She already has her life laid out, and while he was fun to be around he wasn't husband-material. So now he's not only physically damaged, he's emotionally hurt, and despite his own code of never telling on people, he lets her know her brother participated in his beating. That breaks it off, completely.

Then he makes plans to disappear from his family's life...and does.

I wound up adding about 500 words to the story and may do more to deepen it. But once again, despite everyone else trying to tell him what he should and should not do, Brendan goes his own way. I like that, in him.

Step back to heal

Slightly damaged is probably the best way to describe me. Still capable of moving forward, but not at top ability. I'm like an old car that's drivable and will get you there, but not without some serious angst about maybe breaking down. Like my Civic -- 26 years old and still going, just getting crankier and crankier. But since I've had it since it was brand new, I know its every creak and rattle.

I did a financial workup, today, and found I'm $36,000 in debt. $10,000 in a savings account. Bills that are greater than my SSI income. Slowly sinking into financial chaos. I know why I'm at this point. I supported my youngest brother financially for 10 years, to the tune of about $85-90,000 total, and he will never be able to repay that. He's barely able to make it on the money he's started to get from Social security, himself.

I'm not sorry I helped him. It kept him from winding up on the streets, and I couldn't have that. And my sister also helped, a lot. But I used credit cards to keep myself going and while I'm in a better position than I was before moving into my new place--senior housing so my rent is less for a larger place--I'm still deep in it.

So what did I do? Cook. Prep a meatloaf to bake, tomorrow. Make a salad to calm my blood sugar down. Figure out how much money I'll have for next month--the money I'll get from Caladex should help cover everything without dragging more from my savings. And I watched two new episodes of Vera, with Brenda Blethyn.

Now my panic is over, at least. And my depression is lifting. And I even had a note to add to APoS, but for volume 3, when I get to it. I'm just so tired of being so fucked up.

Kick 'em when they're down...

I'm in a foul mood crashing into a place where I don't want to get out of bed. I did taxes, tonight, and my CPA tells me I owe $1200 in self-employment tax. On top of me destroying myself financially to get APoS-Derry out into the world.

So I'm into crash and burn phase of life, at the moment, and staying away from NWFO. Instead, let's hear how to trash a highly successful author in order to sell your own course on writing. I feel so very destructive, this helps...a little. Fuck Stephen King. On Writing is half memoir.

There's also a hundred books on financial advice for writers out there.
A BIT LATE, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Broke but not broken...

Well, I've done as much as I can to get APoS-Derry out there, and I will see over the next two months if it's done any good. You never know until it happens, do you? I took the dive and bought a Kirkus Review, which won't be up till the end of March, or so. And they say they will be brutally honest, so if I don't want anyone to see it, I can keep it hidden.

Not sure what to think of that.

I've had brutally negative reviews of my books, before, and some were for silly reasons. The Lyons' Den got a single star from a couple of people and torn apart because one hated my misuse of grammar and another refused to read past a point where she claimed I didn't describe snow correctly. The Alice '65 was hurt by someone who said I used too many commas.

As for my gay erotica...ooooh, baby. I've been told more than once I should never be allowed to write, again. Anything. Especially something like How to Rape a Straight Guy...which has actually been banned in paperback.

I've also gotten good ones, and some excellent, so it balances out. I learned long ago you can't please everybody and there are some people out there who will trash your work just to make themselves feel better. On one occasion, I had a guy pick apart a script I'd written, line by line, to show me how it should have been done. Things like that are easy to handle.

And I do have an excellent review from BookLife. Which is also posted in Publishers Weekly. But I don't know how I'll react to Kirkus if they dump on Brendan's story. It makes me nervous, gotta admit. But I will not hide it if it's bad. No way. That's cowardly. Besides, well-know authors have been trashed by major reviewers, as well.

Maybe I'll wind up in august company.