Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 69

"Missing"

Just gonna post what I've done with Missing, so far. I have 5 more frames worked out, but still need to be inked in. After I scan them in I clean them up so they're crisp and neat.

It seems one a week is fitting to my current frame of mind. I'm not Tom of Finland or even Etienne, but it relaxes me. Gets my mind of my inner chaos. I doubt I'll make it into a coloring book...still, you never know.

Done...and I do mean done...

I am finished with this section of APoS, unless there are typos or major problems with the story. I'm casting around for Beta readers to give me feedback and check for typos, but all I'm really interested in knowing is if the story holds together. I'm not doing anymore restructuring or serious rewriting. I can do that till I'm dead and never finish. So this is it.

Derry is 349 pages long; 136,210 words. Covering Brendan's life from when his father is murdered to when he is forced to leave Derry, 6 years later. It's all told from his POV and I tried my best to keep true to that while still slipping in some details about events of the time. I took some poetic license, here and there, but overall I think it works. 

Next is Houston, where Brendan tries to settle in but keeps finding he doesn't really belong. Then comes his Return to Derry, during the hunger strikes of 1981, when he has to reconnect with his family and friends on a low-key level but winds up being betrayed to the authorities and arrested for interrogation.

My brain is foggy, right now. I'm more that a little lost. No idea when I'll get back onto the story. I may spend a week or two learning something about advertising and selling the book myself. I honestly don't know. I think right now I'll just watch a movie.

Soon to be done.

If all goes well, I will have a final draft of APoS-Derry come Monday. Right now it's 350 pages and 136,000 words. I'm going shopping for readers to give me feedback. I am done rewriting it unless something is massively wrong in the structure of character consistency. And of course, my usual typos. I've learned not one of my tricks will keep them from happening, so I ask as many people as possible to read it and point out typos, and that seems to get 90% of them. No two readers ever find all the same ones.

My lack of success with an agent has me thinking I need to publish this book, myself. I'm tempted to do it in a hardcover with dust jacket and look into how best to publicize it. Maybe get a publicist or service to do that; I don't know, yet. Part of me wants to wait till next year to do anything, but I've been at it for so long I just want it done and gone. I don't hate the book but I am ready to move on.

So next comes Houston, which is at about the same level of completion as Derry was when I started heavy on it, then after that is Return, which is about 75% done. I'd like to have it all completed this year, but we'll see how that works out. It took me so damned long with Derry...

My right shoulder and neck are killing me, right now, thanks to me sitting at this desk and using a mouse at arm's length for days on end. Icy Hot and Tylenol work to minimize it, and I've got a setting on my shower head for pulsation, so it should be okay. Looking forward to it all.

Avoidance is easy...

Not much done, today. I got lost in Twitter, Instagram and Facebook pushing my progressive agenda -- holding that orange POS, #45, accountable for his crimes; defending Ukraine against the Russian bots out to help destroy her; cheered on others who are fighting back against the right wing nut jobs; just the usual stuff that really doesn't mean much.

I did watch The Big Heat (1953) for the first time in decades...and was really disappointed. It was directed by Fritz Lang, who made Metropolis and M in Germany then Fury in the US, but it was nowhere near as intense as any of those movies...except in spots. 

It's about a cop investigating corruption in his city and how he runs up against crooks who own most of the city council. His wife is killed in a bomb meant for him and he goes off the rails to find the killers. It's got Gloria Graham as a gangster's moll and Lee Marvin as the gangster. This is the one with the infamous coffee scene.

I used to think that was on the overblown side. No one I knew let their coffee get that hot. But then McDonald's served coffee so hot it gave a woman 3rd degree burns through three layers of clothing. That shut me up.

What startled me about the film is that it didn't feel well-thought-out. It was lazy in its storytelling and direction, almost perfunctory. The camera set-ups plain and simple, nothing interesting to add to the tension. Glenn Ford was the cop and he seemed unable to understand who his character was. I honestly think he was miscast (maybe Dana Andrews would have been better), but Lang didn't do much to help him. Didn't do much to put his signature on the piece.

It got me to thinking about a movie made 2 years later, by William Wyler -- The Desperate Hours. About a family held hostage by some prison escapees and how the cops are slowly closing in on them, putting the family in greater danger. Frederick March and Humphrey Bogart were in that, so some pretty heavy-hitters. That film was non-stop tension and polished beyond belief. Didn't feel cheap or half-assed, at all.

It's almost sad to see Fritz Lang just going through the motions.

Back on track?

Went through a rough patch, the last 10 days. One of my, I'm quitting writing because I suck at it, phases. I get those, every now and then, and they're getting harder and harder to move past. I already know and accept I'm not the world's greatest writer, nor will I ever be. My command of the English language is basic, at best; hell, I'm still messing up with fucking commas, for cryin' out loud.
So I shut down, completely. Read Ryan O'Connell's Just by Looking at Him, and while I liked his style I didn't like the story or characters. They truly irritated me...but I finished it. I also did a lot of roaming over the web and decided to start posting a sketch a week for another possible coloring book called Missing. Which will be pretty pornographic. Working on that helped, and posting it on a porn site is even better. So far, still pretty vanilla, but I sort of know where it's going...even if I don't know how it will wind up, yet. So it'll get there.
But what finally got me back to work on APoS was deciding I was not doing another rewrite. I'm just inputting the red pen changes and notes, and that's it. I'm making them fit within that moment of the story, if they're additions or changes in structure, but I'm not going page by page. It's a cop out. I could do this rewriting shit till I'm dead and not be done with it, and that's not how to deal with this story.
I'm not Ernest Hemingway writing about his time in the Spanish Civil war. I'm not James Jones writing about WW2. I'm not Vladimir Nabokov proving his mastery of English even though it's his third language. I'm not James Joyce experimenting with novelization. I'm not even Jay McInerney, whose stories, characters and style I really like. I'm clumsy.
I leave out words and letters, or transpose them. I talk around issues and jump feet first into plotlines without knowing what they are or where they're going. My grammar is inconsistent because I haven't the focus to maintain control of it. I just have to accept that is how APoS will be told. Adequately. That's it.
It's the best I can do.

Valley of the Dolls and Beyond...

Not up for a blog, tonight, so here's a review of a truly trashy movie I saw when I was 15 years old, in Hawaii. Perfect location.

And the trailer for another I saw in San Antonio, a few years later -- a self-proclaimed NON-followup written by Roger Ebert, and a really, truly, hideously awful movie to the point of it being fun. How many soft-porn films end with a take on the Manson murders and a man's severed head rolling across the floor? Very influential on me.

Forward movement...

Laptop's working so I managed to get two chapters input from my red pen edit. It's going slow because I'm making further changes. Adjusting. Cutting redundant sentences. At the moment, the story is 135,000 words and I'm past the most intense part of the edit, so it may wind up being right around that...but no guarantees.

I'm really a crappy writer, and this book is proving it to me. I work and rework and re-rework the sentences I write in order just to get them to make sense and be in the order they should be, and still find they aren't quite right, yet. It's as if I'm peeling an onion layer by layer but never getting to the center of it. I just slop crap together and think it's fine...till I look at it later and think, How the fuck could I have written that?

And the ideas I jammed in to give the story detail and interest? They's silly. Affectatious. For example, I had it where Brendan's father never told his kids the stories he tells in pubs to cadge drinks from the patrons. His bar mates come to his wake and wax eloquently about his stories being so amazing and true, and when Brendan tells them Da never told them, they say he's being silly. The whole concept is silly.

Instead, changing it to his father telling the stories to the kids when he's drunk and close to incoherent, and use an example about harpies living in the Cliffs of Moher and how it came about. Bouncing back and forth in the tale so it's hard to follow. Makes a lot more sense, that way.

In Book Three, when Brendan's twenty-five, he hears a taped recording of his father telling that same story before he'd had his second drink...and it is beautifully told. Almost like poetry, his voice melodious and sure, and it builds anger in his that the man would share his best voice with his friends and those who'd support his alcoholism but not with his family.

Took me six fucking years to figure out how much better that would be.

Shit, shit, shit...

One of the two portals on my MacBook Pro is dead, the one I used for the power connector. I didn't know this until the battery had drained to nothing and it shut down on me, completely. Took me all kinds of tricks to get it back up, and that was only when I tried the second portal as a last resort. That worked. I tried plugging in a thumb drive to the initial portal and nothing. Won't load in.

On top of this, the battery needs replacing because it will not hold a charge for more than half an hour. I hadn't cared because I was working from home and had it plugged in. But if the primary portal is dead and the second one is being used for power, I have no way to download anything onto a drive unless I unplug the power and do it quick, quick, quick. 

Which I did, today. Saved everything I could, even stuff I had already saved. Just to be safe. I suppose I could pull out my old MacBook and see if it will work with the WiFi. I really liked it, but it's 15 years old. so has limitations.

Looks like I'll be buying that MacMini, after all, since I do 99% of everything on my laptop at home. Pisses me off, but what can you do?

I hate technology.

The opening chapter of APoS...

As polished and complete as it's gonna get, right now:------- Those who knew Eamonn Kinsella...and were truly being honest with themselves, for once...had to admit that were he born but ten miles to the west or north his murder would have been seen as the fitting end to a hard and brutal man. As his son, I do not make this claim lightly. Nor is it merely from spite. While true he near twisted my arm off when forcing me to turn over a five-pound note I'd received for my tenth birthday, just so he could drink himself into another stupor, that does not factor into my opinion. All it does is prove that my father was a very difficult man. 
In many ways and with everyone. 
It would take little more than a wrong word, here; a wrong look, there; or even a wrong touch on his shoulder to call forth some beast within. Then suddenly you'd find yourself on the floor with a split lip or blackened eye. And it would be your fault for his reaction, no matter how improbable the cause, so expect no apology. With his height of well above six feet, weight at more than fifteen stone, and back still carrying the strength gained from a long-past position as a navvy, few were they who would take the dispute further. 
That was why, as word of his death spread, the first thought on many-a-mind was he had finally focused his anger on the one absolute truth of existence -- that there was always somebody bigger, stronger, meaner and better with his fists than yourself, and that one day you were sure to meet. 
His body was found off the Limavady Road, down a farm trail that might have offered a pleasant view of the Foyle had it not decided to turn so sharply to the east. The morning air was cold and blustery, and the fields around him bleak and gray despite recent whispers of snow and the brightness of the sky. He had been dumped in a ditch, his coat pulled down his arms and his hands bound tight behind him. Rumors also flew that he had been emasculated, never to be confirmed one way or the other. It was verified that every bone in every finger was broken, several ribs were shattered, an elbow had been dislocated and his face pummeled into the merest hint of a human visage. Blood soaked his shirt to his trousers, the knees of which were torn and scraped as if he’d been forced to crawl on them. Or been dragged. And it was said not one tooth was left in his mouth. 
As for the Coroner’s release on the manner of his death? It was the purest embodiment of callous simplicity.“Mr. Kinsella perished from the result of a bullet being fired into the crown of his head.” 
Mr. Kinsella perished. 
He was not murdered. 
Nor was he killed. 
Or even slaughtered, like a cow in the abattoir. 
He merely perished.A charming word you'd hear more often on the lips of someone claiming they're perished from the hunger. Or thirst. Or cold. Or the mere seeking of a job. Not once until that Coroner's comment had I ever connected the damned word with death. Which sent me to the library to dig into their dictionary and discover it actually was defined as such, with synonyms being expire, wither, shrivel, vanish, molder and rot, any of which might have been just as inappropriate. 
He had lain on his back in a slight trail of dirty water until his clothing was soaked through and solid with ice. One unseeing eye open and tinted by blood; the other swollen shut. Well-preserved, he was. Refrigerated, even. Time of death was somewhere between midnight and four of that morning, which brought forth a great deal of anger. Two nights before, he had been jostled out of McCleary’s in his far-too-usual condition, just after last orders. And he had not returned to his hovel, that much was certain. Nor had he been seen anywhere else, since. So to one and all it became a truth carved in stone that his torturers had enjoyed their game with him for near two days. 
Adding to the horror of his lengthy demise was how the somewhat reticent undertaker handling the funeral arrangements had gently but firmly insistented on a closed casket. 
"Considering the overall devastation visited upon him," he'd softly said to the widow, "well...there's only so much one can do, you know, and really, Mrs. Kinsella, it would be best to remember him as he was." 
To which she began to wail, "My poor Eamonn." As was expected of her.Mrs. Haggerty, her immediate neighbor, was at her side...which was how word of this travesty leap from house to home with the speed of telepathy; that woman never knew a secret she couldn't spread faster than the BBC. 
I also was in the room, as was my elder brother, Eamonn, the younger. I was standing quietly, and told I was being quite stoic a lad, as my elder sister, Mairead, sat on a stool and wept. Eamonn's fists were clenched and his body tight, for he and Mairead knew what all of this meant. And while I did understand the concept of death, I could make no sense from the quiet reticence in the way it was being depicted by any and all concerned.Not then, anyway. 
But oh, did this news increase the dead man's stature in the eyes of any and all. He quickly became the truest of true Irishmen, who did not release his hold on life as easily as others would have. Who fought to the end in order to return home to his kith and kin. Why, he even spat blood in the faces of his killers, that much was a certainty. Before the day was gone, he'd been elevated to the likes of Cu Chulain and Michael Collins and every other hero of Ireland's past, with all past grievances forgotten. 
So throughout the afternoon and evening, many a pub mate dropped by to offer kind remembrances of my Da's bleak eyes and long face, a visage that brought to mind tortured poets and sad balladeers. They wistfully spoke of how he could sing so well as to make the angels weep. Elegant tunes of Ireland's ruined past and her dead future. Others provided gentle smiles as they told stories about the stories he could weave. Melodious tales of fairies living in oak glens that once spread forever across the land. And of gods who roamed her once glorious green fields and forests. And exciting events wrapped around Grianán Aileach, the ancient ring fort but six miles and a hundred worlds away from town. Oh, he had a true Irish heart in his use of word. In another time under much better circumstances, he'd have given the likes of James Joyce and Sean O’Casey a challenge as the nation’s bard, for each tale was brought to life with such beauty and perfection you'd have thought he lived through each and every one. 
Which put me off, for I'd heard Da's stories and singing voice, and not been much impressed. But when I said so, the usual response was, "Oh, you poor wee lad, how could you know?" Or, "What a thing to say about your poor dead da." Or, "This is what happens when you're simple." The last one usually followed by a wink and nod to whomever was seated next to them. And when neither Eamonn the younger nor Mairead said a single word to the contrary, the dismissal of my opinion was complete.
Simple! Once you have the reputation of that, you cannot seem to remove it. But I was smart enough to know now was not the time to remind the bloody hypocrites of the money borrowed but never to be repaid, or drunken rants along the road, or the beatings and the bursts of howling fury and the theft of any money we'd managed to pull together. I had long ceased to wonder at how much viciousness and cruelty could have been poured into one man in fewer than thirty-six years, and had just accepted it was a part of him. After all, he was hardly the only Irishman filled with anger. It was the one honest emotion those like him were allowed to hold. And if my mother was seen at market with fresh bruises, or was out in the cold night air walking us around till our lord and master had sworn himself into weary, drunken sleep? Well, her nails had left scratches deep on more than just his back, and her quick use of an iron skillet to the head had not gone unnoticed.But it hit me wrong, then. 
It wasn't till years later I understood that hypocrisy is just good manners, at a wake. 
So the bad of my father was made quiet and the best cried aloud.His funeral was well-attended and partially paid for through the intersession of Father Demian, who’d so often visited the man’s home in times of distress. The rest was provided by the widow's one sister, Maria Nolan, who had rushed over from Houston. Texas. It was she who'd sent me that five-pound note. She saw that everything was arranged as well as possible in our sad little hovel. She also kept my younger brother and sister at her hotel room to give them peace from the nonstop clamor of adults in the house. And when she spoke to the press, she emphasized that the widow had five children with another soon due yet was living in a structure that was condemned and had no prospects for better. She actually shamed the bastards who ran the town like their bloody fiefdom into at least promising new lodgings once the last of the Rossville Flats was completed.
If there were room still available on the queue, of course. Can’t make promises one might have to keep.
I think they expected that, as with most catastrophic events, soon all would be over and done with and life return to normal as the confusion surrounding us all drifted away, so they could return to ignoring us. And would have but for one small and final detail that proved more than important. 
Eamonn Kinsella lived and died in Derry, in the North of Ireland.Londonderry for those who cannot be bothered to learn the city’s true name.A Catholic town taken hold of by Protestants in the way an abusive man might take hold of a woman he fancied, refusing to let her go even if it meant her destruction. So when it was learned that my Da had been killed by two drunk Protestants, that well-mannered hypocrisy turned to fury. 
It didn't help the bastards swore to heaven and earth they’d only meant to have some fun with the Taig. Which was accepted as the most reasonable explanation by the powers that be, despite his vicious and extremely well-known injuries. So thus was the martyrdom of Eamonn Kinsella to Mother Ireland made a part of history and his trek to sainthood begun as the truth of his former violent existence vanished like a ghost. 
The year was 1966, when several other Catholics were killed for being Catholic and Catholic schools attacked by the Protestant fools, all because the move to civil rights for the Catholic minority in the state had begun to grow in force. It was as if they thought hitting someone who's asking you to stop hitting them means they will shut up and let you continue the beating. To add to the insult, Protestant leaders insisted the Catholic population was responsible for the discrimination against it so no quarter would be given to make amends for the past transgressions that they, themselves, had caused. 
It never ceases to amaze me how many stupid people refuse to see the reality of what is happening around them. That we had decided not to let the past determine the course of the future. That trying to keep everything as it had been was no longer an option, and if they would only compromise a little, a lot could be achieved and both our world and theirs made better. 
But to follow that course would have been intelligent, so arrogance and stupidity took sway...and what followed was all but pre-ordained. 
Having barely passed my tenth birthday, I was not much aware of the quiet hatred that was building to an explosion of death and cruelty. An explosion made only the worse by it happening in a supposedly civilized part of the dwindling British Empire. But what child can see the growth of history around him when even few adults can? Things happen, and you either weep when it ends poorly or rejoice when it doesn’t. Thus, my father's death held resonance for me in but the most selfish, limited and childish of ways -- that he was gone, and I could now live my life in the manner I chose, that of a lad filled with hopes and dreams and prayers and promises, thinking himself to be in a place of safety.

Shock and awe...

There may be civil war in Russia. We'll know more in the morning, but at the moment it appears the head of Wagner, Prigozhin, has led his men to surround the headquarters of Russia's Southern Military Command in Rostov-on-Don and is planning to march on Moscow. If he's in control of Rostov, he's got access to a huge amount of military materiel, and that's scary.

However, he's verbally attacked the current Minster of Defense, Shoygu, but not Putin, so a lot of this is still off-center. BUT...it's just possible this will give Moscow the excuse to withdraw from Ukraine without losing face...which would be lovely.

I am convinced this happened because I posted a video of Tom Hiddleston dancing to Ra Ra Rasputin, by Boney, yesterday. Rather fits, in a way. No matter what, I'm accepting responsibility for it.

Also some family chat to deal with. And the realization I haven't gotten my tax refund from NY State...and finally noticing my CPA input my old address for a check when I'd always had it direct deposited to my checking account. It's not a lot, but every little bit helps. Meaning no inputting done, today, and Monday will be taken up with getting that corrected, I'm sure.

So...just more digging into notes and adding a few more details to APoS. Simple things like add a photo on the wall of Brendan's grandparents, on his mother's side. He knows his father was an orphan but there are questions about a lot of that, questions he cannot get answered even though people in Derry know each other's lineage back a dozen generations, almost.

There will be, tomorrow. I'm getting this draft done by the end of the month.