Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 70

Fuck it...

I got my Shiner Bock. I had one with spaghetti as I watched clouds roll in from Canada, and it set me right. Got me ready.

It's been two months since I asked some people if they would read A Place of Safety-Derry and give me feedback and point out typos. A couple turned me down because they didn't have the time, and that's cool. Three said they would so I sent them copies. I've gotten one complete, one partial with just typo notes, and nothing more. I've asked if the last two'll be able to do it, and received assurances...but I've been through this before, with them. So if they get it to me, great. If not, I'll be fine.

I'm making notes to myself for aspects of the story to watch out for -- punctuation, as already mentioned; proper labels for things and events, like the late meal being called supper in Derry and not tea, as it is in Belfast; and the correct monetary usage, since I've gotten conflicting information regarding the shift to decimalization of the British Pound (did it start the shift in 1969 or was it all in 1971?). Rechecking that.

There's a great site called Retrowow that has information about US and UK prices, entertainment and cars and everything that's quite handy. And my books have photos as well as details that come in handy. Just do a bit of careful cross-referencing.

I came close to trying to work out a quick trip to Derry to use the archives of the Derry Journal (the town's newspaper) and the city library to verify somethings, but it would have been $3000. And that's just for 6 days, leaving out of Toronto into Dublin then up to Derry on the bus. I also couldn't work out the timing. I'm doing Seattle, next month, and possibly the book fair in Toronto the following weekend, then comes Boston and after that we're into November. So I talked myself out of it, pretty quickly.

The crazy thing is, I don't feel let down by not going because I'm honestly beginning to believe I'll get this book done.

Second proofing comments input...

This worked out well. Going through the text just focusing on the comments and notes I got, I managed to add 400+ words and 3 pages to the length of the book. It's closing in on 137,000. I was pointed to a couple of spots where I got so lost in being true to Brendan's thoughts and vernacular, I forgot to make it clear what was going on. That's exactly what I needed.

I've also focused on making a few things consistent -- like one character's name. He's introduced as Brian and snaps "Boru, to youse," as a way to identify himself. So the guys refer to him as Brian Boru-to-youse from that point on, whenever they see him. It becomes a bit of a joke. Only I wasn't consistent with it. Sometimes no hyphens. Sometimes just you. Sometimes capitalized. So I worked that out.

And I decided to use dashes in a slightly different manner from what I've done, grammatically. When Brendan's stuttering in his dialogue, I'm using a single dash -- I-I-I kind of thing, or you-you. I'd been using ellipses there. Then I'm doing the em-dash at the end of sentences when someone is cut off, without spaces around them. Like "But you said—" And when it's a thought breaking into a sentence doing the em-dash with spaces before and after. Then Ma got a look on her face — not that Eamonn would have understood what it meant — but she smiled instead of scowled.

All of which may actually be proper English grammar, but it's been years since I read Strunk & White's Elements of Style so can't remember and don't really care. What matters is it's easy to comprehend what's being said. It's rather nice to be at the point where I'm more worried about proper grammar than I am about the meat of the story.

What's most illuminating is how I found a couple more typos they missed. I've got one more round of feedback I'm waiting for, and I'm sure this last one will find things I didn't see and the first two missed, but that's how it is. I've seen typos in books put out by major publishers, and it used to not be uncommon for books to be bound with a little erratum note explaining there's a misspelled or missing word on page 204, with the correction.
It's been said the best way to find a typo in a book is for it to go through the editing process, then proofing, then printing a galley, then more proofing, then getting printed and shipped to stores, where you go in, pick up a copy, open it to a random page...and see you've used it's instead of its.
What can you say? Nobody's perfect.

Matter of opinion...and style...

I'm about halfway through the more detailed proofing and feedback of APoS-Derry and find that maybe a quarter of their suggestions are to change the style of what I've written. For example, they do NOT like my use of ellipses. And truth is, neither do I, anymore. I was doing it to indicate a pause in Brenda's telling, or to indicate he might have more to say but doesn't. But during this go-through, many of them seemed to stop the reading. So I'm removing probably 80% of them.

They also say that no paragraph should be more than 6 lines long. Which is fine as a basic rule of thumb but not an absolute. I have several occasions where Brendan's thoughts are strung together, or his description of actions needs a long, long paragraph to keep the rhythm going, so on some of the occasions where they suggested a break, I've ignored that.

What's fun is, I've found six typos they missed. Difficult ones that wouldn't have been noticed by spell-check or any English grammar program. I just happened to see them. So once this is done, I'm going back through the story with the type pumped up to 24 point and checking it that way.

Of course, there are also words they think are misspelled or improperly used that actually aren't; I'm approximating Brendan's manner of speech, to an extent, so some don't get changed. But a couple of inconsistencies they noticed do get paid special attention to.

I'm not missing the beer or wine, yet. I'm still waiting on one last set of feedback so it may be best to hold off till then. I'll be done with this set, tomorrow.

Since I was in such a state, last night, I signed up for BritBox, again, and watched the David Suchet version of Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party. Some pretty big changes in it, especially at the end, but it followed the basic story...for the most part. Still, not the smoothest adaptation and only adequately directed.

But that said, Suchet is the best Poirot.

Started good...

Got up. Made a couple biscuits and hot tea for breakfast. Opened APoS and input the typos noted by one of the readers. They weren't as bad as I'd expected. And they liked the story and characters.

The next one is more involved and has comments about my style of writing, which will be harder to deal with. Again, the story and characters were enjoyable, but some of the things they suggested in their summary just aren't me or my way. I think they input some of the changes they were suggesting into the file I sent them. I guess we'll see. I put it aside for later.

So I got ready to head out and get my beer, to fortify me...and suddenly felt a low blood sugar moment coming on. I was going to have BBQ, for lunch; instead I made a quick tuna fish sandwich and kicked back to let the moment pass.

Problem is, those moments wreck me. I feel weak and very tired, afterwards, so took a nap and woke up with a headache. Still wanted to get the beer but it took me half an hour to talk myself into getting going. Then I kept running into red lights and slow cars and bicyclists crossing the road just ahead of me, without concern that I might hit them, so I shifted to a nearby Tops instead of Wegman's, thinking I could get Shiner there.

I wound up in the one fucking store in Buffalo that did not carry beer. At all. None.

By this point, I'm crashing into a depression and thinking the fates are telling me not to do it, so I went to a Pie-O-Mine and got a single pizza and small salad, for dinner. Ate half of each, then came home. And the fucking salad made me sick. And I know without question it was the salad, believe me. I had to throw it out.

Now I'm still fighting off that fucking headache and wary of ever going out in the real world, ever again. There's a liquor store diagonal across the street from my building so I may get a bottle of wine, there. I already know they don't have Shiner Bock, nor does the Corner Store behind them. Or maybe I stick with lots of DPZ and hot tea. Like a prissy old man. I dunno.

I just fucking hate getting old.

Okay...tomorrow is the day...

It's been a battle, but I've been able to hold back from looking at the feedback and proofing of APoS-Derry. Tomorrow, I'm digging into it....and I'm going to use an old trick to make it smoother. I'm going looking for some Shiner Bock. Wegmans used to carry it in their craft beer area, so I'll head there to see. I'll want it cold. And I'm making my enchilada plate for dinner.

Today, I tried out a recipe for cheapie/fake empanadas using flour tortillas. You cut one in half, smear it with cream cheese and jam then fold it over into a triangle and fry it for a minute, each side. Turned out nice, but it's a dessert. I want the prelude. I've got Old El Paso enchilada sauce and refried beans, a can of Ro-tell tomatoes, corn tortillas, Monterrey Jack cheese, Rice-a-roni Spanish rice, and salsa. Need some quac and sour cream, too.

Once that's done, I'm poppin' open the files and diving in, supported by my comfort food and the only good beer Texas ever made.

First thing I'm doing is correcting the typos they found. Nice and simple, right? HA! Nothing in my writing is simple with me. One sent me the typos in a list, with page numbers. One sent me a full document with the typos highlighted throughout, in notes. And I'm betting each of my readers caught issues the other missed. That's how it usually works.

After that is addressing any issues they had with the actual storytelling. After that is pumping the font up to 24pt and reading through it, myself, for issues they might also have missed. After THAT...is assigning it an ISBN and updating the copyright, then setting it aside for another few months till the last read-through.

I've gotten nothing from the agents I sent queries to, so I think I will self-publish it in hardcover. I'm looking at just after the first of the year. I'll be working on the New World for Old section of the story, in the meantime, and should have the two aligned, by then. If all goes well with that, I may put it out in June. That also gives me a year to work on part three, The Return, to have it out by Christmas, 2024.

Keeping in mind that old adage starting with, "The best laid plans..."

Missing is helping...

Seems Missing's series of sketches is helping bring viewers to my very-MM-adult bdsmlr blog and getting more attention for my books. Things had grown pretty quiet in sales, but they've perked up some since I began this. Never figured it would be a tool for advertising my work.

I also belong to a couple of  groups on FB that cater to adult MM literature, both romance and dark. Ain't much in the way of romance in my books, but there's plenty of darkness. But I feel my version of darkness is less compelling that other writers'. I may say I write my books to keep from becoming what they are about, and vent my quiet screams into them, but I'm told by reviewers that my focus is not the kind they're used to.

Most people are into stories that are more like role-playing. Comic-con style. Father-son stuff. Twincest. Bondage and punishment. Slave-training. M-preg. Werewolves and fairies. All of which I've read but doesn't really resonate with me. I can't say they aren't real enough or grounded in everyday truth, not when mine can be just as fantastic. The Beast in the Nothing Room is Sci-Fi/Horror using time travel for sexual assault, so hardly something that happens every day.

It's just, it seems like they aren't being honest with their characters, or their characters' emotional needs. I guess. Hunter, for example, is a wild take about kidnapping young men to sell into sexual slavery. And the MC, Hunter, is totally focused on the money and making sure the law doesn't bother him. So he connects with a sheriff, supplies only Latino studs (since no one in the US really cares about them), and doesn't even think about the consequences or what it means to the men he's kidnapped until he's almost tricked into helping kill the son of an important Brazilian.

Initially, it's his survival instincts that kick in, but then he's confronted with the reality of what he's done and determines to end the whole setup. He very nearly gets killed, doing so, and has to go into hiding to protect himself from the remnants of that sex-slave group. A bit on the James Bond side, really, but throughout the story is pushed by Hunter's emotional needs and development.

I don't see that in many of the MM stories I read. Even the romantic ones, like Boyfriend Material or Red, White and Royal Blue. They seem perfunctory and Hollywoodish, in a way. I think that's why I so liked Anna Karenina and East of Eden. They were grounded in human emotion, to me.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just full of shit and didn't like their style of writing because mine's so much better, to me. HA! That'll be the day I think that.

Jeez, at the rate I'm going I won't figure myself out till after I'm dead.

Pondering...

So comes the question -- how much is too much and when is too much not enough?

I spent the day working on images for Missing, one of which is an addition to earlier in the series. Set between images 8 and 9, it's a sketch I hadn't intended to use because it felt a bit like overkill. But as I went through the ones I'd done -- 11, at that point -- I felt I was missing a step so added it back in. Now I have 13 with another roughed out.

Would that be 13.5 or does it count as 14? I'm not superstitious, though I see no reason to tempt the fates. They've smacked my ass around too many times for me to shrug them off. And the fact that my characters come knocking at my brain for me to tell their stories gives me a strong feeling there's a whole 'nother level of existence in this world that we haven't the ability to  see, understand or even know.

Thing is, I can't do any inking, right now, because the pen I was using is drying out and my backup suddenly exploded on me. I also got another set of notes on APoS, in an email. And my fingers want to do some walking over the keyboard and not paper. So maybe I'm being told to shift focus.

I don't know. Missing just a wicked little series dealing with how easy it would be to reinstall slavery, so long as it's geared towards fulfilling some rich jerk's sexual fantasies. Not everyone owned slaves, in the South before the Civil War. They were expensive and took a fair amount of upkeep. It was those already wealthy who had them. And it's still that way.

No question sexual slavery exists, still, and it's the wealthy who keep it going. I already played around with that in Hunter . Do I really need to repeat myself? The only difference this time is, the guy who gets grabbed is wearing a jacket with the stars & bars on it, indicating he's not nice. He's set up by a girl, and she flips him off as he's taken away.

But still...it's a bit on the repetitious side, for me. The only real difference is I'm doing my commentary in simplistic images that can be printed out and colored in, in place of words. So am I going overboard, here? Not sure.

But I do like how she's got his torn jacket as a souvenir, the way  a serial killer would...

Memories...

This photo is of me, taken 12 years ago at the California Int'l Antiquarian Book Fair, in San Francisco. I look half asleep -- or stoned, as someone was nice enough to point out -- and I think the people I'm talking to were from a book shop in Turin, Italy, but I can't swear to it.

It was when the fair was still at the Exposition Center, just south of the 80 as it fed onto the Bay Bridge. Everyone bitched about the venue because it was long and cold and the roof leaked when it rained, but I felt it fit the aura of the fair, perfectly. It was also easy to move into and out of.

I was there to pack and ship out books that had been sold at the fair. Both domestic and international, using FedEx. It wasn't a cheap service but it did fairly well, so we had it again in 2012, in LA, and 2013 back at the Exposition Center. But things sort of petered out and it was stopped. And I no longer traveled there, to help.

The first book fair I attended, with Heritage, was in 1999, when I flew up from LA with a book a client wanted to see. Worth $10,000. I wrapped it in tissue and bubble, shoved it into my backpack, flew into Oakland, caught Bart across to Civic Center and walked to the venue...about a mile and a half. Two of the sales people were horrified at how casual I'd been, going through Oakland, and said I should have grabbed a cab. I shrugged it off. I was already having my sense of value corrupted, by then.

I think it was at that fair that one of the owners, Lou Weinstein, met with a man who'd found a load of old books in the attic of a house he was buying in Kauai, Hawai'i. I'm not sure how they connected, but the man brought a box of them to the entrance, Lou met him, looked over a copy of Mark Twain's The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and offered the man $32,000 for all the books in the box. Said he'd write him a check, right then.

The man thought Lou was trying to scam him and spoke with Security. They knew Lou, laughed, and advised him to take the check. He did. Lou brought the box back to our booth, had one of the guys input that book straight into our system then let a fellow book dealer know he had a copy. Offered it for $65,000. They snapped it up. They had a client looking for that particular book, and I hear sold it to him for $100,000. It became the talk of the fair.

What made the book so valuable was, it was a first edition, its binding was nearly pristine, none of the pages were marked or foxed from age, and it had all of the original advertisements in the back. The other dealer's client needed this book to complete his collection of Mark Twain. So that book paid for our time at the fair, and the rest of the books in the box were gravy.

That uncorrupted my sense of value.

Casual...

Lovely day to laze away. End of the month so did a bit of financial nonsense to figure out where I am...and it's simply the land of Fucked.  Car insurance, apartment insurance, MRI co-pay, dermatology exam, all coming in this month. Nearly $1000. It's the usual nonsense. I think artists are usually born missing the gene that explains money management to them.

I also looked into my problem with the IRS to find nothing has changed and they still have my old address listed even though I sent them a form to update it. I can't find any letter they might have sent me to explain this; according to them, the last one I got was from two years ago.

So I just shrugged and started reading Trust. Hernan Diaz has a nice style in giving background about the Rask family. It may be fun to see where this goes. I like Grant Atherton's style, but his is more basic grammar, spare and focused on forward movement.

While at B&N in Omaha, I almost got a copy of a fancy edition of Madam Bovary, by Flaubert. The opening pages caught me, but it was $24 and had a rather gaudy hardback binding, so figured I'd get a copy at Talking Leaves, here in Buffalo. I'll look into it, tomorrow. I'll need to go out for some things, anyway. Milk, toothpaste, olives, that kind of stuff.

I got lazy and didn't make my enchiladas. I'm feeling kind of grumpy, so it's better I not do anything that makes a mess...and that does. I like reading, but I'm ready to get back to writing.

Paperwork day...

Worked up expenses and an invoice for my time, went to the office and it was a birthday celebration for one of the women there so had cake. Did a bit of grocery shopping but wasn't really up for it so got only some essentials. Like for making my own enchilada dinner. But then blew it off and just made spaghetti. I'll do enchiladas tomorrow.

I almost talked myself into trying to make biscuits from scratch, but found a recipe online and it was a lot more work than I thought it'd be so just puttered. I'm kind of lost, at the moment; unsure of what to do next. I think I'm going to read another Grant Atherton...maybe...but I also bought a copy of Trust at that B&N in Omaha. It won the Pulitzer, last year, for fiction. I just don't know if I'm interested enough in it to start it.

Found out my auto insurance is going up by a third, thanks to my rear-ending that car in San Francisco. And I have an MRI set up for the third week of September, for my kidneys. And my right shoulder and neck are bugging me, because they're tighter than usual. But I also found out friends of mine in Orlando and outside Tallahassee are okay after Hurricane Idalia, and other friends who were in Malibu are okay after that storm. That was good.

I'm ready to just stay in bed all day and read. It wouldn't hurt me any...so long as I had plenty of pillows to lie on. I do wonder how it was possible for Marcel Proust to have written so much while lying in bed. I start getting stiff and my legs grow cranky if I don't keep them moving.

I'm thinking more and more about the Houston portion of APoS. How all I may really need to do through it is make sure everything is consistent with the first part of the book. It's part three, The Return, that will need a lot of work. Adding Brendan's visit to the University in Coleraine to hear tapes made of his father telling his stories. I don't know if I can work out a way for him to visit Eamonn in prison...but we'll see.

You never know how it'll go until you dig into it.