Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 74

Still dancing with BA...

I think I'm going to keep the section of Blood Angel that I'm working on in 2 parts, after all. I don't want these bits to be too massive, just something like 20-25K in wordage, but I'm still open to either way. Right now, I'm working on the Prussian part to see if it will flow into the Korea part...but at the moment I'm feeling a hard break coming at the point where Léonidès realizes he has to do something about Franz, now that's he's been turned and revealed that for all his manners and grace, he's a monster at heart.
I'm still wondering if I should do sketches to go with parts of the story...like when Léonidès is watching Franz tend to his injured horse...or when Léon grabs his first meal in the Prussian section. I'm getting some serious fantasy crap out of the way with this story, seeing as how Léonidès grabs a deserter after the man's murdered an peasant, then bathes him and rapes him and kills him, then buries him to be like fertilizer.
I'm letting this book go over the top in its brutality. Just to let off some steam after arguing with idiots on Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook, now. To be honest, a streak of this cruelty has always been inside me, lying dormant as if waiting to burst into reality. I've caught glimmers of it rousing a couple of times, but overall I kept it back. I don't want to hurt anyone, so I won't let myself go, due to that danger.
What convinced me I had the need to be careful was when I went to meet with an actor who wanted to be in The Wilderness Rule, a movie I wrote for a guy named Anthony Lo Presti to direct. Overall the film project was a disaster. Poor planning on my part. Unwillingness to postpone to get better prepared. A director who didn't know jack shit. The actors were good and gave far more than they needed to, but I let things collapse into chaos.
Anyway, Lo Presti and I drove up to Dallas from Houston to meet the actor and let him read for us. I fed him lines. We did a bit of the script where he was begging for his life...and he was good. Damn good. But what jolted me was something animalistic roared up deep in my chest, and if Lo Presti hadn't been there, I could easily have lost control and jumped the guy like a beast. Not my favorite memory, nor has it happened, since...because I won't let it. Won't put myself in that situation, again.
That's what my writing helps keep at bay...the beast within me. When I wrote The Beast in the Nothing Room, I was the beast, at times. Now, maybe, I'm too old to be...but never hurts to be careful.

Blood Angel

I got restless ... sort of like going through withdrawal from writing ... so I dug into a section of Blood Angel that I'd written about a year ago. Set in 1870-72 It has Léonidès finding another Blood Angel who could be a companion to him, a handsome young Prussian soldier named Franz, and he lets his dick do the thinking.

The way Blood Angels work, when they are turned from human to vampire they lose all of the lies they tell themselves about themselves. Their true nature comes to the fore. Gabrielle, Léon's sister, learned this the hard way when she was in Moscow during Napoleon's march on Russia. She met a young man named Dmitriy, knew he was of the BA lineage, took him to bed and then turned him to be her mate.

Only Dmitry was lying to himself. Forcing himself to be with women because he really preferred men. So once he was turned, any interest in Gabrielle vanished...except for her money. But she's stuck with him. He and Léon get long well, and she could let her brother have him, but she's filled with anger and more than a little jealousy at how easily Léon is working his way through the world. 

She also believes, not without reason, that Léonidès is the favorite of the ruling caste of vampires, the Oyim. So she's mainly being contrary just to punish both men. They still get together, now and then, but Dmitriy cannot leave her unless she allows it.

Still, knowing how this happened Léon still becomes obsessed with Franz and turns him before really understanding him. And finds the truth of Franz is he's something of a monster. His family is aristocracy and he now sees no limits to what he can do. He's smart enough to wreak havoc with Léon's preference that he and his crew only feed on those deserving of death, and knows not to go so far that the Oyim will step in to stop him. 

So Léon goes looking for his sister to offer a trade, since Franz is very female oriented and the only way he can have the guy in his bed is by near rape. He travels to London, has some fun with Dmitry and learns Gabrielle is en route to Korea to find, seduce and turn a young American Marine. So there he goes to track her down. It's world travel as done in the 1870s style, slow yet romantic. With lots of brutality along the way.

I'm thinking I may just go ahead and put this out, next month. It would be a year after the first volume was released, and that will always be book one. This one, I think I'll subtitle The Prussian. I'll consider it some more, tomorrow. It's only about 80% complete ... but could be done.

Smashwords ebook sale

I've got 12 ebooks up and running on Smashwords, and 5 of them are free during their July sale. Goes through the end of the month.

The Vanishing of Owen Taylor

The Lyons' Den

The Alice '65

Bobby Carapisi

Carli's Kills

The rest, which are my gay erotica books, are $0.99 each. There's Sci-Fi/Horror, Murder Mystery, Vampire, Suspense, and Revenge.

My main goal was to get the free ones read since they had fallen off in sales, and it not only worked but pumped up sales of my other books. Is this a kind of marketing ploy?

Three Beta Readers

This should prove interesting. I now have three people reading APoS to give me feedback and check for typos. Past experience shows they each will fine something incorrect that the others do not or miss, and then will come making sense of it all. But I doubt I'll do that till after Labor Day. I want to decompress.

I haven't been able to focus on anything, yet. Not book or movie. No research into launching APoS once it's done. Didn't even send out agent queries. Just floated between Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Took a nap. Watched cat and dog videos. Avoidance stuff.

I'm unsure about joining Threads because I don't know that much about it, and to be honest I trust Zuckerberg about as much as I do Musk, which is not at all. I stick with Twitter for contacts with the Ukrainian crowd to see how their fight against Russia's terrorism is going, and to bitch at Biden for not sending F-16s and more Patriot batteries to help defend the country. I fear for Zelenskyy and wish Putin would just die, already. But he won't; he's one of those people who knows they'll go to hell once they're dead so is postponing it as much as possible.

On the shallow side of this, my favorite books were by Russian authors -- Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky -- and I can no longer appreciate them as much. This invasion has shown me Russia has always been a vicious, bloody, imperialistic force in the region, thanks to history being discussed by Ukrainian historians and scholars. I knew about the famine caused by Stalin, in the 20s and 30s, and how Ukraine fought the Nazis...and I knew about the war in Lithuania against the Bolsheviks just after WW1 thanks to Werner Schölndorff's Coup de Grâce, but that's about it.

Now I'm steeped in the horrors of Russia's subjugation of her neighbors, all to the glory of her own arrogant image, and I cannot view anything creative from there without that baggage.

"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.