Daniel Clausen's Blog, page 51

The Perfect Novel (Sage and the Scarecrow)

My first novel -- The Sage and the Scarecrow -- was far from perfect. In some places, the book is downright dreadful. It's the youthful expression of a wish rather than a novel. Nevertheless, recently, I've taken up the challenge of revising it and turning the chapters into short stories.

This is difficult. It means I have to cut out some things that strike me as beautiful.

Here is one part I recently cut. It's the narrator describing his conversation with an English professor.

"I then asked him a critical question, to which he provided a complex answer. I asked him this just because it had been occupying my mind of late. I asked: “What do you think constitutes the quintessential novel?” Not an easy question, since I was asking him what the novel should be in its ideal form. Foster was more or less a Marxists, so I was expecting him to say that a quintessential novel should expand the boundaries of the established ideology, or expose it, or something to that effect; but no, as he is often apt to do, Professor Foster surprised me. He said that a novel, in its perfect form, ought to present a state where the harmonious integration of the world is shattered. The character should inhabit a world in which he feels estranged; the book should then work toward a world that is, at the end, unified in some fundamental way. Or, conversely, a novel should work from a state of totality (unison) toward a state of disunity or estrangement...it’s something I’ll always remember: a gem of wisdom from a very good teacher. "

I was describing in a sense what I was trying to do with my novel. I start with a character whose world is crumbling and try to end with a world that's somewhat put back together, if not completely perfect.

Quintessential is the word I use there. That's the kind of word a 19-year-old would think is pretty smart. This time around, I refer more generally to perfection. The key question, as I write these little short stories is -- can I recapture the angst and yearning of youth.

I think I can. In some ways, I'm more of a 19-year-old than I've ever been.

Anderson Takes the Short Way

*This story previously appeared in Ken*Again Literary Journal.


Every day on my way to work I catch a glimpse of her. At the counter she wears her purple hair and dark lip gloss proudly accentuating what would otherwise be a conservative work uniform. In her finest moments, as I walk past, I see her left eyebrow rise ever so slightly, the menacing look of a trained killer, perhaps, just before her customer service oriented smile appears. If her face had a genre it would be purple geek destroyer. For a brief moment in my day she exists, and the rest of the day she lingers in my imagination.

She is the lovely and dangerous face of the Sunville Shopping Mall's finest bakery, the terrorizer of my imagination, and the undeniable queen of my heart.

*

In that dangerous space between her two dark eyes and my imagination a living, breathing persona emerges. She is an anti-establishment take-no-guff goddess with a lifestyle fueled by caffeine drinks, Insomniac Machine Gun Monkey comics, and angry punk rock. This much is obvious to any casual observer of purple geek destroyer. In the more complete version, she is a dedicated pulp fiction addict with a goth aesthetic through which she works out her rage. Out of anger, pushing at the limits of class and gender, she studies at night school in the hopes of someday becoming a lawyer.

Considering success the ultimate affront to the system, she looks forward to the day she can rub hers in the face of every cocaine snorting friend she once had and every hypocrite teacher who lectured her while trying to make a grab for her butt.

Though the familiarity of her face had in no way dimmed my love for her, it did make every look her way less immediate than it should have been.

I realize that now.

In truth, an everyday love affair with a face you could never talk to is better than a dream-filled, unfaithful, you're my everything, break-up, make-up, won't you please give up reading comics, no never, nail-pulling reality of a relationship. But the everydayness of her features, the purple hair, nose ring, I hate everyone, going to kill Congress sensibility she manages to pull off working a customer service job blinds me to an approaching future where she'll be gone.

She'll be gone or I'll be gone, which in the universe of our relationship means she'll be gone -- because to her I don't really exist. I realize one day that through an unknown progression of tragicomic events out of the corner of my imagination she'll finish night school, marry the handsome quarterback from high school she never really realized she loved until now, find a better paying job or go crazy trying and end up attempting to blow up the bakery.

One way or another, the face of purple geek destroyer will be gone.

It's a horrible morning the morning these thoughts pass through my head. I'll have my shoes on. I'll be on my way to work. I'll take the bus to the commercial district, a business suit molding protectively to my body. Palm pilot and cellphone at the ready. When I get off the bus I'll take the long way, not so casually, but this time desperately. I'll go through the mall, look into the chain bakery shop with eyes sharp like laser pointers. Sniper eyes, tense muscles—and the whole of me will shake, quiver.

My mornings for as long as she's there will be a miserable desperate wish.

But no, not today. Today, I take the short way. I finish what already began so long ago. The quiet lease over that bit of reality need not be fixed to her palpable image, I realize. Instead, I sell her sweet image to my imagination, where the purple geek destroyer, who wants to kill congress with poison-tipped swords, kiss girls just for me, and raise insomniac machine gun-toting babies with my nose will remain safe forever.

(Did you like this story? Read more in "Something to Stem the Diminishing." Contact me on Goodreads for a free review copy.)

Something to Stem the Diminishing

An Author Interview with Daniel Clausen and Harry Whitewolf (authors of ReejecttIIon)

You can check out the interview right here:
http://theyounggirlwholovedbooks.blog...

That Other Writerly Moment -- Fear!

No promise of money.

A fear that your life will slip away little by little.

You will forever be aloof, behind the times, poor.

Fear is also a kind of writerly moment. Fear makes you do strange things.

The fear made me write a novel, publish a novel before I turned 21. It was more than fear. It was panic.

I was afraid that if I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have an opportunity to do it ever again. Life problems would find me. Get a girl pregnant. Go to war. Die in a car accident. Develop an irrational love for accounting. That would be the end. I needed to do it now.

A writer sits down somewhere. He or she commits to a void. To scream into a void. Virginia Woolf said, you need money and a room of your own to be a writer. But there are others things that are hard to account for. It’s a lonely thing to write, and it’s lonelier still to strive to be great at writing. It demands so much of you. Fear of failure is with you. But fear of greatness should also be with you because it will drive you to despair. It will drive you deeper and deeper into your own worlds.

I have these vivid memories from time to time of these moments in high school where I worried I would be unemployable. I had this idea that I would work at a grocery store for most of my twenties filling out notebook after notebook for no reason -- my mind would become a labyrinth of unfulfilled hopes and desires. Fear drives you away from writing toward more practical pursuits.

So, what drives you back? How do you find your way back to the notebook. It’s the fear that you’ll get trapped in a world without writerly moments.

ReejecttIIon is now FreejecttIIon!

Yes, you have five days to grab a free Kindle copy of our book ReejecttIIon – a number two (16th – 20th June), so what are you waiting for? It’s funny! It’s fresh! It’s frigging fantastic! So download now!

Amazon.com: http://amzn.com/B01CF3MK4I
Amazon.co.uk: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01CF3MK4I

Something to Stem the Diminishing (Excerpt)

The following is an excerpt from my short story / essay collection -- Something to Stem the Diminishing. If you're interested in a review copy of the book, you can message me on goodreads or contact me at ghostsofnagasaki AT gmail DOT com.
Thanks!

Something to Stem the Diminishing


The universe is rolling back in on itself. Somehow, the universe, ambitious and apt to slip into speculative bubbles, had gone too far—and then, realizing its mistake, had stopped, debated its condition and realized that it needed to go back. Now it was creeping back into itself. Inch by inch, it was excruciating. There was nothing easy about this diminishing. The expansion had been easy. But now the folding back in on itself part would be a painful ordeal.

In the midst of all of this, I am certain of only one thing—it is difficult to write a feeling. In fact, it’s the hardest thing to do. To turn a lump of sensations and happenings into a narrative whose coherence flips the world and exposes its underside is no easy thing to do at any age. In reality, things are never so clear as they appear at the end of a story, and the reality of that summer day in 2008, when I was 26, is that there is no story—not yet—just that feeling. The feeling that the world was trying to become more manageable, and that horrible things were occurring in order to accomplish this.

Interview with Rupert Dreyfus (Micro-Interview)

Hey everyone, this is part of a series I'm doing of micro-interviews with Indy authors on Goodreads. I feel it's a good opportunity to learn from other authors and share experiences.

Not too long ago, I had the pleasure of reading The Rebel's Sketchbook. I hope you'll check out the book or one of Rupert's other works.

"What does being an Indy author mean to you?"

It means realising that not having a literary agent breathing down my neck is a good opportunity to provide an alternative voice to the traditionally published spectrum of books. The literary marketplace has made dissent almost impossible, but now indie authors can shake things up if they want to and show that there's a readership for this sort of book. I'm trying to take full advantage of this by pissing off the powerful as much as I can; but there are millions of possibilities to shake things up through storytelling. The first step is realising that you have a greater degree of creative freedom than being some publishing house's latest gimp on a leash.

However, it also means building a lively community and helping other indie authors to get out there as far as possible. All we need is one decent representative of the indie scene to break on through to the other side with a remarkable book and it'll be a new day for us all. From the quality I've read over the last couple of years -the stuff that not many readers are bothering with right now- I'm confident this will eventually happen. It's slow burning but don't lose faith. Someone is going to break through.

"What’s your favorite sentence or paragraph from one of your books? What does it mean to you?"

Great question! It's probably the following from my debut novel Spark:

"This is what a life working for large corporations does to people. The workplace is a place not to be you; it’s a place to be the corporate you. The you that doesn’t really exist. We all see this corporate you and pretend that it’s a normal part of life. But we know that something isn’t quite right. We know that the real you is slowly fading away like old wallpaper. The corporate you is a myth; just like Icarus. And yet we are powerless against it. All of us are powerless against the wrath of the corporate world."

It's the essence of what I'm trying to say with pretty much all of my stories. The system we're wallowing under is often absurd and soul destroying. So I try to call it out.

"What advice would you give other indy authors starting out?"

Don't listen to me is the first line of advice I give to everyone. Like everyone; I just guess. However, if you trust my guesses then I'd say to abandon the standard storytelling template created by the industry and put out something as original and as brilliant and as beautiful and as devastating as you possibly can. Even if you're writing for a genre, do something new with it. Swim against the tide because those waves aren't as strong as they think they are.

"Have you ever had a pure "writerly moment"? If so, describe it."

Yes! Writing Spark was an enlightening process which allowed me to discover a style which suits me down to the ground. Like most people who get into this game, I'd been writing stories for years, experimenting with style and whatnot, and looking back I was writing stories the safe way. Then I found myself writing in the conversational first-person voice with an emphasis on dark humour as a weapon against the established order, and something just clicked. I can only describe it as a feeling of absolute liberation and as if I wasn't writing for my own ego; I was writing to reassure other people that they're not going completely nuts. I can now take on all the themes I care for. Shit boy bands? Done. Police brutality? Done. Your cunt of a boss? Done. Hacktivism? Done. Gnome fetishes? Done. Donald Trump's poetic hairdon't? Still to do. And on and on it goes...

"What question would you like to see in future interviews?"

What's children's cartoon best represents your personality? Only joshing. A good question might be: how do you see the indie scene in 50 years time? To which I'd reply: it's going to be the norm in publishing. Editors and artists will still be needed but the rest of them can take a swing. The indie revolution is taking writing back from the establishment and with so much talent out there they've got good reason to be worried.

That's it for this Indy interview. Thanks Rupert.

A Love Letter to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “The General and His Labyrinth.”

The General in His Labyrinth

His feeble mind was only good for groping memories like vague shapes in the dark. His body was a withered portrait on the wall of some long forgotten castle. The writer sat down to write a simple love letter to a book he had known in his younger years. Now in the grips of his fever he remembered more and more of them. Back when his tastes in literature had been robust, he had loved a book called “The General and His Labyrinth.” The first time, alone in his room as he grew into a stupor over the labyrinth of his disappointments and his dreams. The second time as he was gripped by a virulent pragmatism known to men twice his age. Then, he had been in his thirties. Now he was an old man close to death.

With his arthritic hand he wrote the first line of his love letter trying to recall the pride and ambition of a younger man.

“The book was a testimony to the power of an author to love his subject more than life itself.”

The sentence came out of his pen hopeful. Yet, the vagueness of his prose and its inability to reach beyond simple sentiment sent the writer into a deep malaise. He stood up from his chair with what little strength was left. His pride prevented him from asking for help and on his way to his bed he almost fell over.

When Jose Palacios came into the bedroom, he saw the writer in his bed seized by fever.

“Jose…”

“Yes, your highness.”

Although he was a simple writer and the servant was a figment of his imagination, the servant insisted on calling him “highness.”

“Highness...highness. You mean ‘lowness.’ Debased. Fraud.”

“Are you at work on another one of your love letters?”

“The desire comes and goes. I sit down to write a simple sentence and when the thing comes out it lies limp on the page and dies, stillbirth and dead.”

In all the years of his unremarkable life, the only remarkable thing about him was how many great literary loves he had had -- a greater accomplishment than even his own literary victories.

A decade before the writer had tried to make a proper accounting of his literary loves and write letters to each of them. After countless hours of scribbling on sheets of various quality and color, the writer had finally given up, burned all the letters, and declared the task hopeless, proclaiming simply, “There are too many! They run in my memory like one long dream.” Over the years, he had climbed into his chair and tried to compose a letter here and there. Not even Jose Palacios knew what had happened to them.

Now, in the twilight of his existence, the feeble writer had fits and starts of work that were equal measures desperate and ineffective. The rest of his time was spent fighting the debasements of time.

If Jose Palacios had been a writer himself he would have thought the writer’s constant constipation symbolic. He ameliorated the writer’s congenial constipation with enemas of immediate but devastating effect. Each time, like a church chime at noon, the writer would exclaim, “Just like my first novel. One big disgusting explosive mess.”

After Jose Palacios had administered the enema, changed his clothes, and cleaned the bedsores on his emaciated body, he placed the writer in his chair, in front of his paper and pencil.

“One more try,” Jose Palacios said. “It’s good for the soul. Good or bad, you will write for love of your literary works.”

There had been so many: X-Men comics in the flower of his youth; science fiction novels about Star Trek and Star Wars in the crude days of his adolescence; the mature yet neglected pages of such books as “The Grapes of Wrath,” in his rebellious years; the more mature loves of young adulthood...

He continued writing for several hours, as if he were in a clairvoyant trance, hardly stopping for the attacks of coughing. When his arthritic hand finally stopped moving he dictated for several more hours in weak hums that barely registered as words to Jose Palacios. When Jose Palacios finally ran out of paper, he had to take to writing on the walls. The walls turned black with ink. Finally, when the old writer’s voice was about to give out, he finished his letter in the only way he felt appropriate. The writer stood up with what little strength he had left, walked to Jose Palacios, and found the place on the wall where the writing had stopped, he curled up into ball next to it, and entered a deep sleep.

Jose Palacios took a blanket from the closet and covered the writer, not knowing whether he would wake. He retired into his quarters to resume his count of the writer’s literary loves and conquests.

Some months later, after the writer had died for the final time. The government ordered that all accounts of the writer’s literary conquests, love of words, or even his existence be destroyed. Thus, the letter and the house with walls tainted with literary scandal were destroyed.

Only in a small village where Jose Palacios lived under an assumed name did the tale of the writer’s many conquests resurface. And like the good servant he had been, Jose Palacios made sure that each literary love, including the “General and his Labyrinth” was accounted for.

The Pure Writerly Moment (Guest Post - Susan Swiderski)

Recently, I've been journaling on the subject of "the pure writerly moment."

On a whim I asked Susan Swiderski about what the term meant to her:

"For me, those pure "writerly" moments occur when I'm so focused on what I'm writing, it's as though I have tunnel vision. Nothing else exists except the world I'm creating with my words. It's the same as "being in the zone" when bowling or shooting pool, when the strikes keep coming, and the bank shots keep working. The perfect words and phrases just... happen... as though someone else is doing the work, and funneling it through me. It's an emotional high. Bliss, even."

You can learn more about Susan here:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...

Now, what is a "pure writerly moment" for you?

Something to Stem the Diminishing (Excerpt)

The universe is rolling back in on itself. Somehow, the universe, ambitious and apt to slip into speculative bubbles, had gone too far—and then, realizing its mistake, had stopped, debated its condition and realized that it needed to go back. Now it was creeping back into itself. Inch by inch, it was excruciating. There was nothing easy about this diminishing. The expansion had been easy. But now the folding back in on itself part would be a painful ordeal.

You can read the entire essay here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...