Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 152
January 11, 2012
January 10, 2012
Rocking the mild instant this morning.
Rocking the mild instant this morning.
The beginnings of A Record Year for Rainfall
A Record Year For Rainfall, like all my finished works, took several forms before reaching the current plot. I always wanted the story to in some way involve Bret, the main character and paparazzi, to break open a political scandal. In the beginning, though, the story would eventually climax in Bret taking the pictures and taking them to the press. The original idea was for Bret to not even be in Las Vegas at the outset. Here's a couple paragraphs from the first version of the first chapter:
I could hear airplanes above me, that vacuum sound amplified to a billion. I'd just left the Los Angeles airport, now officially redefined in my mind as the saddest place on earth. I'd said goodbye to her there for probably the last time. It wasn't that I didn't try to win her back. I thought that a dramatic appearance seconds before liftoff would convince her that the worst had past and there were better times ahead. It would be like in the shitty Sunday movies that end in voiceover montages. I had it all worked out. I thought I had her worked out. But the only thing I got out of her was a lonely and altogether too brief final rejection."Bret," she said, in an entirely new and dismissive way she must have picked up in the two hours since leaving our home.
She said, "I'm sorry."
I stopped at a red light. It was mid-afternoon, and with any luck I'd be out of the vast orbit of western California before night fall. The street sign next to the lights had been halved in a mysterious and possibly violent manner. I couldn't tell from where I sat whether it had been broken off or shot, but half the sign was gone, along with half the name of the street. I was just about to cross "…den st," it told me, but it was obvious there was more to the story than it was going to give me. It didn't matter, though, because specific the names of unknown street names weren't as important as avoiding all the familiar roads I had shared with her. I needed new streets, new corners, new buildings.
There are three options for those in California with broken hearts and an encompassing need to be elsewhere. They can go north, east, or south, and I had places to stay in all three directions. If I drove for a day I'd find myself in Vancouver's haze, comfortably sleeping on the couch of my cousin Richard's two-story. If I went east, I'd call up Tess, my one-time sort of girlfriend, who three years ago took up residence in the city of sin. And if I went south, I'd head straight for my old man's house in Tijuana. He wasn't Mexican, but he married one and fell in love with the city all during one confusing as all hell winter.
It wasn't really a choice as far as I was concerned. I was headed for Vegas. Tess would understand what happened better than anyone, and besides, the neon swell of cheap thrills and good old American excess might distract the voice that was telling me to burn all my possessions and go work for a K Mart in Iowa.
Originally, the outset of the book involved Bean leaving Bret, where he would find solace in Tess' Vegas apartment. His boss, a J. Jonah Jameson-type character, would bark orders at him over email to get certain celebrity shots. He would be someone who only existed electronically. The story would weave through these assignments, stopping every now and then as Bret broke down, got high, found quick Vegas love, and eventually fell in love with a Republican named Leslie. This story worked well enough, but it wasn't holding me in the way it should have, the way No Chinook held me for years. It didn't need a re-write, but it needed some heavy adjustments.
In the beginning, I wanted a relationship between a republican and a democrat in the midst of major political scandal, but what I came up with kept fighting to be something else. So in September of last year, I came up with the idea of shifting the narrative so that the scandal occurs just before the outset of the book. This way, the book begins in what was originally the denouement. Bret is settled but unhappy in Las Vegas. Tess is an old lover with leftover feelings, and Bret's boss is in town, a Perez Hilton-style professional blogger with a video game addiction. Bean becomes the republican, but she lives in Vegas and is connected to the political scandal. The only thing I kept from the plot was that she leaves him just before the story begins.
The changes to the plot turned the book from being a story about a man slowly ruining himself to something more resembling a bildungsroman.
January 9, 2012
January 8, 2012
Reason a million why Tumblr is my favourite place on the...
Reason a million why Tumblr is my favourite place on the internet.
