Talking Myself Into It

I had to talk about being a writer for a couple of years before I did much writing.

When I moved into my current apartment, I went through all my writing papers. Boxes and boxes of papers I've saved through the years. These were the survivors.

Most of my early writing, I destroyed. I didn't want to have it lurking around to embarrass me someday. Hey, Plato was a poet before he switched to writing the dialogues involving his version of Socrates, which made him famous: he destroyed all his poetry. I'm not the only one!

I pulled out stacks and stacks of stuff that I thought might have some use to me now. Old poetry that I thought might occasionally be used as tweets. Hip Files: collections of amped-up language that I used to use occasionally to turbo-charge my prose. But I particularly wanted to get my three SAM DUKE novels out for a fresh look. I've always wanted my own Travis McGee, or my own Spenser, or my own Philip Marlowe.

My SAM DUKE novels were worthless, as is; they got better each time I wrote another one, but even the third one was nothing I wanted to now share with the world. I had a fresh idea for a way to take SAM DUKE to a whole new level for the fourth novel, that I thought I might kick out into the world as the "First."

Problem was, when I finished going through all the boxes of papers, I didn't have the second SAM DUKE novel. It was missing. WTF!

I rarely get angry. When I do get angry, I cool down quick, usually within a minute. For about an hour I was in a rage, tearing through boxes that didn't even have paper in them, going through boxes I had already gone through. I was actually glad that I was alone, because I couldn't trust myself to deal with other people in my then state of mind. Not only was the second SAM DUKE novel missing, but all the supporting papers were gone too; and there were not multiple drafts. I might have discarded early draft prints, but never the final version of the novel, never the brainstorming files that I use to write the novel; it's sort of an evolving default plot and compilation of all sorts of things that I might be able to throw into the actual writing.

When the going gets tough, writers get drunk.

After I had calmed down, I tried to think: I realized that I couldn't even recall what the second SAM DUKE novel was about. The basics of SAM DUKE 1 and SAM DUKE 3 were easy to remember. SAM DUKE 2? My mind was blank.

Then a sneaky suspicion crept into my mind. I remembered that initially SAM DUKE 3 had been written in 1st Person, but that near the end I had changed my mind and rewritten the whole thing into 3rd Person. Could it be that I had been counting the 1st Person and the 3rd Person versions as different SAM DUKE novels to inflate my numbers when I talked about my writing to agents and editors and friends?

Right now, I think that's what happened: I told a lie to myself and everyone, and over the years came to believe that lie; so that when I was faced with "proof" I refused to believe that proof. But I'm not absolutely sure.

Pink Floyd has a song: "Careful with that axe, Eugene." My version goes like this: "Careful with that lie, Eugene."

@hg47