It's my book!

Jack Kerouac famously said on the Jack Paar show that he was on the road for years, but he wrote the book in weeks. I'm not sure if the same holds true for me, but my book about a Beat legend, real or imagined, was written relatively quickly in the summer of '98, but I had a hard time closing the deal. I'm really into astrology, so I've come to the conclusion I wasn't meant to finish "If So Carried by the Wind, Become the Wind," until about now. I'm definitely going to change the Kindle version, so if you've already bought the book, I'm sorry, but like a painting you can appreciate it for what it is. I'm rewriting it because I was encouraged to do so by the artist who made the cover, and he was right but maybe it was never intended to be finished, and yet it was so close once upon a time. I'm not really sure what caused the delays, but there were reasons: I felt beholden to the characters in the story, and this is never a good thing for publication. I'm sure lots of artists feel this towards their art, and thankfully I'm not really in that category, though I'm sure I hold up, but everyone does. I mean there are people who never write an honest word because they are too afraid of hurting someone, and I'm not one of those people. The second reason I never published it was that I never really finished it, but this also gets confusing. I typed it up years after I initially 'penned' it in my notebooks, because I used to write by hand, and then type my stuff up, but I don't do that as much anymore (the computer has ruined me!) I knew I'd done something important when I first typed it up, but I wasn't ready for the adulation that came my way, even though it only came from two people, my mentor whose in the book, and Stan Rice, a friend of his, and the (deceased) husband, of the famous novelist. Stan read it and gave me a strong review, that kept me going for years, and I mean years.

When is a work of art finished? How is it finished? Why is it finished? I never answered these questions well enough in "If So Carried," but hope I've finally finished it, though I've come to realize it will never be finished. It didn't start out trying to be a perfect work of art, or a monster, like my mentor's book. It's a relatively short and quick story, actually, that you can read in a day, and that's the way I like them, so I was true to myself. My mentor pretty much hates most art, or thinks it is worse than his, and he may be right, but he really liked this book, and he hasn't liked much else that I used to send him. He's a purist and looks at art like a religion, and would never lie, so his criticism meant the most to me. In some ways, my life as an artist was nothing more than to gain his approval, and my parents, though I failed at the latter. "This puts you on the map," he told me, and that was my life's ambition, so to hear it at 33 years old, was a relief. I'd almost died once already (you'll have to read it in the story), but this was a second death, and a much more rewarding one. I saved his message on my voice mail for months, and then had a long talk with him while the U.S.C./Notre Dame game played in the background, and my mentor marveled at how I wrote like Artaud, his hero (mine too!). I only sent my mentor the story about him, but in the summer of '98, I also wrote about 'the mad captain,' my roommate who drove me crazy with art, kind of like Rimbaud. I'd say living with 'the mad captain' in a house that I did my best to describe in a story I wrote simultaneously with the one about my mentor and a beat legend, in the rolling hills, was my artistic spark. I typed it out as a separate story, thinking it had nothing to do with Los Reyes, but boy was I wrong, and I'm baffled at how I didn't see it. I know they are two separate stories, but the themes are completely interrelated, and the stories even reference each other at times, though they could be read independent of each other. The Los Reyes story was more important to me so I typed it up first, and I felt like Jack Kerouac, or S.E. Hinton, or John Steinbeck, in "Cannery Row." I'd really tapped into something and this was in an age before kindle and amazon had wiped out bookstores, but that's not to say we were in the halcyon days of literature. There was a book fair in Seattle, with publishers setting up tables, and I thought the story was so hot I could go right down there and sell it that afternoon.

I was up early writing the synopsis, looking at the snow glowing on the Olympic Mountains, and felt invincible, but I didn't go to the fair. My mentor was still alive, and I thought he had to read it before anyone else did. He told me it was the best thing to happen to him in years, but I couldn't publish it. It went against his credo, and the Beat legend's, I traveled to California in December to commiserate over the book, and we both decided there wasn't much work to be done on it, but some work. I took notes and then got a letter from Stan Rice, telling me what he thought the manuscript needed, and I went on that. My mentor thought the manuscript wasn't funny enough, or something like that, and that I could pepper it with dialogue, and make it better. "The characters are sitting at a table, nothing happens, so why not have dialogue," he said. I agreed, but instantly we had a disconnect, because my mentor wasn't thinking of how little I was writing.

Another big point, that I should give credence, was I hadn't done a hard edit on any of the manuscripts I wrote in my twenties. I was obsessed by them, to greater or lesser degrees, but once I typed them up, I didn't really consider how crazy they sounded. I also didn't know the tricks of the trade, like shuffling sentences, and paragraphs, that my mentor taught me (like my master in "I Dream of Jeannie"), and the process was new to me. Remember, I was ready to hand this into publishers, and thought they should be happy to publish me, and I'd received glowing praise, so I wasn't sure what was being asked of me. Emotionally, I didn't really want to rewrite it, and saw the whole thing as a drag. In one of the most blatantly self hating things I've ever done, I wiped out all the poetry of my masterpiece, and made it sound like a bad joke. I'm sure I was trying to please Max, who wanted it funnier (he wanted his book on 'X' funnier too, and used to tell me how Kokoschka only liked the students who painted like him). For whatever reason, I took my mentor's approbation and turned it into opprobation. I gutted the manuscript, and not surprisingly my mentor liked it, because he'd already got the tough poetic version, and now he got the fluffy stupid version, painting him better. Stan wrote a scathing critique of this version, and I'd say in many ways I never recovered from it. He really knocked me out, but rightly so. He told me to go back to the original, but that wasn't done, either, and I was lost.

My mentor thought the Beat legend would hate the book, and publishing it would go against both of their principles. I agreed not to do it on my first visit, but changed my mind, wanting the fame that I thought awaited me, but that was folly. Writing this, I realize that it sounds simple if my only problem was the FV (first version, in Stan's words) was the shit, because I hadn't lost it, but it never felt this simple. We'd all agreed the book wasn't done, and this took on several dimensions, from grammar, to content, and it was hard for me to tell where one began, and another ended. I'd never done a rewrite before, and I felt under a lot of pressure, thinking I could only ruin what I had done, so getting the manuscript back to its pure form, albeit a little better, turned out to be a Herculean task.

I published a decent version of the "Jake" part of the manuscript a year and a half ago, but it wasn't right. I tagged on "the mad captain" to the end, thinking that would explain something, but now I've weaved it into the text, like I first wrote it, and it feels right, even if it makes "If So Carried" less accessible. I wrote it that way, and I can't help but feel that's how it was supposed to be all along, and if you don't like it skip the italics and read about Jake.

*My book is changing radically, my friends. The parts in asterisks are gone, and it's one unbridled story, full of poetic grace. I'm going to get it polished by an editor, and hope for the best.

* I took out the 'interweaving' plot and made the story clear. I also added an intro from a historical point of view, that is always of the dead, and feel relieved. The names have been changed to protect the innocent, and that must be a civil liberty that the great Jack Webb show "Dragnet" must have taught to me. God bless our liberty!