The Next Big Thing
“Fobbit” author David Abrams was kind enough to tag me in this ongoing string of posts. The idea is that you answer a standard set of questions about your current work in progress—or whatever is next in your pipeline—and then tag a few others. I’ll do that at the end of this post.
(By the way, “Fobbit” is great. Great! You should read it. And from the sound of things, you should look forward to reading “Dubble,” too.)
What is the working title of your book?
“Julep Street,” which follows “Evergreen,” the conceptual title. When I finished the thing—or, rather, when I finished it to the point that I was ready to send it to my agent—the manuscript bore little resemblance to the original idea I had. (These things happen, alas.) And thus, it also had little fealty to the title I picked out for it when I started. That’s one of my little idiosyncrasies. I can’t write the first word, much less the 70,000th, without a title. Even one I’m going to eventually drown in the tub.
“Julep Street” is the fictional name of the main thoroughfare in the fictional (and unnamed) Kentucky town I’ve conjured, and it’s the artery that supplies blood to most of the story, so it makes sense as a title. Still, I resisted it for a long time—mainly because “Julep Street” sounds a little like the title of a book a failed movie novelist (played by William Hurt) would write. But it’s the best I have, so it’ll have to do for now.
Though the town in “Julep Street” is fictional, it does have a real-life inspiration.
What genre does your book fall under?
On the list of Top Ten Reasons Craig Is Likely to Wallow in Relative Literary Anonymity, being unable to align with a genre has to rank pretty high. “Julep Street” has literary themes—everything I write does—but I don’t think I’d call my work “literary fiction” unless I were willing to kick my own ass for pretentiousness. On the other hand, with this book more than anything else I’ve written, I directly confront my fear of obsolescence and my uncertainties about God, all in 61,000 tidy words that generally buck my over-reliance on simple declarative sentences.
So, yeah, literary fiction, I guess.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Actually, now that I think of it, William Hurt is not a bad choice, especially if he’s still carrying around that extra weight from “A History of Violence.”
What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?
One lonely man is made a relic before his time—and proceeds to lose his shit.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Oh, gosh, I don’t know. Two months? Three? It’s hard to tell where first drafts end and the million tiny adjustments and major overhauls and sentence tinkerings begin. I started in the early summer of 2012 and turned it over to my agent last month.
I will say, for what it’s worth, that quick first drafts tend to be a good harbinger for me. I’m not suggesting here that the writing is easy. Goodness no. It’s not, ever. But when I’m connecting with the work and the characters and I feel myself slipping into the screen as I go along, only good things seem to happen on the other end.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I don’t want to be difficult here, but I’m just not good at the compare-this-book-to-another-book game. Those comparisons usually end up being skin-deep anyway. Further, I tend to think cinematically when I’m writing and reading. On that note, I’d say that there’s a little “Falling Down” in this book, and maybe a little “Cast Away,” and perhaps even a little “B.J. and the Bear,” if you can picture “Bear” as an ancient yellow Lab rather than a cheeky chimp. No Sheriff Lobo, though. (God, yes, I am a child of the ’70s and ’80s.)
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Several things:
1. I built a career as a newspaper journalist. Perhaps you’ve read about our industry’s struggles (on the Internet, no doubt). Further, I’m a newspaper production editor, a particularly endangered subspecies of journalist. Do you think I might have some questions about my long-term efficacy as a gainfully employed citizen? Maybe.
2. One of the things I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about is self-identity and the terminology we use to present ourselves to the rest of the world. When those words come from some external source (“I’m an engineer at General Dynamics,” “I cut the meat at Albertsons”), we give up power; someone else can render those definitions moot if the quarterly reports don’t look good. The main character in “Julep Street,” Carson McCullough (yeah, yeah), has spent his entire working life self-identifying as a newspaper editor. It is how he thinks of himself. It is the face he wears for others.
But what if, without warning, there were no more newspaper office to go to? Then what?
3. One of the less-than-complimentary reviews my second novel, “The Summer Son,” received on Amazon was from a thoughtful fellow who contended that the absence of any fulsome reference to or thoughts about God undermined its effectiveness. The subtext of this criticism was that I, the author, just didn’t have anything to say about God. That’s not true. I’ll admit that my thoughts tend to be muddled and searching, but they exist, and in Carson I found a vehicle for exploring them. (Sidenote: A Facebook friend once accused me of being hostile to God, which is both incorrect and silly. I’m hostile toward religion, mainly because the worldwide story of religion is told in hostilities. I’ve never been hostile toward God, even if I have profound questions about who (or what) he is and how he operates.)
What else about your book might pique a reader’s interest?
It’s funny. I just got finished with a Q&A about my new novel, “Edward Adrift,” and in it I mentioned that I tried to avoid the usual road-trip tropes of a hitchhiker and an unforeseen destination. Well, “Julep Street” also has a road trip, and in the revision phase, I added a hitchhiker. One of my trusted early readers made that suggestion, saying that if Carson was going to go on a big, sloppy road trip, he should bathe in all its excesses.
On that note, an excerpt is probably in order:
The miles fall away in a soliloquy.
“See, the thing was, I knew when I met Sonya—that was my jezebel, I told you that, yes?—I knew I would fall. I am not a strong man, no sir, I am not, and when I met Sonya, I knew I was not strong enough to stay away from her. I tried, Lord yes, I tried. But I fell. I knew I would.”
The highway man gave his name as Jagur, which Carson figures to be the fakest name ever, but who cares? Carson introduced himself as Jerry Joe Ray Bob Dale—“honest to goodness,” he said—and faked out the faker. Now Jagur sits in the passenger seat and dangles a hand into the backseat of the car, stroking Hector’s undercoat and sending the dog into contented sleep.
“Wait,” Carson says. “ ‘Fell’? So you, what, boinked this Sonya chick?”
“An unnecessarily crude assessment, I rather think, but yes, that is what happened.”
“So what?”
“She was not mine to boink, as you colorfully put it. I am a married man. I have a daughter who is on the student council and the Honor Society. I should have no time for jezebels. It was a sin.”
“So what are you doing out here? Go home. Be with your family. Forget Sonya. A mistake.”
Jagur’s hand leaves Hector and palms the dashboard. The hand is massive, vascular. He sweeps it across the dash, leaving a grooved trail of dust behind.
“Are you married, Mr. Ray Bob Dale?”
“That’s Mr. Dale. The rest is my first name.”
“My apologies. Are you married?”
“No.”
“Ever married?”
“No.”
Jagur again massages Hector. “Forget Sonya, you say. I could sooner forget a knife plunged into my heart. God is testing me, Mr. Dale. When I told my wife—”
“You told your wife?”
“I am not a keeper of secrets, Mr. Dale. When I told my wife, she and God said that I should leave the house and venture into the world. The truth of the matter is that she said only that I should leave the house. It was God’s idea that I go into the world. My penance is out here. My test is out here. And when I have passed it, when I have satisfied God, I shall return again to my wife and to my daughter and to the world I am not presently fit to live in.”
When and how will it be published?
We shall see, on both counts.
*****
Now, to keep this thing going, I’ll tag …
LynDee Walker, whose debut novel, “Front Page Fatality,” has turned into a big hit.
Stant Litore, who writes literary biblical tales of the voracious undead.
Elisa Lorello, the dazzling author of “Faking It” and “Ordinary World,” and quite possibly the most ardent Duran Duran fan alive.
Inside ‘Quantum Physics,’ Part 6
We continue today with the story behind the story on the sixth piece of short fiction from my upcoming collection, Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure. To read previous installments, go here.
THE PAPER WEIGHT
Backstory: Like Alyssa Alights, this was salvaged from a novel that didn’t make it to the finish line. For a long time, I’ve wanted to write a good blast-off on the challenging times newspapers and newspaper journalists now face. When I started my career more than 20 years ago, I knew what I was getting into, having had a stepfather who was a longtime reporter. But it also seemed, at the time, like a rock-solid profession, full of job security and interesting assignments. Well, the latter still exists, but the former is gone, probably forever.
The obstacle between wanting to write such a story and actually doing it lay in my being entirely too close to the subject matter, a condition that dogged this story when it was part of a novel-in-progress and threatened to derail it even as a short story. It was only when I conjured an absurd approach to the main character, Kevin Gilchrist, and played it out to its illogically logical end that I found my way through the thing. As it turns out, this has ended up being one of my favorite stories in the collection.
Here’s an excerpt:
These facts about The Diploma caused Gilchrist to despise him on several levels.
First, he had only four years of honest-to-goodness, in-a-real-newsroom experience. And in those four years, he had kissed enough of the right asses to be running the whole shooting match at the Herald-Gleaner, which, back in the days when people actually read newspapers, had been a pretty damned good one.
Second, the guy went to Kansas and Missouri, for Christ’s sake. If one were to equate collegiate sports with politics, it would be a little like defining oneself as an abortion-rights Republican from Alabama. (Gilchrist had begun to suspect that The Diploma didn’t care much for sports. On the odd occasions when he would join a newsroom bull session, uniformly uncomfortable moments for everyone, The Diploma would put on a serpentine smile and slink away when talk turned to whatever game was in season.)
Third, The Diploma had a master’s degree in journalism, which Gilchrist figured to be about as useful as a screen door on a battleship. Journalism—real journalism, the kind practiced by Gilchrist and those who had come before him at the Herald-Gleaner—didn’t happen in a laboratory. It wasn’t theoretical. It was real. It happened outside the glass walls, on the street, among people whose stories demanded to be told and among people who, as a matter of course, would lie, equivocate, prevaricate and falsify to keep somebody like Gilchrist from discovering the truth. The Diploma came out of Missouri with big ideas about databases and web hits and social media, none of which meant a damned thing to Gilchrist.
(Copyright © 2012 Craig Lancaster)
Trivia: This is important. None of the characters in this story has a direct relationship to someone I know in real life. They are all amalgamations of various people I’ve known in a 20-plus year career in newspaper journalism. You will never find a more irascible, maddening, insanely brilliant group of people anywhere, except maybe at a fiction writers’ convention.
____________________
Quantum Physics and the Art of Departure will be officially released on Dec. 6, 2011.
Grab Bag: My Sunday night
You may have heard that I’m a Dallas Mavericks fan. And you may have heard that the Mavericks won the NBA championship Sunday night.
(If you’re Facebook friends with me, you no doubt heard entirely too much of both things.)
But Sunday night wasn’t spent on my couch, with a plate of pizza and a bottomless mug of beer. You see, Sunday nights lie smack dab in the middle of my work week, when I’m doing the job that (a) takes 40 hours of my week and (b) pays the bills and (c) I’ve been doing for more than 20 years now, in one way or another.
I’m a copy editor and page designer at the Billings (Mont.) Gazette, and like many daily newspapers, on Sundays we go with a smaller crew of newsroom workers. On Sunday nights, I edit and design the front page of the newspaper and the front of the sports section. This particular Sunday threw an interesting curve into everything: It brought the biggest game in the history of a team I’ve rooted for since I was 10 years old. I’ve been a sports journalist for much of my career, and thus I’ve conditioned myself to be more placid observer than rabid partisan when it comes to the nexus of sports and work. But Sunday night was terra nova for me, and I’ll be honest: In an environment that didn’t include the press box — where it’s never OK to cheer — I allowed myself to bask in the joy of the Mavs’ close-out game.
I caught a break on the front page. I’d designed the centerpiece (on the rising number of skin cancer cases among young people) the night before, leaving two smaller stories to choose, edit and place, along with the various add-ons (top-of-the-page promos, the index, etc.). You can see the results at the top of this post. I also edited the designed the two smaller stories on the sports cover.
At game time, I was far enough along to slip over to the TV and keep a close eye on things for a while.
Once halftime rolled around, I started harvesting NBA photos from the wire service with a mind to how I might approach the early edition, depending on how things shook out. I had already researched and compiled two charts — one on the three road teams that have won Game 7s in the NBA finals, which I’d have used in the case of a Heat victory, and one on the current franchises with NBA titles, a group Dallas would be joining with a win. For our first edition, the end of the game was going to be a tight squeeze, so I basically went simple: one big photo, one story, the applicable chart.
I’ve posted here the page as it evolved for our final edition. I put a horizontal crop on a vertical photo to capture a nice moment between Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Terry, the two holdovers from the 2006 Mavericks team that flopped in the NBA finals. The NBA champions chart splits the two stories — one on the Mavericks’ win, the other on the residue of the Heat’s loss.
I’m pretty happy with how everything turned out. It was a fun night to be a journalist and a Mavericks fan.
Even minus the beer.
Something to talk about