writing

The Beginning of Rewriting

God this is weird. Rewriting consists of rereading your work over and over again. At least it does for me. I understand that the process differs from person to person but, for me, I just like to sit at my computer and read and read and read and then reread and then rereread and correct and reshape as I go. I really need to get under the hood in order to tinker around.

However, I haven’t read a single word of this book since I started writing it outside of the briefest of scans a few sentences up at the start of each day to reorient myself. Oh, and I think way back when I tinkered with the opening a bit. But  basically I’m reading this for the first time which is…wow this is a weird experience.

On the other hand I left my running shoes in New Jersey this weekend and I dropped my razor in the toilet when unpacking my Dopp Kit (n0 idea how to spell that) and today sucks so I think the thing to do is go watch the Bachelorette at a friend’s house and then maybe watch Inception at like midnight and then see how tomorrow goes.

Which is technically today for you. Because this will post in the morning.

It’s kind of like time travel this thing we do here.

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Moment 1: Matthew Makes His Second Choice

It’s hard to explain where a story comes from. Caffeine has something to do with it. So does lots of upbeat music played over and over again very loudly. The events in my life have something to do with it, although there rarely seems to be a direct, “I once skinned my knee so now this character will skin his knee,” correlation. What sort of story my brain is in the mood to create certainly comes into play. And then there’s everything else.

Which of course explains nothing.

I had a guy, he was at a wedding, he was wearing a tuxedo. That was how this all started. It was my third story and I was fresh out of ideas. The first two stories were things I had wanted to write for years. They were fleshed out to some degree. This was to be my first outing of the project with no real foundation to build on. And I had nothing but the image of said guy at a wedding. So I got playful. I started wondering if I could make it into a Twilight Zone sort of thing where this guy makes a deal with the devil and there’s some sort of ironic ending where he gets what he wants only to discover that this is a bad thing not a good thing.

Then I decided that was boring and started wondering why the devil always gets such a bad rap. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we were rooting for the guy who brings pain into this world? If he was actually the good guy?

Suddenly all sorts of things started clicking and over the course of a few subway rides larger and larger chunks began fitting together. I can distinctly remember worrying this over in my head, standing there on my ride home, and suddenly understanding how the choices worked. This was possibly the only time I completely understood the choices. They’re rather confusing. I prefer Epp’s explanation where he brushes aside explanations and just says that there is, “an odd little hiccup in the universe.” How the choices work isn’t really important, only that a choice exists. At least that was what I told myself every time I screwed up the choices and had to go back and rewrite a scene.

But back during that subway ride I understood, and I knew that this “Matthew” character would have made one choice back when his wife died, only he didn’t understand that situation fully, because really he had two choices to make. A second choice was coming. The first was to give his life to begin with, the second revolved around who it was, exactly, that he was giving his life for and whether he would continue on in this world when those he continued to love moved on. And at the center of it all was a discarded home pregnancy test.

And then I was off, branching out and discovering one of the most interesting worlds I have ever visited as a writer. Coming up with new stories for Matthew and Epp became one of the best parts of this project. They gave me a canvas where everything could be played with.

On the other hand they also became the biggest stress inducer of this project, because as more and more stories piled up, more and more pressure to carry on this tale in the expected fashion began to pile up as well. I never want to write a book in that way again. That was terrifying.

So Matthew and the choice that set everything off gets the top slot. His encounter with the daughter he’s been unknowingly following for her whole life never fails to make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and the moment he decides she’ll be okay if he lets go sends me all over the place emotionally. It is the single most important brick in this building. Despite the zombie knife fights and trips back in time, it is Matthew’s struggle to accept his second choice that is really what this is all about. It is Matthew, after all, who brings Epp back around at the end. And it is Matthew, in a mirror image of the scene below, who signs off on Gus’s last push and all that it involved by letting himself believe that Zach will turn out all right, leaving a little message for the mortal in the meantime.

At the beginning of “26 Stories” weaving a book into it was certainly not the plan. Now, though, I have a hard time imagining what this would have been like without a visit with Matthew and Epp every third story.

I’ll visit with them again I’m pretty certain. Their world strikes me as way too rich for me to stay away from for long. I did mention a few months ago, though, that there are no plans to go back at the moment. And that remains true. The doors are currently closed and I will not force them open without an actual story in mind. But I get the feeling that one will fall into my lap eventually.

I’ll be working over a scene in my head or something, and it won’t sit right. I’ll be unable to put the camera in the right place, so to speak, and the characters will all be acting off and I’ll run it over and over in my mind trying to figure out what’s going on. And then I’ll take a step back to regroup and I’ll notice, there in the background behind the trees, a man in an immaculate suit resting his weight on a cane, or the girl on the blind date will suddenly turn blond and the patrons around her will walk right through her, or the man holding up the liquor store will have a big blind man with mirrored sunglasses breathing down his neck…and I’ll know.

But for now that hasn’t happend. For now I leave you with my favorite moment from this project.

Matthew Huntington of Brooklyn making his second choice:

The hallway Matthew entered was dark, but he had the feel of high ceilings and dusty white walls. He walked, his feet noticing the occasional warped slat of wood under his feet. He walked past a semicircle arch that led to a cramped kitchen, past a closed door, then around a corner to a bedroom. There was a fluffy comforter, rumpled and bright like starched snow, an end table with a clock radio and a lamp, a small desk cluttered with books and a laptop. He stared around; everything looked generic enough on its own, but combined there was a personality here.

Epp stood at a tree, his hands passing around and around it as he unwrapped loop after loop of tape until he finally reached the end. He walked around the tree, gathering handful after handful of tape as he went, the light on his left shifting from dusk into darkness now, and two figures ran towards him, one of them tossing a knife into the bushes before they reached the barrier where the tape had been and they disappeared to catch up with their present selves.

Matthew heard a door slam and he spun around to see a woman standing in the hallway, sleepy eyed, wearing a large t-shirt, reaching a hand through the doorway he had passed to flip off the bathroom light. He breathed in, and in, and in, seemingly unable to exhale any as his blood beat warm in his ears. “Christ, you look like your mother,” he said as his daughter walked past him. And her face, on top of the resemblance to his wife, was somehow so familiar, and he remember in rapid succession, a child’s laugh at the corner of a room he was working, a little girl in pigtails who had watched as he caused a fight on a street corner, the glimpse he caught in the shop window of a teenager walking past as he looked over the clientele, her face at a thousand different moments in his past appearing again and again as he floated through his work and it was like an optical illusion that he had only seen one way until just this moment when it became so clear how close he had been to her this whole time, how much of her life he had witnessed.

Epp wound his way around the third corner of the square he had marked out, tugging the tape off a tree branch. Inside the square the light rain that had passed through earlier that night began to fall, the raindrops tapping soothingly against the treetops.

Matthew watched her climb into bed, roll around a few times trying to get the comforter right on her body. She settled down onto her back, her face up at the ceiling. He watched and could tell that she was debating whether she should go back to sleep or not. She reached a hand up, scratched her forehead, half rolled over and looked at the clock radio, then rolled back. She clasped her hands behind her head, wriggled back onto the pillow, and smiled as she looked up at the ceiling. One thought went through Matthew’s head as he watched her and it shocked him with its certainty, but as a lifetime of watching his daughter grow up flooded through his memory he knew it was true.

“She’ll be okay,” he thought.

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writing

Moment 2: Epp Decries Modern Telecommunications

What to say about Epp? Most likely not a lot. The guy was everywhere, was arguably the main driving force behind these tales, influenced every character and became the center of, if not the reason for, the entire third act. He was a character who was so powerful that scenes he wasn’t anywhere near changed course simply because his name was spoken out loud. He was a character so cool that he made britches and a waistcoat seem stylish.

Picking one moment to capture Epp, I realize as I write this, is completely out of the question. It just isn’t going to happen. He’s here, obviously very high up on the list, but the moment I’m going to choose isn’t any grand Epictetus moment. If you’ve come this far then you know all the grand Epictetus moments yourself and probably have a few stuck in your memory that are being trotted out right now: the cathedral; Newtonian Physics; pounding the bar at the Port Authority and turning a stack of hundred dollar bills into a brief history of currency. I’m not about to go picking and choosing amongst those to try and capture everything about him in one little scene.

He also has a number of rather wonderful lines:

Smooth – “Even for the immortal, Benjamin, life is too short to drink bad scotch.”

Touching – “Two thousand years and the power of a god and there’s no end to how much I’d give up to be able to talk through some of my problems with you. You were always so good at helping me notice what I was thinking too hard to see.”

When asked why you would buy the cow when you can get the milk for free – “One would purchase the cow if the future value of all milk after deducting for risk was greater than the asking price plus the value of the amount of expected free milk, assuming a cow that provided no benefits other than milk.”

But, no, none of these are my favorite moment. My favorite moment is nothing but a little throwaway line that comes in the middle of “Three Lessons.” It’s just something that Epp mutters while waiting for a text message.

Why choose this moment? Because it’s something that any of us might mutter while waiting for a text message (I mean, not me because I love texting, but other people). My favorite moments for Epp, in fact my favorite moments in these stories, are the moments when these keepers of strength and defenders of inspiration, when these century old demi-gods and masters of quantum particles, when these embodiments of the “whatever” in “whatever doesn’t kill you”, when these testers and pushers act undeniably human. Because that was the best part about these tales for me.

Despite all the bells and whistles and craziness happening, these characters came out as some of the more human characters I’ve ever written. That’s really all I want to say about that as far as the deep end of the pool goes, that statement is surely up for debate, but in the shallow end of things there are hundreds of moments where these characters become perfectly accessible because they do things like mess up math in their head, fumble with metaphors, screw up times zones, forget appointments. That aspect of things was a huge part of the world-building that went on for these stories. I didn’t want larger than life immortals gnashing their teeth and causing giant earthquakes and speaking in booming voices. I wanted their roots, their beginnings, who they were to start with to always shine through. I wanted them wonderfully and at times woefully human. Human but with the ability to turn mass into energy at will or quantum tunnel their way through a car roof.

So Epp at slot number two speaks for itself as far as Epp the character goes. The moment is irrelevant, so say I, allowing me to pick a moment that has nothing to do with anything except that it continues to make me smile when I think about it. Just one line when Epp is sitting alone in Sophie Loughton’s bedroom while Matthew is making his first push. Epp is contacting two strangers who turn out to be Mary and Bartleby, and in the silence of the gathering storm outside his phone continues to beep softly, and he continues to clack the keys in reply, and he utters to no one a very simple human sentiment:

Nobody talks on the phone anymore.

I always loved that line.

Of course, here we are with Epp and it’s only moment number two.

Surprised? Wondering what moment one is? It’s pretty obvious when you think about it. After all, this never really was Epp’s story, now was it?

(thanks to Reza Vaziri for the photo)

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Moment 3: Smith Gives Me a Motto

Way back at the start of this project, back before Epp brought a cathedral crashing down, back before Matthew smoked his first cigar, before Jacob checked out or Dorian chased his wife into the past, back before all of that there was “Liquid Calling.”

A simple tale of a hit man, a conspiracy theory to spread Alzheimer’s and a young man named Smith. For a lot of people this story is a favorite and the twisty plot and clear writing put it pretty high up on my list as well. Taken away from this project I think I’d still like this story, but within the confines of “26 Stories” Smith and Morzeny’s battle against death and each other took on a lot more weight.

This whole concept always seems so simple when I think about it: I write stories; you read the stories; if you like them you tell some friends. And we go from there.

But then things go all crazy. Because I’m out here in the wilds of the internet, and at times it doesn’t seem like the internet. It doesn’t seem like the internet at all. It seems like the wild west. I’m in some rustic town with no law. Madmen and lunatics own the streets and whore houses outnumber farmhouses by about a hundred to one. All the major players from back east, well they all have representation here, but all those representatives do is fly the company colors and hope for a transfer back to the big city where things are really happening. And there are gold in the hills all around, or so we’ve all been told. We have stories of those who have struck deep rich veins of the stuff. But after awhile you begin to wonder how much of those stories are myth because when you take a real good look around it seems that all of the deals being cut out here revolve around gambling or sex. And there are no rules. And there are no plans. And I’m standing in the middle of the muddy road as gunslingers and stagecoaches and drunks and whores and jesters and gamblers roll past, holding up my little stories like some embattled preacher, trying to bring my brand of literature to this land.

Although since I’m talking about literature instead of religion, maybe I’m not the embattled preacher. I guess that makes me the doe-eyed schoolmarm.

Maybe I shouldn’t push this metaphor too far.

The fact is, of course, that since diving into the internet I’ve come across a number of blogs that I really do love to read, and a lot of sites written with wit and intelligence, and works of art that have no classification but still take my breath away. So I know it’s not all that bad.

But still, sometimes when I look back over my shoulder I don’t see the world wide web. I see Dodge City.

There have been any number of times over the past year that I’ve thought back on Smith and Morzeny sitting in that apartment, both mortally wounded, neither wanting to budge a millimeter. And I would think about one of my favorite lines to come out of Smith’s mouth. And what was weird was that after enough time and enough stories had gone by, my favorite line of Smith’s really started to seem like something someone else had said: “I prefer to be underestimated.”

And it became my motto. Mind you, there’s a fine line between “I prefer to be underestimated,” and “I’m pretending that this is where I want to be because I screw everything up and wind up on the losing end naturally so I might as well act like I meant it.” So I never started saying Smith’s line out loud or anything. Never took it too deep to heart. Never printed it up and taped it to my wall. No, it just became something to repeat to myself when it was Monday night, I had no story, the stats were down and I was wondering what life as a banker would be like.

Moment number three. Smith gives me a motto:

Morzeny rolled his cigarette slowly between his thumb and first finger. His arm was settling into a slow, deep, throb. Had he not been trained for this he knew he’d be going to pieces. “You’re not what you appear to be,” Morzeny said.

“I’m not what I appear to be?” Smith said, gritting his teeth with the effort of talking louder than a whisper.

“Your dirty sweatshirt, your stupid haircut, your head bobbing walk, your annoying teenager attitude, it’s all an act, isn’t it?”

Smith’s eyes glared hard for a second, then his head rolled back, away from Morzeny, and Morzeny knew he had finally figured Smith out.

“I prefer to be underestimated,” Smith said.

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writing

Moment 4: Kyo Craves Raw Fish

I have a baffling tendency in my writing to sometimes invest characters with qualities that are utterly foreign to me. Now, naturally that’s pretty common. It’d be a helluva boring world if all authors’ characters were themselves carbon copied over and over again (do the kids these days know what a carbon copy is?). But for me there is one quality that continues to pop up in story after story that I’m beginning to find a little odd. For some reason I’m running a guerrilla campaign in my fiction with the goal of convincing the world that I really like sushi.

I hate sushi.

I hate most fish. I’ll eat mussels sometimes and clams are okay and canned tuna I’ll do, but other than that I hate fish. And this isn’t a “I can’t stand how slimy they look and I’ve never touched one” sort of hate. Over the years I’ve sampled what I’ve been told is some of the best fish in the world. Smoked salmon in an Alaskan fishing shack, the winner of the best tapas in Spain, plus I’ve picked off of plates in a number of restaurants here in New York. And they’ve done nothing for me even when I have been able to swallow. I hate fish.

Yet love of sushi has appeared in a lot of my stories. It pops up in “New York City Marathon” for example and, possibly for the last time, it appears in the form of Kyokutei in the Matthew and Epp stories. I say possibly for the last time because in its other iterations my fake love of sushi was a passing nod, a glance in through the window, a cursory mentioning. With Kyo things became a lot more involved and I spent days reading more things about sushi than one might consider sane. It didn’t help that I needed to know about sushi as we know it as well as sushi as Kyo knew it. This is because sushi became a huge part of his story as it was fleshed out in “The Monk, The Warrior and The Lord.” But that isn’t the story that contains the number four moment.

Nope. Kyo was rather nebulous before the writing of “The Monk” for me and until I actually wrote his story it wasn’t clear exactly how far outside the normal lines he existed, so even though that story was where he solidified into the samurai that he is, that story doesn’t contain his moment in my mind…although he’s not a samurai. He’s a ronin. And that is what his story is all about.

Which is to say that Kyo’s origin story drew heavily on the Japanese legend of the 47 Ronin with the number of ronin, obviously, decreased by 46 and the length of time and the number of antagonists increased. His story was a departure from the main storyline but I knew that Kyo’s differences were going to become important and I felt that establishing his origin was blah blah blah I really wanted to write a story about a samurai.

But, again, his spot on this list doesn’t come from his origin story. For Kyo’s moment I find myself landing squarely in the little precursor for “The Monk, The Warrior and The Lord” that we get in “Robin’s Flight.” During Robin’s tour of the world we touch base with all the main characters as they go through their day and in Kyo’s case that meant him sitting at a local sushi bar in Tokyo by himself, desperately trying to convince the chef to make him a type of sushi that hasn’t been around (to the best of my understanding) for a few centuries. And as Kyo stares down the chef, the chef stares back and now and again gets the strangest sensation of times long past, of wagon wheels rolling over hard dirt ruts and the shouts and smells of a small village in ancient Japan.

For me this is everything. Kyo’s longing for his past is so strong that even the sushi chef can feel it and in a few quick strokes Kyo’s loneliness is captured. That’s really what his story was about for me. An outsider in every way, Kyo never even had a chance to make his own choices. There is a sense for those testers who do their work that some sort of release awaits them; in the first story Epp talks about how his mentor eventually was able to move on. But for Kyo this hope doesn’t exist. In death Kyo hoped to find honor and a completion of his tasks, but instead he finds himself wedged between worlds forever as an anomaly that nobody quite understands with a set of rules that nobody can figure out.

Of course rules are never as set as most people think they are and Kyo, albeit hundreds of years later than most, does make a second choice of sorts in the form of Mary.  So the last few seconds of “Where Sarpedon’s Body Lay” were in the running for Kyo’s slot.  As were any scenes where he was using his sword.

But, in the end, I had to go with Kyo staring down the sushi chef in “Robin’s Flight” where we get our first whiff of the age that produced Kyo, where for the first time we see Kyo when no other testers are around, and where I first began to wonder just how different this guy really was:

“It is not the same effect,” Kyo said, and the itamae felt the odd notion that this man in the ugly suit was not who he appeared to be. His eyes, his manner, his ability to act in the most impolite way but somehow not come across as anything but the superior in the situation, all of these things always made the hairs on the back of the chef’s neck stand up. Anyone else would have deserved a ban from the sushi bar and would not have been allowed to remain after such insults, but the sushi chef always felt a strange sensation when he talked to this man that settled somewhere deep in the back of his skull and for fleeting moments he would feel as if he were one of the ancient members of his trade in some roadside shack along a muddy road, outdoing his own best to craft perfect pieces of sushi that would feed the local samurai who passed through. The sushi chef enjoyed this feeling immensely, and it was for this reason alone that the man in the ugly suit was allowed to act as he did, not to mention rarely, if ever, pay his bill.

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Moment 5: Frankie Doogan Takes a Bath

I have nothing against happy endings. I really don’t. But they don’t come to me naturally very often. I would argue, mind you, that everything I write is a happy ending, or at least an optimistic ending, it’s just that I rarely view happiness as dependent on everything working out perfectly. I like a little grit in my life. The way I look at it, it’s going to be there anyway so you might as well figure out how to use it for you.

So my endings don’t usually have an “everyone’s ducks are in a row” type of feel, mainly because my life never seems to have an “everyone’s ducks are in a row” type of feel, and even if it does for a moment the next moment something requiring my attention is bound to pop up, so “ducks in a row” doesn’t seem like a very honest type of ending to write. And why are we lining up our ducks anyway?

Which brings us to the one clear-cut happy ending I wrote for this project, “Black Eyed Susan.” The story of Unnamed Male Narrator and Unnamed Female Narrator (no, they never receive names) wasn’t written with a plan in mind. It wasn’t written with a structure in mind. It wasn’t written with an ending in mind. It was just written. I had a male voice, and he was talking about meeting his wife, and I had his wife, the female voice, talking about meeting her husband. They took it from there and I wound up, much to my surprise, writing a love story. But after a few pages I came to realize that this was only 50% love story. The other 50%? The other 50% was nothing short of a judo match.

Each section was a push from one side or the other. Unnamed Male Narrator would give a few paragraphs of honest emotion and his view of things that put him just far enough out on a limb so that when the section ended and we swapped over to her side of things, Unnamed Female would be able to take his story and neatly tumble it ass-over-elbows with one or two deft sentences. Then Unnamed Female would start telling her point of view, build up steam through her section until she herself had gone a little too far with her viewpoint, and then we’d have another section break and sure enough Unnamed Male would step in and throw Unnamed Female’s story for a tumble.

It got to a point where I didn’t know what was coming next; I just knew that when I hit a section break I should duck. The sometimes playful sometimes painful tug of war that brought this story to light was one of the more enjoyable experiences of this project. I loved every turnaround, every section where he saw things one way, would state things quite firmly with his ending sentence, only to have her section open with the complete opposite point of view.

So slot number five goes to one of their smallest sparring bouts. A quick four sentence break involving Unnamed Male’s rival love interest, one Frankie Doogan, and Unnamed Female’s firm belief that nobody was pulling strings the night of their first kiss. This moment actually prompted a real Frank Doogan out there who had spent time at the Jersey Shore to e-mail me and ask if he had ever inadvertently tried to steal my girlfriend. He didn’t. This story is all fiction.

This moment also caused me to laugh harder than at any other point in this project. I’m talking pushed away from my desk, headphones off, face buried in my hands because I had just burst out cackling so hard I might have freaked out my neighbors.

Three simple sentences.

Then a fourth that changed everything all over again:

Did I know about Frankie Doogan? Of course I knew about Frankie Doogan. Why do you think I pushed him into the bay that night?

Of course karma paid me back after your mother broke my heart.

(thanks to Dom Dada for the photo)

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Moment 6: Blob Gets a Name

I still have no idea why I decided to write a children’s book. Actually, I have some vague recollection of thinking that I would “take it easy” for this story. Back in January what this meant to me was that I would write a children’s book. So simple. How hard could it be? You rhyme mouse with house, draw some pictures, and you’re done.

Plus, I work with kids, large parts of me are still beguilingly childish, I like talking animals, it seemed a perfect way to coast through a story and catch a break after the halfway mark of the project.

A number of people who are far smarter than I am have hypothesized, after reading “Mindy and Barkley,” that I probably have a new found respect for Dr. Seuss and his ilk now because these things, duh, aren’t easy.

To put it simply, yes. Yes I do. Ridiculous amounts of new found respect for Watterson and Seuss and everyone whose books and rhymes entertained me growing up. Rhyming is hard. And while I enjoy doodling, and while the pictures I made still make me laugh with their in your face crapulence, making a picture that carries the story and maybe even adds to it is also, as it turns out, really hard.

Really.

During these two weeks I didn’t exactly get a chance to “take it easy.” I did get a chance, though, to create one of my favorite stories and to cut loose from whatever rules happened to be with me at the time and completely go nuts. Imaginary friends, blobs, poop jokes, etc. You name it. It’s all there. Plus, come on, who didn’t bawl their eyes out when Barkley came back? Huh? Show of hands?

On top of all this there was the notion that for the first time ever I was writing something fully intended to be read aloud. I’ve never done that before. It made meter king in a way I haven’t ever experienced. It also allowed me to mess with anyone who dared to take that step and read this to a child. Because when you read aloud you get into a rhythm, you start to feel the words, you develop a running flow, and I went ahead and intentionally threw a gigantic hurdle in there of unjumpable proportions when it came time to give my blob a name. Because I was floundering like crazy during those two weeks, it seemed to me that anyone who followed me should flounder too.

So slot six goes to these two couplets from “Mindy and Barkley”. Just imagine trying to read this out loud. Mwahahahahahah!:

Now, way far away in a neighboring land,
Lived an angry green monster with ugly thick hands

His name was Slzzynqux, though to friends he was Blob,
And he wandered about with a frown on his gob.

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Moment 7: Nyx Stops Off For Chinese

I don’t even know where to start with this one. Throughout the course of this project people who were Matthew and Epp inclined would tell me how much they enjoyed one character or the other. Some people liked watching Matthew as he tried to bumble his way to an understanding of the new world he had entered; some liked Epp’s smooth manner, charcoal suit and hard-taught lessons. And I would nod as they said this. Then I’d open my mouth and out would come, “I like Nyx.”

And the person would slowly back away from me.

There’s nothing like writing the bad ones. The bent and the devious are always the most fun characters to play with. I had known this going in to these stories. I had written a few lunatics, a few warped individuals, a few people it would be fun to have a drink with assuming you were safely separated by a nice thick sheet of bullet proof Hannibal Lector cage glass.

But none of them prepared me for Nyx. I love Nyx. There isn’t any moment of Nyx in these stories that I wasn’t in love with; her introduction, her cold creaking glove, the bizarre and pert sexuality of her body movements, her teenage-style head bopping attitude, everything. To the point where, once she had appeared and I began to appreciate her, I made a conscious decision to under use her. To only let her bounce in at the sides of scenes, to never let her command the stage. I wanted to keep her as off center as possible. For a few reasons.

First, I think less is always more. I’m a firm believer that the best thing to ever happen to Steven Spielberg’s career was the mechanical shark not working when he began filming Jaws. Less is more. To show too much of Nyx would have lessened her impact. In fact, I never once showed what it was that she did with her victims. The farthest I ever let her get on the page was her first kill, and there we only see her teeth just touching the back of Robin’s head, then we get a single sound, then we leave and come back when she’s done. That’s as far as we see her go. Everything else she does we see only the aftermath of. Except, of course, the parts your imagination fills in.

The second reason I didn’t want to linger too long on her was because I wasn’t sure how much there was to linger on. A lot of these characters I knew I’d be providing back story for. As soon as Kyo showed up I knew there’d be more to him. Others I knew there would be exactly no back story for. We were never going to see Mary or Bartleby’s origins. They just weren’t part of the structure as it first came to me. It would be possible, mind you, to create their stories, like it would have been possible to create an origin for Nyx, but those tales would have felt tacked on. Like putting an addition on a house using a different architect than the original. It might work out okay, but it might not, or you might wind up with two very nice structures that don’t really relate all that well as a whole.

My third reason for keeping Nyx thin is similar to the first. Not only did I not want her to have too much page time, I also didn’t want to run the risk of describing her attitude for you. I didn’t want her to act creepy. I tried to never make her snarl, never glare, never look “with evil intent” at someone, never rant or rave, never, really, do anything other than be a somewhat empty-headed girl in her late teens/early twenties. I’m sure I slipped up here and there on this, but for the most part I just wanted Nyx to be a normal girl…who happens to cannibalize those around her for what, at times, appears to be sheer entertainment purposes. It felt to me that this would be much creepier than to have her gnashing around in every scene she’s in.

Nyx also created one of the weirder aspects of the Matthew and Epp stories from my end of things. Her and Mary.

I listen to an astounding amount of music while I write. Very loudly. AC/DC‘s “Dirty Deeds” got me through most of “Sunrise Over the Dakota.” And I listened to “These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers over and over again while writing the scene with Epp in the cathedral. Within this love of popular music, there is contained a sub genre of rock and roll music performed by women. There’s a lot of Furtado and Stefani in my i-Tunes. I have a rather profound liking of girls who can sing. And rock. And turn a crowd into a frenzy. A girl who can properly scream, “Thank you, CLEVELAND,” and then drop the microphone and throw her hands up before walking off stage…well a girl like that is a keeper. And, granted, you don’t get that sort of Joan Jett rocking as much in today’s musical landscape, but in my mind it’s all good.

Now, I’ve already mentioned that when I was casting about for what Mary looked like during her introduction, I wound up using this photo of Shakira as sort of a template:

I don’t really think Mary looks anything like that. At all. But at her genesis this photo helped me get a bead on her. And from there on out I found myself putting on Shakira whenever Mary was around.

Then came Nyx. And while I didn’t use a photo to create Nyx (she was based on a girl I saw riding the subway) I started noticing this album cover popping up on my i-Tunes:

That’s an album cover from the Swedish band The Sounds. It’s very nipply. And it sort of freaked me out. Because I looked down at the little square on my i-Tunes window where the cover art for the current song is showing one day and Jesus Christ but Nyx was sitting there. Two of her. One innocent, the other hungry. And from then on songs from The Sounds became my jumping off point whenever I needed a shot of Nyx, creating this very odd split of musical personality with Shakira/Mary on one side, her songs melodious and vulnerable, and then The Sounds/Nyx on the other side with their gravelly pep.

It’s rare, very rare, for me to be provided wide open doors into the worlds I write. Usually I have to sniff my way around when I pick up writing for the day until I can get my bearings, and then I have to proceed slowly with my first scene or two. Or I’ll have to meditate and think a bit on one of the bigger marquee scenes that are firmly rooted in my head, then back away from there to the scene I’m working on, retaining as much feel as possible.

For Nyx and Mary, once this weird battle of the bands started in my head, I never had to do anything more than play Shakira or play The Sounds and I was able to walk right into their heads. They even started becoming counterpoints to each other for my writing. This isn’t overly abundant in the finished stories, but when I was trying to bounce back from one side of things to the other it often became easiest to take Nyx’s (or Mary’s) view of things and invert it in order to figure out how Mary (or Nyx) was currently handling the situation.

I never got to work Shakira into Mary’s personality, but I did mange to make The Sounds a part of Nyx’s life. One of their songs is her ring tone.

I love Nyx.

And she’s the only one of my antagonists to make the list. Gregor didn’t make it. His muddled attempt at recreating the world always seemed a bit more like a roundabout way of getting even with Epp. And Hector? Hector was nothing but a persnickety coward. After he made his first move Hector did nothing but hide. I get the feeling that even if the battle at Katie Packer’s birthday had gone his way, Hector still wouldn’t have felt comfortable coming out in the open. For Hector, things were never going to be perfect. You ever notice how often he readjusts things mere centimeters so they look right to him?

No, for me there was only Nyx. I’ll throw in here that, for the briefest of moments when I was trying to come up with Nyx’s look, I almost made her a ten year old girl. I’m not sure I could have handled that.

And then there was Nyx’s ending. Her ending was abrupt. Part of me felt she deserved more. But part of me was worried that this was my wanting more Nyx and not what the story wanted. So I made Nyx end the way she existed: mostly off of the page. And it was a little disturbing to not properly be able to say goodbye to her. But I think it’s what she would have wanted. She was never a major player. She was the side-kick. She was the muscle. Hell, for that matter when we first meet her she’s the side-kick’s side-kick. The muscle’s muscle.

And so she gets slot number seven. And there is nothing that captures Nyx for me like her lovingly sucking on some poor person’s finger bone through all of “The Monk, The Warrior and The Lord.” The thing rattles around in her mouth the entire story. Of course, it’s not until the following moment that you were meant to think it was anything but a delicious piece of hard candy. Which for Nyx I guess it was:

She took a long, slurping suck on the object in her mouth, enjoying its taste so much she didn’t notice Hector glaring at her until he cleared his throat and she froze, like a student caught chewing gum.

Hector held a cupped palm up in front of her mouth and she obligingly slid the object out between her lips and into his hand. Hector held it up to the light, turned it around a few times, then stared angrily at Nyx.

“What?” she asked. “I stopped off for some Chinese before I came here.”

Hector handed the finger bone back to her; she popped it into her mouth and resumed sucking.

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writing

Moment 8: Will Quits Running

“New York City Marathon” is a favorite story of mine and will always be a favorite story of mine. This is the story one thinks about writing when one manages to find time to daydream and think about writing. The whole notion of “capturing a generation” or becoming “the voice of a” group of people is a pretty common daydream among writers.

I have no idea if I managed to do either of those things here, mind you, but for me this story is a nice take on my life during the past decade. The notion of living in New York being a bit of a long haul meshed nicely with one of my favorite events in the city, the marathon, to provide a backdrop that works well on a number of levels. Which is to say that the people in this story wearing jogging shorts aren’t the only characters who are running a marathon.

The most cutting moment for me came when Will and the unnamed runner crumble and decide to give up the race. I wrote it as simply as I could, aiming for less description and written thought whenever possible and tried to have them just give up. Just feel pain. Just start sobbing. Plain and simple. Because Will and the runner were only part of the equation. Really it’s watching Byron react that drives this moment home.

Byron, the ever caustic smart-ass, has his guard forced down as he witnesses the unnamed runner, and thus Will, at their most vulnerable moments and we get a brief, albeit swear induced moment of humanity from him. The rest of the story doesn’t work, I don’t think, if Byron doesn’t crack open here. This scene allowed his character to become rounded out to a degree I often fail to achieve.

I should mention that the story also doesn’t work if Byron stays cracked open, so him righting himself while his brother watched almost won. Likewise Byron and Calvin returning to their race, running down the street, sliding back into their usual roles with some friendly punches at the end of the story almost edged out this moment. But in the end Byron cracking open was what stayed in my mind, and him cracking doesn’t happen without the unnamed runner quitting, and that doesn’t carry as much weight without being interplayed with Will’s decision to move back home. Yes, that might really be three moments in one, but I won’t tell if you won’t.

So slot eight goes to Calvin and Byron and all the other people out there currently on the hard-side of the mile seventeen marker in their own personal marathons.

Remember to stop off for drinks periodically:

There was no need for him to be in this city anymore. He would move back to Ohio.

And that was it. It was decided. And Will, for the first time in months, maybe years, felt the absence of pressure on his body. He would tell everyone in a day or so. Right now, with that decision firmly in his head, he just wanted to go home, maybe get a good night’s sleep. He was tired.

“I’m heading out, guys,” Will said, getting a wave and a smile from Byron and a couple of words of goodbye from Calvin. Then he turned and started walking down the street.

Byron was staring intently at the race. There was something strange in his face and Calvin was about to ask what was going on when Byron spoke.

“Ah, shit,” Byron said, “I saw this start to happen while I was over there.” His voice was very different, lower, heartier, a gravel filled bed of humanity running underneath his usual bite. “I hate to see this.”

Calvin watched Byron swallow slowly and then turned to see what he was looking at. Coming towards them from the race was a group of three people. Two were obviously not runners, they were dressed in jeans that didn’t fit right and t-shirts that were too busy. They were flanking the third person, a woman, who was slowly making her way down the street. This third person was dressed in full racing gear, teal shorts and a stretch tank top. She was favoring one leg as she walked. Her shoulders were covered in a foil blanket. She was sobbing.

Byron was staring at her, one of his hands up at his face, his first two fingers lightly rubbing up and down his jaw line. “I actually saw the moment when she decided to quit,” he said slowly. “She saw her two friends on the sideline, she had forced herself to make it to them, then she just veered off and stepped out of the race.” He pulled at his lower lip. “I’m not sure when she started crying.” Byron and Calvin watched the woman let herself be guided to the other side of the street. She stopped near a car parked on the other side and they could hear her crying change pitch as some new pain flared in her body. Her two friends turned and started walking back to her.

“Come on,” Byron said, staring across at the scene playing out, the volume of his voice soft but the force behind it strong. “Come on,” he said again, rooting her on, his energy strong enough that Calvin felt himself getting caught up in it. “Let yourself do this much at least.”

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writing

Moment 9: Neil Bakes Muffins

I like plots. A lot. And in general I enjoy writing plots. I like creating characters, winding them up, then watching them act out stories. I enjoy treating events like open ended puzzle pieces that I can then mix and match in order to create a larger picture. So whenever I write something in which basically nothing happens it’s always a scary time for me.

There is no way to know what people are going to make of it when your story takes place completely internally. When I, say, take one character and have him inject another character with deadly poison in front of your eyes, I know that this is going to come across in some way or another. At the very least you’ll see the physical motion, you might not be entirely with me as far as what’s going on inside of these characters, but you’ll get something.

If you take away the deadly poison, though, things become very tricky. Then it’s just two characters standing there. And as a writer you have no footing that you can be sure of. For all you know (and all the little voice inside your head tells you) everyone who reads what you’ve written is going to do nothing but ask why you thought watching a guy make muffins then watching that same guy try to sleep was a good idea for a story. Because in “You’re Allowed to Order Take-Out” that’s all that happens, really, as far as the stuff taking place right in front of you. They mess up muffins, they have trouble sleeping. The end.

But people were more than happy to linger with Neil in a way I never expected and it was touching for me how many of you found it touching yourselves to watch this overwhelmed father struggling with how his new daughter fit into his life while worrying about how he would fit into hers.

So the number nine spot goes to Neil as he drifted off into what I can only hope turned out to be a mouse-free sleep:

And he wondered what time it was, and wondered who else was awake, and wondered what kept the world going at this hour, and wondered if the bagel store down the street made good coffee, and wondered that his new daughter would someday be able to talk to him like Illiam and he wondered if she knew he was here worrying about her in the middle of the night. He lay down on the couch so his head was near the crib and rested a hand on one of the wooden slats, the physical nearness of her a comfort to him, and in a few minutes he fell asleep, his body relaxing deeper and deeper as the rain softly pelted the windows.

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