I have not worked on "Love Stinks" today. Oh, it is hot and sultry to the point of defeating any expense of energy. I have caught up with some of my email and my blogging instead. Creativity needs energy.
I believe this is the first time I am drawing on Beyond Craft, a Substack from a former editor (IIRC) of the now-defunct Orca. Frankly, I hope to find out why they rejected everything I sent them. Reading this paragraph, I may have found one answer (I think the other is the story was just not up to snuff):
Voice in creative writing is the foundation of your work. It is the combination of all literary elements, such as the ones mentioned above, combined into a single method of delivery that allows each one to come through without having to be unnecessarily emphasized. It is the personality of the story. It is the alchemy of the story. Just like talking to that person at the party, or listening to a standup comedian. The voice has to make you feel comfortable in the world of the story, and yet excited for what is to come.
Particularly with the last work on "Theresa Pressley" I found the voice I used in my original stories to be stodgy. Whether my changes have made the characters compelling remains unknown.
Not something I have actually done, albeit I have tried to think of a possible reader when writing.
I’ve always believed that a writer should determine, as best as possible, who the audience for their work should be. Who do you imagine reading this story? What is the level of language that will challenge that audience without being obscure or didactic? Just as important you have to assess the characters, the theme, and the action of the story so they are represented in a way that makes them seem spontaneous and realistic. You want readers to believe the story could have actually happened.
You also have to pay a lot of attention to the point of view. Which character should be telling this story? Should it be first person or third person? Maybe even second person. Present or past?
If I apply the amount of rejections received to the idea of a possible reader, I may be a bit delusional about who is my ideal reader.
I definitely have not done the following with regard to voice; although, I would like to think that I did work on voice. Again, the number of rejections have me doubting the success of my efforts.
When planning a story I will typically take several weeks going over the different options for voice in my mind, listening to how they sound delivering what I have decided should be the opening scene of the story, looking for the best possibility of engagement, and the best way of communicating the ideas and theme I want to convey to the audience I have in mind. Then I have to find a way to craft the voice so that readers don’t think of it as story, but are engaged to where it becomes an experience. Essentially I want to create a literary oxymoron—write a story that seems so real it takes readers out of their daily reality. That’s perhaps the hardest part of all this.
This is great advice put clearly. When I can think of something besides the heat, humidity, and sweat popping up in places annoying.
I also like the kindness in this paragraph; it is a sign of humility on the part of its writer.
Which is another reason writers shouldn’t be so bummed out when their work is rejected. A rejection is not an editor necessarily saying you don’t have good writing skills. Instead it should be read as your voice is not resonating with that particular reader. Keep that in mind, especially when you ask for feedback on your work. Editors and members of writing groups have a tendency to pick apart stories, offering criticisms about specific aspects of craft, and making them sound like there can be no other interpretation than, “your story isn’t ready.” In my own experience, though, I’ve found that the criticisms often contradict within the group. For example, one person might say they didn’t understand the main character’s motivation, and the next person might say they identified with the character completely.[1] Really what the critics might have said is that the voice just didn’t work for them. A writer can usually tell, though, especially when opinions about a submission are divided.
As the writer says towards the end, no concrete answers. That is fine; I have doubts about pronouncements that sound like the literary version of paint-by-the numbers. The most I get out of this advice - and the other advice I am posting here - is to make me think more broadly about my work. That is, not to just get it done, but to question my process of writing. Has it worked? Let me answer that when I finish the pudding. Until then, it is about applying the ideas to the work, so I need to get back to writing.
The COPD kicked in yesterday - too much humidity in the kitchen. I came home, piddled for about an hour and pretty much slept away for 12 hours.
The Senate's Republicans committed suicide yesterday; Lisa Murkowski made herself the post child for decadence, cowardice, and corruption:
Some will hope that this means a Democrat tidal ave next year when the MAGA troops realized they just old themselves out.
I doubt it. The Old Bolsheviks blamed themselves for being in Stalin's show trials. MAGA will be told this new law will make America Great. What the MAGA voters never ask is if MAGA's leaders include them in their vision of America.
When the SS slaughtered the SA, the Nazi party kept moving on towards the Final Solution. MAGA hates, and it is hate that occupies their minds. Hurt those who MAGA hates, MAGA will follow. What if MAGA followers die from poor medical care or starvation, or lose their jobs or their homes, so long as gays, trans people, immigrants, and minorities, and Democrats suffer?
There was a time in this country when such threadbare legal arguments would fail in a court of law—and these parents did, in fact, lose when their case went before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. But we live in a theocracy run by the six unelected law priests at the Supreme Court. Writing for the majority, Sam Alito found that the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion allows these religious parents to change the public school curriculum for their children. He ruled that parents are entitled to be notified in advance about any text that might offend their religious sensibilities, and that after receiving such notice, they must be allowed to pull their kids out of the lesson.
***
Alito’s opinion is flatly homophobic. There is no other way to put it. Alito is hysterically concerned about pronouns, repeatedly uses “scare quotes” around the acronym LGBTQ+, and consistently mischaracterizes the books at issue. As part of his supporting evidence, Alito includes pictures from the books in his opinion—pictures that, to the normal eye, merely show LGBTQ people existing. But Alito includes them as evidence of the deeply subversive nature of these books.
I agree with David Klion's State of Exception (The Drift) because I never saw any break between the Moral Majority that sprang to life with Reagan or the sociopathic Grover Norquist or John Yoo's fetish of the unitary executive and MAGA.
Many of Trump’s abuses are novel — no president has ever asserted such broad powers with so little legal or circumstantial justification, not to mention so little buy-in from the public and, especially, from the establishment. But Trump perceives, perhaps more clearly than Bush and his supporters ever did, that the post-9/11 state of exception never definitively ended. With its black sites, warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detentions, and extrajudicial assassinations, the War on Terror under Bush, Obama, and Biden provided a template for a more authoritarian approach to American governance that has never been properly dismantled — and that now, under Trump, is being fully exploited.
Well, enough of venting my spleen. Two days ago, I managed to get the correct ink for my printer. I have letters - real letters - to write. I have a shambles of an apartment to repair.
Reading Zachary Hardman's Kierkegaard's philosophy of love (Engelsberg ideas) explains some things about my depression and, I think, why I feel like I am on a much more even keel now.
I recognize my feelings while depressed in these paragraphs:
How, then, might the spiritual self be rescued? To answer that, we should briefly look at his earlier companion piece, The Concept of Anxiety. Anxiety, or angst, for Kierkegaard, the natural consequence of our fallen nature, is, far from being a negative emotion or an illness, the thing that marks us out as spiritual. Unlike animals – which are not, strictly, selves – we are conscious of myriad choices about how to live our lives. This produces in us anxiety – the ‘dizziness of freedom’ – as though we were looking into a chasm. The chasm is the boundlessness of our own possibilities. There is something infinite about possibility. Where we have possibility, we have imagination, desire, a movement toward becoming. In short, God. For Kierkegaard, God is that ‘all things are possible’.
If we lack possibility we live by pure necessity, from moment to moment, as animals do. Or in a world of triviality. This, for Kierkegaard, is spiritlessness. The spiritless subject ‘tranquilises itself in the trivial’ and, therefore, does not even know it is in despair. Spiritlessness manifests itself today in a rational-scientific attitude that whatever cannot be measured does not exist, in the banality of consumer culture, in the distractions of modern media. Kierkegaard asks: what are we distracting ourselves from? Without the distractions that prevent us from seeing the emptiness at the heart of our lives, we would have no choice other than to despair. For Kierkegaard, that would be a very good thing. The closer we come to despair, the closer we come to the remedy.
I mean feelings, not thoughts. The latter I pigeonhole as rational. Despondency - the word I favor for depression - deranges the rational; what feels like logical thought is only rational to the despondent. Feelings swamp and colonize the logical, and they are not pretty, happy, shiny thoughts.
My feelings come within these categories:
There are two forms of self-conscious despair he highlights. The first is the despair of not wanting to be ourselves. The desire here, really, is to be rid of the despair of being ourselves. We may despise being ourselves or pine after being someone else, perhaps a famous actor. But this – wanting to be rid of our despair – only intensifies our feelings of despair, which Kierkegaard calls ‘the rising fever in this sickness of the self’. The second type of despair he mentions is the despair of ‘wanting in despair to be oneself’. Though we may earnestly want to be ourselves, in perhaps trying to invent some better, less despairing version of ourselves, we avoid actually becoming ourselves. We may decide we must become prime minister, for example, but this is not really our self, so our despair intensifies even further.
I read similar things in Orthodox Christian writers:
Yet it is only when we are brought to the ‘utmost extremity, where in human terms there is no possibility’ that, for Kierkegaard, we accept ‘for God all things are possible’, which is to have faith. The person of faith puts his or her trust in God – for whom ‘all things are possible’ – knowing full well ‘that humanly speaking his destruction is the most certain thing of all’. This is irrational: ‘to have faith is precisely to lose one’s mind’.
Orthodox Christian recognizes explicitly the idea of a fool for Christ, Fool-for-Christ (OrthodoxWiki).
Back to the original essay, this helps me understand why I think of myself divorced from my old despondency:
Whether we rid ourselves of despair is, ultimately, our choice alone. But this notion of the single individual standing alone before God in fear and trembling is often held to be the weakness of Kierkegaard, who is criticised – including by some existentialists – for forsaking social relations for religious asceticism. When we dig deeper, we find this is only partly true. In the later Works of Love – his inquiry into the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour – Kierkegaard writes that: ‘Love is a relationship between: man-God-man, God is the middle term… For to love God is to love oneself in truth; to help another human being to love God is to love another man; to be helped by another human being to love God is to be loved’. If God, for Kierkegaard, is that ‘all things are possible’, then to love another person is to see the infinite possibility that dwells within them and to help them on the way to their realisation of the spiritual self. As we cannot fully know the other, this is an act of faith. It is to hope....
On the other hand, I had reams of philosophy in my head and my despondency censored all of it. It may be that I would have failed to recognize myself in what I knew.
See, I also ignored a favorite Lou Reed song.
What I would like to say now is that I was given enough breathing room to put what I had learned from philosophy, what I was learning from Orthodox Christian writers, what I knew from Lou Reed, was putting all this information into a system that let me live, to get past the self-destructiveness of my despondency, the utter revulsion I had towards living in this universe. In short, knowing the parts did not help until I found a way to connect them all.
If I did this, so can you. Oh, yeah, those who feel despondent do read Kierkegaard sooner than later. Like, in many ways, I am no one to emulate.
So, why is Lyon making this move? Well, it's not due to something in the water. Like the other European entities, Lyon's move is part of a broader strategy to achieve digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on Microsoft software. The simple truth is that many European-based governments no longer trust their data or software to American-based companies under President Donald Trump.
They fear their data could be read and that Microsoft could kill their services on Trump's behalf. While Microsoft Chairman and General Counsel Brad Smith dismissed such worries and promised that the company would stand behind its EU customers against political pressure, he hasn't managed to convince some European Union (EU) governments.
Melissa Donovan's How to Develop Your Best Novel Writing Ideas (Writing Forward) has me thinking of what I have done with "Love Stinks" (which as of today, everyone hates) and "Chasing Ashes" (which is still coalescing).
By identifying your passions, you can figure out what makes you tick, and that’s a great start to your quest for novel writing ideas that you can really sink your teeth into.
All your past and present obsessions hold the clues to your future commitment to your own novel. Pay close attention to your preferences for genre, theme, setting, style, character archetypes and above all — emotional sensibility. Make lists of what you love about your favorite stories, and soon you’ll see the shape of your own novel start to emerge.
"Love Stinks" hides my interests in history and memory and epistemology behind a love story of my version of the Bickering Bickersons.
"Chasing Ashes" has become more autobiographical over the past 15 years, and even something more political, more philosophical. A man comes home from prison trying to understand his place in America.
Actually, story ideas are everywhere. The trick is to collect a variety of ideas, and let them stew while you decide which one is worth your effort. Here are some quick tips for generating ideas:
Hit the bookstore or library and jot down some of your favorite plot synopses. Then rework the details to transform these old plots into fresh ideas for new stories. Try combining different elements from your favorite stories. And use movie synopses too!
Load up on fiction writing prompts and develop each prompt into a short (one page) summary for a story.
Harvest some creative writing ideas from the news.
Grab a subplot from your favorite movie or TV show — a story line that wasn’t fully explored — and make it the central story problem.
The impetus for "Love Stinks" came from reading reviews about writers writing unpleasant characters, from the idea that two people might love one another and never be wholly comfortable with each other, that a marriage maybe a redoubt from which to face the world.
"Chasing Ashes" comes out of trying to understand my life and how I could put it together after having done my best at destroying myself. There is the question of what history has wrought and my place in it. There is plenty of the news influencing it direction.
The best ideas rise to the top. These are not necessarily the bestselling ideas or the most original ideas. They’re the ideas that are best for you. Those are the ones that will haunt you, keep you up at night, and provoke perpetual daydreams.
These are the ones worth experimenting with.
Both novels are experiments, the success of either is doubtful.
In truth, the experimental phase is when you start writing the novel — just like the test drive is when you start driving the car. But you haven’t committed yet. You’re still open to the idea that this is not for you. This might seem like I’m nitpicking over semantics, but you’ll find that discarding partially written novels wears on you after a while. If you play around with your story with the understanding that you’re experimenting, and if things don’t work out, you can always walk away without feeling guilty or like you gave up. Go back to your idea stash, and start tooling around with the next one.
How do you experiment with novel writing? I’m so glad you asked. There’s a lot you can do. Start by brainstorming. Sketch a few characters. Poke around and see what kind of research this novel might require. Draft a few scenes. Write an outline. If you keep going through these motions and can’t shake your excitement, then you are finally . . .
I like the optimism here, it feels like permission to make a fool out of myself (well, even more than I have done so far in this life).
Many (or most) of your novel writing ideas might end up in the trash or in a bottom drawer. But every one of them will be worth it when all of that idea generating, planning, and experimenting finally pays off. Every idea that doesn’t work will pave the path to the idea that will set you on fire.
Where once I had accused Ngũgĩ of ideological overreach, I now began to perceive instead a kind of consistency, the rigor of a writer who refused the division, beloved by privileged literati, between aesthetic subtlety and moral clarity. Ngũgĩ’s fiction did not flatter the reader’s intelligence with ambiguity for its own sake. It confronted one with the burden of truth-telling in contexts where equivocation had long passed for sophistication. Ngũgĩ was not attempting to redeem history through art, as so many of our idols had attempted, but to insist upon literature as the record of history’s cost. Not the decorous gesture of memory, but its reckoning. Not sentiment, but responsibility.
From this essay, it sounds as if the truth-telling is brutal; certainly not genteel. What American would think of writing like this?
Ngũgĩ’s satire is not escapist; it records the surreal logic of dictatorship, where buttocks become protest and court flatterers chant nonsense with liturgical zeal. In such a world, absurdity becomes the most faithful mode of realism. That the novel remains free of bitterness is its most withering critique. It laughs not to soothe, but to expose. In its grotesque clarity, Wizard of the Crow speaks more truthfully of African postcolonial life than realism bound to interior psychology ever could.
I am struck and stuck by "interior psychology". Is the inability to write like Ngũgĩ is our American individualism. That we filter the culture through ourselves without being able to see the culture for itself? Or is inferiority our literature's defense against cinema's lack of interiority?
To read him seriously is to be reminded that literature, particularly in postcolonial societies, is not an indulgence but a duty. Ngũgĩ gives us no refuge in cleverness. He demands, rather, that we remember. That we mourn. That we articulate our condition not to explain it away but to expose it to light.
He is, I now see, not a writer one outgrows, but a writer to whom one returns—chastened, wiser, more exposed. The kind of figure who, like an elder too easily dismissed in youth, proves with time to have been speaking the truest language all along.
Gore Vidal wrote often enough of American's historical amnesia, he may be right. We now be paying the cost of that amnesia, and its counterparts, hagiography and mythology. Then I think of Toni Morrison's Mercy. Maybe Huckleberry Finn, even if I can think of nothing mourned by Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer putting an appearance muddled this novel for me). The possibility exists for us. We may need to take it up.
These traits predict 90% of failed novels
4 Critical Things Every Novel Must Have
9 Signs the Beginning of Your Novel Looks Promising
After listening to all of these videos, I tried running through "Love Stinks" in my mind. KH refuses to read the new opening; he really dislikes the characters. I have heard nothing from Joel (who I should be calling). Being neurotic, I cannot help think of further changes to the opening. (It also came to me today why I did not think of flash forwards.) I think I will implement them tomorrow - anyway, that's the plan, Stan.
The circular idea interests me. More so for "Theresa Pressley" - over which I fret the ending.
"The Sagging Middle" video brought me back to "Love Stinks". Since no editor liked the short story that occupies the middle section now, I think that will need to be rewritten. I will keep it as a short story - probably even more of a digression - rather than an essay.
Ocean Vuong is a name making the rounds right now. I have read an essay by him, if memory serves, and, if I did, I liked what he had to say. Tom Crewe's My Hands in My Face: Ocean Vuong’s Failure (London Review of Books) savages Vuong's novels. I put it into this post for what it has to say about the writing of novels.
... In order to support them, Hai, who has started using opioids again, but not in a way that causes much trouble, takes a job at a fast-food joint called HomeMarket. (Vuong once lived with an elderly woman with dementia called Grazina and worked at a fast-food joint called Boston Market.) That’s pretty much it, in terms of movement – and this is Vuong’s intention, since he claims (again, overestimating his novelty) to be doing something radical in breaking from the Aristotelian emphasis on catharsis, representing instead the great fact of ‘stasis’ in American working-class life.
Once again, the success of the novel hinges on its mode of presentation, and Vuong proceeds to exhibit all the same tendencies. Once again, there are hundreds of incoherent sentences and images.
***
Vuong has repeated the same observation in other interviews. Something he insists on in this context, while declaring that it is out of fashion (another dubious proposition), is the literary value of his own ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’. But the presumption that someone’s first impulse would be to leave their co-worker’s car stuck in a blizzard is that of a cynic (‘Writing became a medium for me to try to understand what goodness is,’ he has said. ‘I’ve been in dicey situations in my life where I realised early on, I just don’t have it’). This explains his strained attempt to communicate to the waiting world his discovery that people can be nice. V.S. Pritchett called sincerity ‘that quality which cannot be obtained by taking thought’. But Vuong’s sincerity is self-conscious and willed – he is constantly stoking it by shovelling on more and more words. It is why, despite his close identification with his characters and their class situation, he turns them into parodies (and their enemies into grotesques). He doesn’t imaginatively enter these lives, but stands outside them, waving for our attention so he can tell us what they mean.
Defending himself against the (generally indulgent) criticisms that have so far been made of his prose, Vuong has attributed his style – he claims, blasphemously, that it is a ‘19th-century’ style – to his sincerity, expressed as an opposition to ‘dogmatic values about clean lines, minimalism, restraint, control, rigour’. On the podcast Talk Easy, he suggested that these qualities ‘are the privileges of the wealthy’, whose sanitised, smoothed way of life ‘denies the corporeal reality of the body’....
***
An extravagant sentence can certainly be a thing of beauty; style is often by its very nature excess. But no writer can expect to be taken at their own self-estimation, and this emperor is wearing no clothes.
Decide for yourself if these words are helpful or not. Not having read Vuong's novels, I cannot say if they are an accurate criticism of his work. That did not really concern me when I was reading the review. I have read much touting sincerity and authenticity in current writing; those qualities can be false. The falseness seems to be in either presentation or substance. There was a controversy some years back about some Anglo writer writing as a Mexican. This was considered inauthentic. But what if a Mexican writer tells a story that misses capturing the truth of our existence that the Angl writer captured? Which one is the more authentic? Sincerity should come out in style. The Good Lord knows Theodore Dreiser was sincere; so was Upton Sinclair; neither is known as an exciting stylist. However, I cannot imagine a style like Marcel Proust would make them equally sincere. As for Proust, how he captures emotions would not be served writing like Dreiser. Personally, I like what Vuong describes as the qualities of his prose. It reminds me of what Nelson Algren wrote in Nonconformity. However, what I read in the review of Vuong's prose does inspire in any desire for emulation.
Not pitched directly to novel-writing, but that is its actual trajectory:
This post shambling along to this point is far past long enough - or far from long enough - and whatever good sense remains to me says finish this now, for now.
Okay, I have said this elsewhere: the presenter in the Book Focus videos is a bit intense; that does mean you will not learn from him. It may be that I have read several of the novels mentioned, and that I will stand with anyone who promotes Tom Robbins' Still Life With Woodpecker. The title for the following is Top Ten Transformative Novels That Break All The Rules.
Something a bit more practical - I like the circling around. A chapter as a short story.
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 6/29/2025]
What a change from The Invisible Man, or my European fiction writers. Out of Season comes from 1984. [6-29-2025: I forgot to mention in the original note that it is set in Indianapolis. sch.] It mentions Stark and Wetzel meats, Wasson's, and L.S. Ayres. I thought Ayres was still around in '84, and not all sure of Wasson's. I once got stuck in the elevator at the Wasson's in Eastgate. [6-29-2025: the next sentence I wrote back in 2014 makes no sense to me now: "Market Square still stands." There was never a Market Square Mall; there was a Washington Square Mall and the City Market. sch]
I cannot recall if this is the third or fourth Albert Samson detective novel I have read. I know Larry Sweazy gave me two, and I finished one. I recall reading one before those two. I cannot remember why I quit reading Lewin. Maybe because he was doing something I wanted to - write about a modern, realistic Indiana - and reminding me of my laziness, my cowardice. He still inspires me.
"Damn it, I want some answers. Unless you no longer know what is a truth and what is fiction."
Hoosier determination for survival comfortable swamped the learned submissiveness. "I know what happened in my life," she snapped. "Nobody else does."
[ I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order… Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. The date in the title is the date it was written. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars.sch 6/18/2025]
I need to get books read. The unit manager sicced his bully boy onto our unit. Allegedly, most prominently, because we have been ranking between 4 and 6 in inspections for most of this year. He also mentioned the disappearing shower nozzles and the guys (all sex offenders) driven out of their rooms (except for counts and sleeping). That one of the counselors was removed - allegedly for introducing contraband - got a mention that was more an announcement, but never was any explicit connection made with the increased inspections (I did that). After all, the meal rotation inspections have no apparent rationality, or we would not be second this week. The inspection that put us into second place occurred before the enhanced inspections. One more reason for calling this place Franz Kafka land. Also, the unit manager's promise to do something about the black mold and the dripping water pipes remain unfulfilled. These inspections have as much to do with meal rotation standing as I have any longer with polite society.
But I got three pillows to hide. I have two extra blankets. I got the Norton's Anthology of English Literature and volume one of Shelby Foote's Civil War history, on which I perch my CPAP machine. I put them into the locker, along with pillows and one of my blankets. I must get room, and that means the books must go. Which, for me, means reading them, not discarding them
And I had a rather bad bout of depression. Joel C. read over "Mike Devlin's Homecoming". He spotted one problem I had seen - it is not quite as much a standalone storey as I think they all ought to be. He also pointed out a flaw I did not see. I wanted Devlin to be a hope for others. This hope was to be an illusion. I see this installment's overt theme to be illusions. Devlin has his illusions: his independence from nostalgia, that he can go back to his pre-prison life, that he has time to accomplish his goals, that his son will appreciate the father's absence, and all he needs for success is will power. The other main characters have their illusions about Devlin. The problem Joel saw was I had not given the reader enough reason to believe in their hopes/illusions. That I already killed Mike Devlin influenced me. From that flaw, I think I found another with pacing. I put a lot into this. I also had a problem with obsessional behavior.
Depression started creeping in with my questioning if I have any talent for writing. I know I am doing something. Then I ponder just how good is my judgment now. I will myself to patience, for feedback from outside of this place. I tell myself it takes me four drafts to get over my laziness of mind. This was the third draft.
It did not help T2 that last evening hung up the telephone rather than take my call. More about that later.
I will make Devlin think of his life as empty as mine has been. It may be another illusion. He will continue. I came up with this phrase: To not be a Captain Ahab without a Pequod.
Draft four awaits typing paper. Actually going to work on draft 3.5 longhand. We have been out of copying/typing paper for about a week now. The guys running the gambling here went wild, copying their betting slips. This does give me time to read.
I finished Best European Fiction 2010 (edited by Aleksander Hemon; Dalkey Archive Press, 2010) last night. I feel pummeled by the experience. Yet it made me want to get back to writing by telling me how far I had gotten off the path when I turned down TJ's offer to let me write. Yet, I cannot put my finger what exactly moved me.
Then come the stories I think of as fantasy without the satire. The story is a character in David Albahari's "The Basilica in Lyon." The Faust story makes an appearance in Julian Rio's "Revelation on the Boulevard of Crimes" and the Messiah in George Konrad's "Jeremiah's Terrible Tale". What I will call magic realism appears in Valter Hugo Mae's "dona malva and senhor jose ferreiro" (ghosts) and Orna Ni Choileain's "Camino" (a seer) without stilting the storytelling. Not that I have found any use, but in a story already written. Yet, it gives me ideas.
I suggest reading the biographies and writer statements in a book like this. Here I got ideas, here I got inspiration, and here is where I saw how far I got away from my dreams of writing. TJ and my oldest sister condemned me at different times of being against dreams. I recall being deflated, taken aback by both accusations. I never meant to be so critical, such a realist. No one has asked me what dreams I had or might have. Maybe I dreamt too largely. Maybe I never expected, never wanted, to live so long. I was far too superficial because I thought I had no time. But I do not remember anyone telling me they really wanted me to stick around. Not you, TJ. Not you T2. Nobody came back to get me. I had to get sent to prison before my dreams about writing could bear any fruit.
I need to write honestly about what I know. The Europeans got this idea through my head. Then I must write well. This was also beaten into my head. I may not pull off a story like Jon Fosse's "Waves or Stone", but I can try. I thank all of them who I forgot to mention.
I move onto Michael Z. Lewin's Out of Season (William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1984) Thirty years old, it came out that year of Phyllis and Michele Moon and an angry TJ; of leaving Muncie and starting law school; of hopes remaining. I recognize the Indianapolis of this novel - even if I had no idea of gay bars in Indianapolis. That would LAH telling me of them. I wonder if Lewin still lives. Is he in print? This is not the first of his books I have read. I liked the fellow. I will have to make my mind up about how I like him. I go on towards a less crowded locker.
