First of all, it's time for my Second Annual Bradbury Marathon. I've already read Bradbury's biography The Bradbury Chronicles, From the Dust Returned, re-read Dandelion Wine and read it's sequel Farewell Summer, and now I'm reading one story a day from his collection Long Past Midnight. It promises to be another wonderful Bradbury summer.
The thing is, I find myself once again really thinking about what it is I want to write. Not necessarily genre - the weird and strange and supernatural is my home. It's those types of stories that get me out of bed at 2:30 in the morning. And Billy the Kid is still a go, because that's also the type of story I adore: an anti-hero slugging it out against impossible odds and his own personal demons and the world's demons to save the day, that doomed, cursed hero with scarring and damage but a bright, shining soul that won't let him quit. And it's also highly mythic, an epic Weird Western. As soon as this novella is done, the summer will be dedicated to finishing Billy the Kid.
But I've been reconsidering the tone and intent of my short stories. Things Slip Through, coming November 2013, represents what I consider to be the best of my early work, and also, for the first time, introduces my little haunted town, Clifton Heights, New York. It's my Castle Rock, Cedar Hill, and Green Town. And they're good stories I'm really proud of.
However, in reading Ray Bradbury's biography, I found what I think is going to be the turn-key in how I feel about my short fiction (note: I didn't say the turnkey for my SUCCESS. Just how I feel about the short work I produce).
Bradbury was a hopeless idealist. Someone once accused of him being over-nostalgic and a sentimentalist and his response was: "You're goddamn right I am!" He was able to take that magical view of the world and mine his personal experience to produce some of the best work we've ever seen.
I'm no Bradbury and never will be. But I'm a hopeless idealist and highly sentimental and nostalgic. I believe in a higher power, that our lives have purpose and meaning. And lately, my eye has been turning ever toward my childhood as a source of material. I have a novella which I REALLY HOPE FINDS A HOME with a major publisher right now which, even though still set in Clifton Heights, is my first attempt at this personal type of writing. The second is the novella I'm about to finish up and send out.
The thing is...I'm not sure if all these stories will really be horror. I mean, the current novella I'm finishing up definitely is, but other one I've recently sent out isn't. It may or may not be supernatural, but it's not horror. And all the other short stories I've been thinking about lately aren't really horror either, though they delve in the realms of the fantastic.
And they're probably going to be hopelessly sentimental and idealistic. And, I've come to the point in which I just don't care.
Because that's me.
So I'm going to write these stories without a clear idea where I'll send them (more on that in another blog, because that's caused much fodder for thought also). But they'll be ME on the page, more than ever, and I'm excited about that. This whole thing started just a year ago, when Madi and I spent the night at my Dad's house. Sleeping in my childhood bedroom, on inspiration, I churned out the following and posted it to Facebook. This and Billy the Kid is what's really got me excited about writing this summer:
(long)
So, here it
is. How much of this is true, and how much of it is made up? I'm not
going to say, though I will admit to changing all last names and most
first names. However, for those I went to high school with - if any
of you read this - please keep the following in mind: it is, however
"autobiographical", in the end, fiction. And if I've turned
things that really happened on their head, the reason why is
expressed perfectly in the following quotes, by authors Neil Gaiman
and Tim O'Brien:
"Stories
may well be lies, but they are good lies that say true things, and
which can sometimes pay the rent.” ― Neil Gaiman
"Fiction
is the lie that helps us understand the truth." - Tim O'Brien
Is this the
novel I'm planning on self-publishing? Well, I'm not sure. But, it's
a story I'm passionate about, the story I've always wanted to write,
and I think that if I really want to see if self-publishing works, I
have to try with something I really care about, something I consider
to be my best work, ...and this, I think, will be it.
***
Prologue
I wrote my
first novel in this bed. Every night, hidden under the covers.
Sweating in the stuffy air as my flashlight burned away the darkness,
my Number Two pencil scratching out a story across the lined pages of
a spiral-bound MEAD notebook with a turquoise-blue cover, an
uncontrollable urge gripping my mind to get it all down, as fast as I
could, every single night. What had started as an exercise in idle
curiosity - a requested short story for a proposed school newspaper -
had blossomed into a manic explosion of creativity the likes of which
I'd never before experienced.
Of course,
the newspaper never got printed. Either the students or the newspaper
moderator or maybe even our computer teacher, Mrs. Trueax, lost
interest, I can't remember which. But at that point, it didn't
matter. I was a lost cause. Hooked, like a new junkie, I was
main-lining the hard stuff, writing a "novel" about my
life, every single night, under those bed covers by weak, jittery
flashlight.
I had never
felt anything like that before.
And, even
with my modest list of publications now, I'm not sure I've felt that
way since, felt that burning, consuming need to tell my story.
And it all
began here.
In this
bed, where I'm writing this, right now, in this room that's basically
become a "catch-all,” where Dad stores stuff he hasn't got any
other place for. But much of the original furniture is still here,
and if I close my eyes, I can see in my head everything as it was,
years ago.
A tall
bureau stands directly to my left. Gone are all the assorted race car
models I'd arranged on top as a kid, hours of cutting and trimming
and gluing and painting and decaling long past, now. Not sure where
those models are. Maybe long-since thrown away, or stored in a box up
in the garage loft or down in the basement, somewhere.
My bed -
which I'm lying in, right now - sits where it always has, headboard
against the far wall, in the middle of the room. Against the opposite
side of the room stands my very first bookshelf. Growing up, it had
been crammed full of all kinds of books: the entire Hardy Boys
collection, old westerns and pulp novels given to me by my late,
great-grandmother, junior-grade and Young Adult titles long-lost to
me, now; The Chronicles of Narnia, Choose Your Own Adventure novels,
everything you can think of, and maybe more.
Eventually,
my junior year of high school, and into my freshman and sophomore
years of college (I attended the local community college, lived at
home for those two years), I replaced those books with a heady
collection of science fiction novels, most notably the Star Wars and
Star Trek novels, movie tie-ins, and anything written by Robert
Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub,
Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft I discovered later, after I moved
into my first apartment with my sister.
Now that
bookshelf is full of Dad's books: war memoirs, old engineering and
manufacturing handbooks, math and physics textbooks, his Boy Scout
Handbook, and his only literary concession: James Fenimore Cooper's
Leatherstocking Tales, which he made me read the summer after my
seventh grade year, (along with Pilgrim's Progress, The Pit and the
Pendulum, and The Cask of Amontillado), and which I remember fondly,
good old Natty Bumpo and his trusty rifle Deerslayer, which never,
ever let him down.
To my left,
further down the wall, next to my dresser, still stands the desk I
built all my model race cars on, its wooden top scored by countless
flicks of all those silver XACTO knives cutting through plastic or
balsa wood or cardboard. Little splotches of sliver or metallic blue
or orange paint still linger. I'd labored there for endless hours,
building race cars of every kind, size and shape, from kits, or from
spare parts and scratch. During my childhood, works-in-progress had
perpetually littered the desk, along with assorted little glass
bottles of Testors' enamel, and Testors' squeeze bottles of plastic
cement, as well as bottles of Elmer's Glue.
I remember
being an avid, enthusiastic, productive but only average modeler, not
nearly patient or meticulous enough to build the perfect, pristine
model car I'd always wanted, but what I lacked in precision, I made
up for in enthusiasm and effort and production...oddly enough, a lot
like my writing career, so far.
In the far
right corner - from my perspective, here in bed - is, of course, the
closet. Where the monsters hid at night, very early in childhood.
Left open after dark, it became a portal to unknown, alien worlds
through which Stygian night beasts would lurch, eager to strip the
flesh from my bones with gleaming, obsidian teeth (Believe it or not,
this fear emerged long before I discovered Poe or Lovecraft).
Of course,
when a little older - say, six or seven or eight years old - I often
hid in that closet when in trouble and awaiting the wrath of my
father, who, it had been promised, was going to teach me “a lesson
when he gets home, young man!"
Once, in a
desperate, hysterical, heart-pounding vigil that lasted maybe ten
minutes until I got bored and slipped out my window to tramp around
in the woods behind my house until Dad did arrive home and dispensed
said lesson, I wrote on the closet's back wall in black crayon: "I
hate you!" only to scribble it out immediately, convinced that
if I happened to die in the next five minutes, I'd be committed to
the fiery bowels of hell for such sinful graffiti.
Against the
right wall stands another, shorter clothes dresser. Years ago, I kept
my old toy record player on top, with its cheap, tinny-sounding
speakers, which played Star Wars dramatizations (turn the page when
R2-D2 beeps!), Tim and Tammy Bible Stories, (the Bakers in happier,
simpler times, before fame and power and greed and Jessica Hahn and
Playboy), and best of all, my collection of Disney movie records. To
this day, I know most of the Jungle Book's songs by heart, thanks to
that record player.
Later, of
course, my aunt's old Hi Fi system - complete with tape deck and
eight track player - replaced the toy record player atop that
dresser. On it, I played the Queen records and AC DC eight tracks my
aunt surreptitiously slipped me one weekend at my grandparents, and I
also went through an amateur Hi Fi-dabbler stage, wiring together car
radio speakers salvaged from the junk cars littering Grandpa Collins'
hay fields, glueing them into a cardboard box with holes cut out,
soldering or sometimes even just taping the wires together, creating
my own, home-made, jury-rigged "sound system" that I then
jacked into my stereo.
I'm a
little surprised, in retrospect, that I didn't set anything on fire
during that phase.
To my
direct right, under the window, sits my homework (and later, writing)
desk. Here, during high school, I reluctantly but dutifully labored
over fractions, division, multiplication, Pythagorean Theorem,
kinetic and potential energy, and, my junior year, summarizing each
and every chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which
I loathed then, but fell in love with later in graduate school.
By that
time, of course, my bedtime was a thing of the past, so I no longer
had to write under the covers by flashlight, rather I sat at that
desk late into the night, and wrote some of my earliest - and awful -
short stories, by hand and later on a Texas Instruments Word
Processor, mostly lame attempts at space opera that never made it
past Analog or Asimov's Science Fiction's slush readers, and several
Star Wars pastiches, back when I labored under the delusion that I
was destined to someday write a Star Wars novel (although, truth be
known, I still labor under this delusion in secret, often sitting in
my basement office, staring wistfully at my shelves of Star Wars
novels, imagining my name on one of their spines).
And, after
a tour of this room, we come back to this bed, inevitably. Because it
was here where I first realized that putting words on paper, making a
story, took me away to some far off, magical place, where my
characters - people I'd made - lived and breathed as my pencil moved,
and when I stopped writing, when my pencil fell still, they stopped
living and breathing, stuck in limbo until I started writing again.
Right here,
in this bed.
Like me,
tonight.
Initially,
Dad had invited Madison, my daughter, to sleep over alone. Dad loves
both my kids dearly (my son Zack amuses him to no end; he gets quite
the 'kick out of him', as they used to say), but I sometimes think he
dotes especially on Madison. Whatever the occasion - feeding the
chickens, milking the goats, walking in the woods, fishing in the
beaver pond just down the road - he takes her in hand with remarkable
ease. Could be he's bonding so well with her because she's at that
fun age of perpetual wonder and discovery, when EVERYTHING is amazing
and new, and he's just fulfilling the role of doting grandfather.
I often
wonder, however, how much of me he sees in Madi (because, as Abby
puts it, Madi is "you with a pony-tail"), and if he's
especially drawn to her because of that. This may be a bit of
self-flattery, but I'll take it, gladly.
However,
despite Dad's easy way with Madi, Abby and I were a little concerned
about how Madi would handle herself, thirty-minutes away in the deep,
quiet country, on a sleep-over alone, with no Mom and Dad if, for
some reason, she had a nightmare, or simply had a hard time sleeping
in strange surroundings. For all her expressive vocabulary and
sophistication and maturity, Madi is very much still a seven year old
little girl, especially at night.
So, I
decided it'd be best if Madi and I slept over at Mom and Dad's
together; Madi sleeping in her aunt's old bedroom, and me on the
couch in the living room because, as I've already said, over the
years my old room had become a store room of sorts. However, much to
my surprise, Mom had cleaned off the bed and cleared the floor prior
to our arrival, and after a fine night roasting marshmallows and hot
dogs around a fire, listening to crickets chirp and coyotes howl,
watching for shooting stars, picking out the Big and Little Dipper,
we retired for the night, Madi to her aunt's old room and bed, and me
to my room.
To this
bed.
Where it
all started.
And as soon
as I bedded down, a torrent of childhood memories bombarded me, so -
in-between projects right now - I pulled out my notebook and began
writing.
Because
this summer, especially, I've been thinking often of my childhood.
Maybe it's
because of the wonderful summer we've just about finished:
clear and hot every day, filled with adventures and excursions and
milestones. Madi, catching her first garter snake, barehanded. Her
and I building a fort and campsite in the woods, catching crayfish
for lunch from the creek down the road, spending hours on the beach,
where Madi passed the deep end swim test for the first time while I
spent hours delightfully working my way through Karl Edward Wagner's
Year's Best Horror short story collections and Charles Grant's
Shadows anthology series.
Taking
day trips to used book stores, discovery centers, the library, the
zoo - Ross Park, the oldest zoo in the country, and the perfect
setting for a ghost story I'm determined to write someday. Seeing the
falls and visiting curiosity shops in nearby Ithaca, driving its
brick streets and enjoying its beatniky Commons. Madi and I coming
here once a week to pick blueberries and poke aimlessly around the
"old homestead", as Dad likes to call it (he's added two
buildings, a greenhouse, two chicken coops, another berry patch, and
a small barn in the last twenty years), and walking in the woods
where my sister and I and our friends camped and tramped, as well as
visiting the railroad tracks running through the woods, right behind
Mom and Dad's.
And also,
on a more somber note, near the end of the summer, Madi biding
farewell to her favorite of our two pets, Peanut, a thirteen year old
tabby cat who'd suffered a stroke, bravely carrying Peanut in her
lap, comforting her all the way to the veterinarian’s, and before
Peanut was put to sleep, quietly, calmly - and so maturely for a
seven year old - kissing Peanut on the head, whispering "Goodbye"
before going out into the waiting room, where she prayed that Peanut
have a special place in Cat Heaven.
A week
later, we found a special rock in a creek at Dad's, and he engraved
it with Peanut's name, and we placed it on her grave out back. And,
showing the amazing resilience of youth, Madi - after waiting a
respectable period of about a week - began eagerly inquiring into the
recent batch of kittens her Aunt Mindy's cat had given birth to,
wondering whether or not they were old enough yet to adopt.
And it was
this, in particular, that REALLY unleashed the memories of my youth,
opening the floodgates on one year, especially. Death has a way of
doing that, of course, because from Death comes Life. It's simply the
way pf things, probably one of the first, and most powerful lessons
we ever learn.
And yes, it
was only the death of a thirteen year old cat that had suffered a
stroke and had to be put to sleep because of old age...
But still.
The things that trigger our memories, setting our minds into motion,
are often the smallest, most trivial things, and those small, trivial
things turn like keys in our minds, unlocking gigantic doors to
memories equal parts fantastic and terrible. Watching Madi so
maturely and sensitively encounter death for the first time reminded
me of when I first experienced death, when someone my age died on
the railroad tracks behind my home, and when one of my closest
friends and teammates drowned in the river behind the school,
probably by accident, a tragic dare gone horribly wrong.
Probably.
No one still knows for sure.
And those
memories, sparked by Peanut's death, turned like a BIG key in an even
bigger set of doors, warning me of what loomed ahead, that, after
putting the final touches on my first collection of good and maybe
entertaining and technically proficient but not astounding nor
especially important short stories, and while the first draft of a
Weird Western novel featuring Billy the Kid and demons was being
ripped apart by beta readers, it was finally TIME. Time to turn my
attention towards my "holy grail", my magnum opus, the
ubiquitous "coming of age" novel, or the
"author's-thinly-veiled-creative-rendering-of-his-childhood-as-he-wishes-it-actually-happened"
novel. Or something like that, anyway.
For years,
I had worried that, when it came time to write this novel, I wouldn't
have much to say about my childhood, that it wasn't all that special,
really. Abjectly normal, pedestrian, vanilla, rather boring, even -
as I recalled - nothing all that exciting to write about.
But as it
turns out, I was wrong.
Because I'd
been thinking of my "coming of age novel" as a writer
plotting his next project, considering my childhood through the
filters of adulthood, my imagination bogged down by flat tires and
ruined transmissions and rusted mufflers and broken timing belts and
bad power steering, replacing water heaters and septic tanks,
budgeting for bills we can't pay with money we don't have and the
grind of my own studies and teaching career. Viewed through this
lens, colored by these very grown-up things, my childhood seemed far
away and depressingly average, indeed.
But
everything this past summer - from our daily adventures, our annual
family vacation in the Adirondacks, even the somber introduction of
death into Madi's life - everything that's happened this past summer
has unearthed a reservoir deep inside me, one I hadn't realized still
existed. A cascade of memories has filled my head, making me realize
how strange and wonderful and sad and joyous and spiritual and
MAGICAL my childhood really was, and with that realization came
another realization, shocking in its utter simplicity: it doesn't
matter if things actually happened the way I remember them. It only
matters that I remember.
And I
remember how everything began, that one year, when Al Moreland died
on the railroad tracks behind my house.
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