"All these novels unwritten..."

I’ve written something like this before, I’ll admit, and it had virtually the same title, and I’m going to use it as a guide here, but since I wrote it out, a sort of outline on dead-ended plots, I’ve come up with some new ideas, and these are less tried and killed, but rather more insubstantial and uncertain, like a pitcher who does well in college, but has yet to show any big league talent.

When the last Harry Potter book came out, Rowling read the first two chapters at a sort of opening party for the book…I think it was the first two chapters. My father said that he’d rather she just sort of said, “Okay, here’s how the story goes…” and spewed on about it for a while, which I thought was a preposterous idea then and still think of as a preposterous idea now, but only because of situation. This was a book that was in a series, we knew the theme of it already, the style was nothing new. Now if it was a book she hadn’t finished writing yet or one that was just getting ready to be published, but was a stand alone kind of thing, then it would make more sense.

Not that what I’m doing here makes any sort sense.


“A papier-mâché Mephistopheles”

This is the novel that I’m writing in my head right now. It’s a female narrator and I’m looking at unlikely sources for ideas on how I can approach the concept of male writer writing in female voice—Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone, which has just a brilliant title; so far the first book of Lee Goldberg’s Monk series, original novels based on the characters of the USA show that’s now entering its last season, oddly enough, this book, Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse, has been since adapted into an episode of the show, presenting the sort of continuity issues that I find quite interesting; The Spy Who Loved Me, a book I haven’t gotten yet, Fleming’s only first person Bond novel. The plot of the story concerns a mid-2020s school reunion that reintroduces our heroine with the stock character “one who got away,” which I’ve been developing in my mind as some sort of self-pitying semi-successful novelist, autobiographical, only a better man than I am in virtually all ways. The first part of the story I see as the standard romantic comedy, with our narrator watching the now fifteen to twenty year old films The Holiday and Music and Lyrics among others, actually imagining herself attempting to stop her love from getting married, sort of a smart chick flick, as our narrator, her name being Samantha McGee, I believe (the writer named maybe something along the lines of Brad…something, I don’t know…maybe even three names), evaluating her life as it goes through all the little flutters and flights of such films. Then, after this, I’d liked to move onto a new genre, a sort of novel of ideas, about the two of them teaching each other their contrasting views of the world, learning new things, changing their minds. The backdrop of the last section is the presidential election of 2028, whose leading candidates present our couple with a dilemma, since Sam’s family is related by blood, however murkily, to one candidate, who bares their last name, but she is considering voting the other way. An idea I have, for her mother to be coming out of prison in the first section, for gauging how their relationship is changing, is also evaluated here. And then with a final concluding story that is vastly formless in my mind, but hopefully brings us into a new genre again, something, maybe ten to fifteen years later, and—an idea that occurs to me as I type—that could be built our protagonists looking forward, observing, and thinking about the effect of some future event along the lines of ‘69’s moon landing. Think of it as skiffy written with the style of yesteryear, our characters are older, and think differently, perhaps some juxtaposing sentences thrown in, like the carbon copies that Easton Ellis does in Less Than Zero and American Psycho.


“A Working Class Hero”

An epistolary novel between old friends who have grown out of touch; one is running for president, the other is only trying to make ends meet. A sort of rolling narrative might form, but I’d like to keep it in letters…I don’t think I’ll write this book until after I’ve read Dracula and The Gum Thief, and hopefully I’ll get more ideas about it from there. Eventually, the book would expand, and we’d get more letters written by different people to characters we already know, probably, that’s the idea anyway, when approaching an entire book as fragmentary as one made of letters, I think you can fall to breaking style quite quickly. The last story/letter/whatever would probably end on someone saying they were listening to the John Lennon song the other day and then slowly, mid sentence, our book ends. Maybe it starts out the same way, just half of a letter fragment, to we don’t know, from who knows where. And maybe I’d incorporate little articles from Paul Kuberg, my little fictional journalist into this one. Also, now that I think about it, in “paper-thin” the short hand I’d give to the book listed above (the one for this one would be “hero” or “working” probably depending on what I’m talking about exactly), we’d have a bit of this too, since our narrator would read from the books of the writer, Brad Something. I don’t know how well I could write an entire epistolary novel, though, this seems like something that could truly leak through my hands quickly and surely.


“roadkill”

This one is the most haphazard. I have the title, I have the immediate idea and then it goes haywire. The narrator might be a writer. He’s disconnected from his father, perhaps knows that his father had an affair, but never told his mother, perhaps not. Mother and wife both die in a car crash. What I want to stir up with the title is the same sense of “ick” that I got from first reading about Bag of Bones, and it being about a writer and his dead wife. Now, in King’s book, the bag of bones has nothing to do with his wife, is actually continuously referenced as all even the best characters can be. In mine, roadkill is meant to mean, sickeningly, the narrators lost wife and mother, and perhaps he would characterize their bodies as that in the book at some point. I want to write a book where our narrator begins to become unreliable, his writing goes crazy, and perhaps he becomes haunted by ghosts of his family that the narrative leaves to you to decide if they are real or not. And that’s probably all I’m willing to write about this one in the stone of the internet at the moment.


“All these novels unwritten…”

A placeholder title—This would be a book about a writer named Mike (I’ve started a few of the stories and figured that much out), somewhat my form of Mike Noonan, the main character of Bag of Bones, more so just a name I’ve picked, since I consider myself particularly bad at coming up with character names. The novel would actually be more of a short story collection with perhaps some framing involved, but I’m not too sure on that part. What it would consist of are these little vignettes that vary in style and more so in genre, since I do want to make it all in somewhat the same voice. These would be purposely in haphazard chronological order, and perhaps the full extent of an idea of come up with called “hiding a novel,” which I’m sure is not entirely new and created by me, is probably not even coined this for the first time by me, but is an interest of mine lately. The idea would be that the novel—defined somewhat as a singular work of length that is sometimes broken up into chapters and the like, but is still over all unified by more than just a common characters or setting—calling anything that doesn’t fit this as something akin to the concept album of books, rather than the rock opera, which would be the novel. The lead story to this would be called “The Ghost Story,” and although the rest would probably not have such vague, weak names, they probably all would start in the word “The,” linking them, as these are the specific work in this book, that represents the story with that title. “The Ghost Story” itself, which I’ve started, has a bit of a frame around a campfire and the campers look to Mike for a story, since he’s the novelist with the group. I think this would be a book like Bag of Bones or Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, not in comparison as to skill, obviously, but as to theme, since neither of those are truly about plot, but more about writing than anything else. My own pseudo-writing-memoir, if I had the talent to write it as such, which I might not. Another story which I’ve started would be “The Great Novel Race,” and it might be a closer to the collection or just one somewhere stuck in the middle, slightly closer to the back. This story would take a look at writing that mirrors Junot Diaz’s speaker, Yunior, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, since there would be some distance between Mike and his subjects who are involved in, obviously, a race to finish writing novels. I would love to be able to capture the sort of commentary on writing that Chabon gets in Wonder Boys here. And then there would probably be at least half a dozen other stories there, each perhaps averaging thirty pages, with maybe thirty pages of frame spliced in.


“A Light in the Dark”

This would be a third person story, one I’ve written once, when I was in fifth grade, but one that derived into an alien invasion story. This, to me, is still a good title for it. Story about Jack Kraloni who’s a detective suffering black-outs and a series of killings going on, and Jack starts to wonder if someone isn’t doing them in his body while he’s decommissioned. Obviously written better than that was. Guest stars would be basically every character I’ve ever written with the thought of them being in more than one story.

And I call this “All these novels unwritten…” with a touch of my general pessimism, since I’ve never written a satisfactory novel, these will probably be forever never written.


8:04PM Wed 8/12/09
Def: 0.5pp

"Smash my head to make it spin"

Starting it off with a title taken from “Thrashing Days” by The Notwist, what might be apparent from the tag I’ve put on today’s post is that I see this one as little snippets, clips, like a news update, bite-sized little morsels. Think of each new title as a headline or better yet, as the cards they show before the scenes in episodes of Frasier.


“Print as the Phoenix”

There’s been much debate about how much longer paper publishing is going to be able to hold on and not enough insight into which way it is really heading. We are not approaching so much an end to books, but a specialization of them. As Jay Leno talks about how electric cars will allow gasoline vehicles to become niche items, the same is going to grow true for paper. When it comes down to it, people are going to have to want to read books, and not screens that replicate books to near exactness (and believe me, they aren’t that far away from getting there).

The great thing about paper, though, is its versatility. The free newspaper is generally well received and considered unmenacing, has an approval rating leaps and bounds above junk email. Warren Ellis has an idea of a company that takes a set number of blogs that you like, collects a word count or an entry count, page count, whatever would work best in this case, and spits you out a paper every now and then. I’m not sure how developed his idea is, and I don’t have his blog post handy at the moment (I know, I know, I’m playing this one close to the chest), so I guess I’ll just have to assume that I’m adding to his thoughts, but if not, his idea is brilliant enough in its own to be spread. How I would tweak this is through mail delivery and ad space. Suddenly you have regionalized ads floating around, perhaps even better than TV. You have a publishing company making a newspaper out of individual blogs that all they have to do is get a minor profile on, and I would expect advertisers to go wild. The best kind of commercial is the one that’s selling something the customer is likely to want, doncha know?

So I’m also thinking, how hard would it be to take this and streamline it a little bit, make the paper something you just write off, send out to everyone in a certain area, perhaps collect profile posts of different bloggers, the like, would this sort of thing have a market? And if so, suddenly money and advertising can come from all sides. Bloggers hoping to boost their credit to companies and thus sell more ad space could pay this company to publish them and then you have the same process. Or you can piggyback this into the first idea; add a new blogger to each copy sent to a perspective reader, sort of like TiVo suggesting new shows I might like.

The reason that the newspaper is going out of style definitely has nothing to do with the newsprint itself, but with the fact that television news and the internet make your regular newspaper obsolete. But think about a collection of different people’s minds, made manifest in your hands to open and read their thoughts. And whether or not this is a group that you have chosen for yourself, I seriously doubt that there’s anyway that clicking between tabs is going to be seen as a cooler thing than just turning pages.


“Baseball as the Human Sport”

In Futurama, of course, if I remember correctly, there is some humor poked at baseball’s history. As America’s pastime, it is easy to foresee that most of the problems that the country might face would be mirrored in its ballgame, its relaxing night on the couch with a beer and the son watching the country stage little city versus city or league versus league rivalries. From 9/11’s delaying the season into October (its notorious play off month) and pushing the World Series into November, baseball and the country have sure come a long way. But when we go back, we have a time when baseball would actually make the first move, like watching your mirror reflection part your hair a different way, before you begin to do so yourself. What I am talking about is the story of Jackie Robinson, which is one I’ll assume you know moderately well. Although conditions were not as they should’ve been, baseball did take steps towards integration before the country, as a whole, under Johnson, would begin to resolve this growing problem of second-class citizenry. Tracing back from number 42’s unprecedented career, we are led to the silver lining of baseball’s segregation: the Negro Leagues. Supplying a new think tank on baseball and a new experimentation process, these independent baseball leagues would help form some of today’s endearing concepts in the majors—fan voting in the All-Star Game, inter-league play, etc. And it is this era that Futurama parodies. Bender is of course a fan of the robot blernsball (an evolved form of baseball played in the 3000s) players who are not allowed to play in the big leagues. This paragraph thus serves as a caution that I do not mean to point out that baseball is a sport without robots with the title to this section.

What I do mean to portray here is that baseball is a sport that will always come down to someone calling the game. Replays should not ever be allowed outside of their current use in home run calls, and balls and strikes should vary from umpire to umpire. This is an idea that baseball itself even upholds in its uneven ball parks, that once they stretch past the infield diamond, can become completely different affairs, perhaps built to suit particular stars of the team playing there at the time or only incidentally brought up to cause certain peculiarities and differences. From turf to grass, even, baseball fields have their own characteristics, like people in their own ways. From the baggie in right field of the Metrodome to Tal’s Hill in deep center of Minute Maid Park in Houston, baseball presents its venues as each a little different, each needing a little time to get used to.

And that’s really what makes the game what it is. Because everything is a little bit different, a little bit more left to chance, in a baseball game. And with 162 games per team per year for the regular season, each game is like meeting someone new.


“My Novel as a Movie Franchise”

The book that I have mainly in my head right now is growing in its own way, little bits of plot, tiny shards of knowledge forming in my mind that will hopefully be able to be pieced back together into a worthwhile mirror once again at the end of the day. It’s an odd thing, because I think I’m so used to short stories, things that have beginnings, middles, and ends, whereas a book can obviously have those as well, but the middle generally becomes its own set of crests and troughs, that are, in their own right, new beginnings, and new ends.

What is interesting to me at the moment is how I’ve been basing all my stories in the same sort of universe for a while now, basically our own, but with a hazy illustrator who leaves key differences here and there, as well as major ones that could in themselves be written of in stories (one of which I have begun writing), and now this book has somewhat spiraled forward and planted itself into this world that I had already begun to create.

This is what Tolkien did, definitely, and what Alan Moore suggests. Sort of like starting with the setting of a picture before you paint any people in it. And, even though this isn’t generally the way I write things, I like the way my mind is thinking right now.

The original Casino Royale film was actually a satirical James Bond film in 1967, and even though this film may not have been greatly well received, I think it does go somewhere we rarely see, which is a film franchise that not only switches leads or minor characters or canon, but actually genre as well. My novel I see as something along the same lines as this. Mayhap in three parts, the first presenting one genre and then perhaps even an interlude allowing time for our actors to get backstage to change their clothes into the costumes for the next part, making sure that this time they have the right mask. And even if that might seem more like a play than a movie to you, I just say that the way I see my novel now is like waves lapping the beach, one comes in and has a certain majesty to it, something that can’t be truly replicated, and then the next comes down on us, and no matter if the water looks exactly the same in either image, both waves hit in completely different styles. Equally original, and equally as hard to surf.


And that’s the only three of any value in writing that I can pluck off the top of my head at the moment. (Value in my opinion, as self-evaluation, or as Vonnegut put it, comparing “myself with myself.”) Another idea I may try out on another Tuesday could actually be a form of non-fiction symmetrina, but for now I’m quite whipped.