Tag Archives: Anori. writing process

My “Hail Mary” Complex

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I was genuinely excited to read Andy Weir’s highly-acclaimed Project Hail Mary, hoping for inspiration on improving the writing, structure and marketability of my own speculative work, The Cx Trilogy.

My positive outlook waned after a few pages. It wasn’t just the undeveloped writing nor the caricatured characters – much of which seem at first draft level – but more the lack of an engaging narrative. While the premise was compelling – why is the sun getting dimmer and how can this be stopped? – there was little development of the protagonist and his journey beyond a barrage of scientific details.

I’ll cite examples to mitigate your opinon of me as a bitter unpublished author. Below that is the room I woke up in. The one with my dead friends. I sniffle and wipe a tear away. Initially, I thought this was intended as sarcasm, but I soon realized that this was a genuine expression of Ryland Grace’s emotion.

Each of them kind of look like a beetle. Each beetle has a name up top: “John”, “Paul”, “George” and “Ringo”. I’m on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. This sense of humor permeates the book.

My students didn’t swear at me. Their squabbles were usually resolved within a few minutes, either by a teacher-enforced handshake or detention. And somewhat selfish but here it is: They looked up to me. I missed that respect. Mr. Weir has clearly never spent a day as a teacher in his life.

I could go on, but why bury myself even deeper? Mr. Weir has achieved incredible commercial success and knows how to market his work, while I’m an unpublished failure who teaches high school…which is what makes this difficult to process.

I genuinely cannot understand what it is about Mr. Weir’s work that is compelling to such a large audience. And what it is about my own writing that seems destined to never get beyond the literary agent’s automatic reply: Unfortunately, your project does not sound like a fit for me at this time, and so I will have to pass. Boo hoo. Poor me.

Every Day You’re Dying

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Why are you here? Ask yourself that. What is the purpose? Where do you belong? I try to write like that. And then I don’t like how I feel when I go too long, my head thick, nothing working, done and lost. It seems like life isn’t worth it at that moment.

It’s not complicated to get my energy back, my brain back on its stem, even if it doesn’t feel like that. I walk and eat. And then I am new again, that clarity of purpose back inside, thinking I just came here to find the answer.

And this is it: We go fast on the roads we know and slow on the ones we don’t.

And that’s it.

Title Change Needed: No Longer “Anori”

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Over ten years ago, I decided upon Anori as the title for the first book of The Cx Trilogy. Meaning ‘wind’ in Greenlandic, the word is an apt metaphor for a number of themes of the book, including the acceptance of change. I was happy to learn recently that a Greenlandic wind turbine company used the name.

I was less happy to scroll through the film titles on my Air Greenland flight to Ilulissat and find a romantic drama of the same name.

And so that was it; no more Anori for me. My replacement title is Em, who is the clone of the main character, Dee.

It’s early yet, but I like the concept for now.

Writing Process: Out of the Muck

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I had a dream about a broken-down electric dog, its wiring hanging out, paneling split open, trying to climb out of a muddy hole, pawing and digging and getting nowhere. I didn’t like it.

As much as I might tend to deflect and joke about my current malaise, it’s what depression might be, realizing how pointless everything is. It’s a dark fucking cloud, not knowing what to do, which direction to turn, to carry on or not, giving up and admitting the failure. Drinking to that. It isn’t a good feeling. It’s shit.

And then it’s not. It’s something else. The light. A sound. A thought. Something to do. Not phone games or social media, but the work, things that need to be done. First things first: stuff the wiring back in and get up out of the muck.

Living in Fear

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I’ve made a lot of decisions as of late – or they have been made for me – that have brought me to here. And so I now live in fear. Not so much of the world and death and all of that but of the person I have become and what I am to do now.

Angoraphobia is the fear of open spaces and crowds – the Italian author Alessandro Manzoni famously suffered from this – and that is what I feel like I have, not of a physical space but what is now in my head.

I have sought to find something that means something outside of sex and booze and have put myself on a quixotic quest of words to make sense of that. There are no editors, agents or publishers out there as of yet that see my prose as anything beyond sophomoric and unsellable. And that is hard. And I guess the point.

And so I will fly to Copenhagen from here (JFK, if you haven’t guessed) and on to Ilulissat where I either affirm my sophomoric drunken self or write something of worth. Or both. It is to be the end of the trilogy, a book that has been sitting in wait for some years, the arrival to another place. Not here.

This is where my mind is most often. Not here, this godforsaken place where we’ve plunged into the digital wasteland, where words and thought mean no more, but out there, another place, where others have gathered to start the experiment again and find what the hell is so precious about a species fucking hell-bent on self-destruction.

And so, yeah, I live in fear. That is, when I bother to think.

The Confessional as Narrative

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My creative writing teacher in college, Viktor Coleman, told me that I obfuscated too much in my writing, meaning that I put up barriers to avoid sharing my genuine voice. His analysis pissed me off. “All this guy cares about is fucking his hot students,” I railed to friends. “He doesn’t give a damn about what makes writing work.”

I don’t shy away from sharing my thoughts and experiences in my writing through my alter egos Buzz, Dee and Davis. They’ve been shamefully drunk, horribly abusive and have fucked whoever and whatever they could, including a bean bag chair. They just don’t dwell on what they’ve done. There are no revelations. These things happened; they accept that and moved on. Like real people do.

Which Coleman and others might argue is where the artifice comes in: the arc, denouement and lessons to follow. I don’t agree, Life isn’t like that. Life is a teacher fucking his student and nobody giving a damn, including the students. There is no Me Too. No clever point of view. It’s just things that happen, and that’s it. The characters are still alive and looking for the answers in all the wrong places.

Things happened and here we are. That’s my narrative. That’s what I see in our world. My heroes – super or otherwise- don’t save the day. They takes care of themselves first and then whoever suits their needs. Nobody’s buying that yet. I just need a couple more years of scrolling and we’ll be there.

Me and Ray Croc: Persevering Until the End

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Nothing in this world can take the place of good old persistence. Talent won’t. Nothing’s more common than unsuccessful men with talent. So is John Lee Hancock’s biopic film of Ray Kroc, The Founder bookended.

Michael Keaton plays capitalistic monster, Ray Kroc

You will be surprised to hear, as am I, that I am inspired by Ray Kroc, the fictional one anyway. It’s all I’ve got to go on now.

I’ve been frustrated over these some forty years of fighting to get something published. From my opening book, The Sacred Whore – which actually received brief attention from an agent – through Manitou Island, Black Ice and The Buzz Trilogy to the many Davis films and The Cx Trilogy, I have carried on.

The Cx Trilogy might be finished in a year, maybe Fuck Pedagogy before that. Persevering pathetically, proudly on, that’s me, on the way to…oblivion?

The Worst/Best Piece I Have Ever Written

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Having completed the 9th (or 11th?) draft of Anori, I have no clue what I have written. Some of it flowed just as I remembered. Others parts had to be reworked…to what effect I have no clue. Dee was consistent. I think. As was the tone. On the verge of death or already dead. Something like that. Anyway, I shouldn’t be blogging about this. I am a cotton-headed ninny muggins at present.

Instead I will offer this quote from Ken McGoogan’s book Dead Reckoning on the taste of polar bear cub meat: Apart from its tenderness, the cub’s meat had a particularly piquant taste, and we greatly regretted that the old bear had not had twins.