Back in the B-U-Fa-Lo

Totally misspelled but it sounds right for the Beatles' song.

I met with a fellow author (Michael Gleich) for brunch, today, and felt so VERY LA. He rode his bike over to Santa Monica from Encino! The man's crazy...and so were his two friends, Caryl and Juan. I know how LA traffic is, even on a Saturday morning -- especially along the 405. Madness. MADNESS!

Good old Southwest was late leaving LA but I was told it didn't matter because my connection in Las Vegas was running late, too. They lied. So did the "departures" monitor, telling me I had an hour to wait. So I got my shoes shined and played some slot machines and opened my laptop to check my e-mails...and suddenly my name's being called to the plane. The bastards left on time! I was the last person on the flight and got to sit between an old woman and a guy who looked like a Latin Boxer because every other seat was taken. NOT the most comfortable flight of my life.

I used to really like Southwest because their service was fast and pleasant, but now they're just like any other airline, and not always the cheapest way to go. Or most convenient. So I guess I'll be using Travelocity and Expedia from now on.

Still...I got home a bit early...if you can call Buffalo home...and got some reading done for POS. It's a rather dry book about local peace movement groups in N. Ireland and how they affected the sectarian violence and divide in that country. It's got some fascinating facts...but it's SO much like a text book I find it putting me to sleep.

Which isn't hard to do, now. It's nearly 1am.

BTW -- I was turned on to this guy by another blogger. His name's Sufjan Stevens and he has a gentle, inviting manner and voice he uses to sing some very tender songs.

Dreading the trip back

And not so much for the reasons one might think. I miss LA in a lot of ways and seeing my friends out here makes me long for it even more, but the trip back to Buffalo is going to be nasty, I fear. I flew Southwest, which doesn't do assigned seating. Instead, 24 hours ahead of the flight, you go online to print up your pass and be assigned a group to board by -- A, B or C, which board in their respective order. But in order to get a decent position, you have to do this at exactly 23 hours and 59 minutes prior to your flight's scheduled departure time or you don't get into the A group. Well...I didn't get my boarding pass printed up till just a few minutes ago, so on the section of the trip from Las Vegas to Buffalo, I board in group C. Which means a full plane and I'm not boarding till nearly everyone else has. Which means a center seat instead of an aisle. For the entire 4 1/2 hour flight. We are not happy.

But I honestly did not think about it till I was back at my hotel room after a long, rather unsettling day...seeing the current situations of some friends and missing out on others. I did have dinner at Marix Tex-Mex Restaurant in West hollywood with my buddy Brad, his girlfriend, Cathy and his sister, Sharon...and drank too much beer and it's upset my innards...which will make the trip back even more unpleasant.

And now I'm dog tired, again. I think I'll call it a night and crash till the AM comes.

I'm not used to the sun

After months in Buffalo with rain and cold and snow and clouds and such, I get to LA where it's been sun-shiny all day and traffic makes you go SLOOOOOOW and the golden rays pound in on you and suddenly you're dog tired from the heat tempered only slightly by the cool breezes. I've downed more water in the last couple days than in the previous 3 months (mainly because I don't like water unless it's got tea in it). But now, after my third Perrier of the day...or is it my fourth? Anyway, I'm beginning to feel human, again.

Job packing is done and it turned out to be twice as much weight as I anticipated. They ain't gonna be happy when they get the bill, so I gave them some advance warning about that. Now it's time to relax. I saw my buddy, Brad, today and drove around town and wish I hadn't done the latter. I went by where Heritage used to be and the new owner flat out ruined that building. He got rid of the slate roof and bay window, added goofy windows to the upstairs, took away the main entrance and painted it white. And West Hollywood let him do it. The scum. That depressed me.

I tried to see a couple of other friends but that didn't work out. Now one of my German buddies is coming over for a drink. I guess I can relax till tomorrow, when I head for Huntington Beach during the morning rush hour. Oh, do I look forward to that.

No writing done. No reading. No way it can happen now.

Walking dead...or waking...whatever

Turns out my job was more extensive than I was lead to believe so I'm dog tired. Packed 21 boxes of books and have another 10 to go, probably. Doesn't sound like much until you realize how much care has to go into the packing since they're rare and VERY difficult to replace or even repair. Something I learned working at Heritage is, if an antiquarian book has been repaired in any way, it lessens the value. Better it be left alone unless it's about to fall apart...and even then you have to be judicious.
it might be better to have a protective box made for it.

Still got out to see Karl and Carrie and their daughter, Caden. Long drive up to Topanga, but I had a free meal out of it -- vegan but good, overall. Of course, my body doesn't understand the veggie stuff, so to keep it from going into shock I had my very own Dr. Pepper. It's my one true addiction.

No more, tonight. I be weary since it's nearly 2am my time.

Home in LA

I'm back in LA and feel like I never left...but it was a chore getting here. My flight out of Buffalo was late and packed and I wound up with a couple of Canadians sitting next to me who were scared of flying and would not shut up. For the four and a half hour flight to Phoenix. The woman next to me finally had a glass of wine and zonked out while the boy got into his book, so I was able to do some editing on POS and planning for what's next, but then she woke and I needed to stretch my legs so the last hour of the flight was shot. Don't get me wrong, they were sweet people; they just could not take a hint that I had other things I wanted to do besides hold their hands while the plane went through some turbulence.

And there was some FUN turbulence landing in Phoenix. Then the second leg of my trip, from Phoenix to LA, got off on time but landed late. Head winds was the excuse. Still I got my car, got the supplies I needed and still made it to the hotel by 7:30. I'm now fed and happy and feeling the 3 hour time difference though not by much since I usually don't go to bed till 1:30 or 2 am anyway.

I learned a long time ago I'm a solitary traveler. I like to go where I want to and change my mind as to what to do and just wander, sometimes. And I don't like to socialize much. Never have, really. Of course, that's one of the reasons I got nowhere in the film biz. 90% of business is done at parties in this town, and to me that's like torture.

ANYway...I brought the printout of POS with me and tried to make it through the first section before hitting LA. And I almost made it. What's nice about having a hard copy is being able to make notes wherever I want when I think of things and outline other things I need. I think I have about 50% of this part written, now that I've had a chance to really look it over, and there are places I repeat myself and have thing happen that need to be taken out or shifted to another part of the book...but I'm comfortable with the direction it's going and Brendan's voice is solid, so far.

Now if I could just figure out some way of keeping people from talking to me on the long flight between Las Vegas and Buffalo...but I have a feeling it's going to be loaded with broke Canadians heading home after doing the things in Vegas that really need to stay there. I think on that flight I'll get an aisle seat.

Velvet haze

After printing up the 312 pages I've written for "Place of Safety," I read through some of the later sections and found there are moments I honestly do not remember writing. I don't know if that stems from being so lost in them they became like a reality I have yet to live or if I'm just slipping into Alzheimer's. I say "a reality I have yet to live" because I want this story to come across as something Brendan is living as he tells it. Not a memoir but real time for him, as though we've gone back to this awful period in history and are seeing it ourselves. A true "eyewitness to history" sort of thing.

I don't know if I can get away with that -- make it both immediate and all-encompassing while still keeping it in a human voice -- but I think that's why Brendan's been so adamant POS be told in first person. The third person POV puts a curtain between the reader and the story, so it never strays out of the realm of a tale being told. While that can work beautifully in many instances and gives a far greater chance for lovely prose (and blithe self-indulgence), it just seems wrong for this. Brendan's life is not a story, it's his truth...and he wants no more space between him and the reader than is absolutely necessary.

Of course, my not remembering could also be a case of me just jettisoning information I've transferred to another form of memory so I can make room for what has yet to come, like dumping the cache on a computer. Hardly as romantic a notion but probably closer to what's really happening in my brain. I've survived most of my life by having very selective short-term remembrance while the long-term is so deeply buried in my brain, you'd need a master technician just to locate it, let alone dig it out.

Oh, and just for the sake of counterpoint to the "Free Derry" photo from yesterday, here's how that area looks, today.


Tomorrow it's off to LA for a few days (WAY too few). I was born in California. It calls to me. I haven't always wanted to live there, not like I do London or Paris and how I've recently wanted to in Ireland (albeit for more literary reasons, and I would do so in Galway, not Dublin), but it's more my home than anyplace else in this country.

Rinse off, repeat

Fed los gatos, again, and played with them a bit then did laundry and called mom for mother's day and have the rest of the day to myself...and brain is blank. The vagueness building within my skull began last night, after I finished proofing RIHC6v2 and sent it back to Nazca Plains...and I couldn't figure out what to do next. Work on POS? Research for it? Watch a movie? Go for a walk? Anything? Each thought that passed before my consciousness just kept on going by like an express train.

I wonder if it's time to just print up the 200+ pages (oops, make the 312!!!) I have written for POS and use my tactile senses to move forward? It's easy to get lost in the nothingness of programs and images while working on a computer. I don't think it's as easy to jump back and forth in the story to make notes when I have an idea, not like when I have everything held in a notebook. It's also easier to keep track of (and correct) repetitions or separate uses of the same idea in different time frames. If I stick to composing on just my desktop or laptop, I usually wind up lost in the story and that may have helped make the first half of RIHC6v2 so complex (which I think works because Antony was confused as to all the crap that was happening, but once he zeroed in on a course of action, the narrative became simple and direct).

And maybe I just need to take the damned day off. I swear in the last few years I've become a write-aholic. If I'm not in front of a monitor relaying a story in my head, I have no idea what to do with myself. This trip to LA will be good for me. I'll be busy seeing friends left and right when not working (I'm so tightly scheduled, I'm only planning on a couple hours with each) so won't have time to write except on the plane there and back...and for that I may take books I still need to read.

Yeah -- I'm taking the day off. And tomorrow. I got movies to watch. And I fly out on Tuesday.

Oh, I can't wait.

To keep my brain in gear --
None of these buildings still stand, just the "Free Derry" wall.

And just for the hell of it --
Merde, je voudrais faire un voyage a Paris! *sigh*

Cat duty

I'm about to run over to the office and feed and brush the two little Himalayans that run the office. Since it's on the first floor of an old three story home (my bosses live on the second and third floors) the cats have free roam of the place and are used to people usually being around. But they're out of town till Monday, so I'll be there an hour both today and tomorrow, then I'll do LOTS of washing. My allergies aren't so bad with them, even after I brush one as she lies on my desk, but I seriously do trail fur home like Pigpen's cloud of dirt in the "Peanuts" comics.

I've edited half of RIHC6v2's proof copy and found 6 more typos (I need to hire an editor, not just rely on people I know). And I'm beginning to wonder if I made the whole story too damned complex. That or the style I wrote it in. I mean, I can follow it, but Antony jumps around a lot...and while that works for his mental state I wonder if it'll come across to the casual reader? I may have gotten a bit too ambitious, here. Let's see how I feel at the end of it; I may be just working myself into an "own worst critic" snit.

It's interesting to compare Antony's sharp, twisting, almost confused style of telling his story with Brendan's casual, straight-forward manner. There's one small section -- where he's seeing Eamonn off to Belfast to join the People's Democracy march -- that he jumps around, and it's never felt quite right. Now I have an idea why; it's not the way he'd tell the story (and thinking about it, that's when I was bouncing between three different books I wanted to write and I think I got my voices mixed up) so I'll be changing that.

Ah...voices in my head. Just like "Sybil." I wonder if Sally Field could play me, as a drag king?

RIHC6v2 will be published soon

Got the proof, today, and a contract. Moving right along. Just waiting on the cover art.

Going through the first part of POS showed me that even though I have over 70K in wordage I'm just 60% done with the book...maybe 50%. In the part up to the point in the story that I posted, last night, I still need to introduce Joanna and set up Grianan Ailigh as a place the boys sneak off to, then have the October 5th confrontation occur. I also need the celebration that takes place after the British troops arrive, Operation Motorman, Bloody Sunday and the growing sense of betrayal felt by the Catholics as the British take the side of their oppressors. Right there is a good six chapters.

And I have at least half the second and third sections of the book still to write. Man...this thing may wind up being 150,000 words long, over 600 pages. I DO think I'm Tolstoy.

And in the back of my brain, Brendan smirks at me. My life now is to tell what is to be told, so I can't whine about it yet. Even if I did, my only acknowledgement would be a shrug from him. Write it first then see how you can cut...which doesn't work too well with me. I've found once my stories decide on a length, they stay damned close to it. "Bobby Carapisi" was 125K long till I trimmed it back to 120K...then broke it into two books and it wound up just as long as before I edited it down. Same for my scripts -- though those go by page count.

For example, I adapted the biography of Beryl Markham into a 160 page first draft then trimmed it to 130 pages, but only by removing an entire subplot and changing my style. It won me Best Adaptation at The Houston International Film Festival in 1991. Jeez...nineteen years ago. Did me a hell of a lot of good, that award. Not. The women I wrote it for lost the rights to Sydney Pollack, and he wouldn't even read my script. And he never made the movie. So...what was my point? Oh, I did a refresh on the script, a couple years back, to use as a sample, updating my style to my current one, and tried to cut it back to 120...but no matter what I did, it stayed at 130. So that's how long it is.

Such is life in the big city.

Where a battle leads...

This is what I worked on, this evening. This is after Brendan's brother, Eamonn, is injured when the civil rights marchers are attacked at Burntollet Bridge and Brendan found him at Altnagelvin Hospital. Brendan's almost 13 years old at this point.
--------------
Father Pat drove me in his car but it was difficult. RUC checkpoints had gone up throughout Derry and barricades had been built around the Bogside to keep the constables out. The march had continued on and been attacked, again, on Irish Street, but they’d finally crossed the Carigavon and made it to the Guildhall. And that’s when people heard of the horrors that’d been inflicted. In fact, news of Burntollet crossed the globe and in their stupidity, the Loyalists couldn’t see what a damage they’d done to themselves. Not just in the eyes of Catholics in Ulster, but in the eyes of the world. Headlines and photographs of bleeding kids were splashed across the newspapers and the television news had footage of it all, despite occasions where news cameras were smashed in a foolish attempt to keep the attack undocumented. It did them no good, but arrogance breeds a certain blindness in people and it was in full force now, with the idiots insisting nothing had happened and what had happened was the fault of the marchers and no one else.

“It’s laughable,” said Father Pat, as we drove. “They can’t see that it’s the beginning of the end of their rule here and the start of a new order. Westminster won’t tolerate this, any longer. They’re too embarrassed by it all.”

He kept on and on about it, like he was pleased at what had happened, and finally I had to ask, “Did you expect this?”

“No, nothing like this,” he told me, absently.

“But something?”

He looked at me, finally taking notice of the question. “What’re you asking me, Brendan?”

“Did you know what would happen on the march?”

“Know? Of course not. Why would you ask such a thing?”

“But you suspected.”

“The leaders of the People’s Democracy march expected there to be some trouble along the way, as was made clear by those who opposed it. That is why they emphasized there was to be no retaliation by anyone on our side. They wanted the world to see we ask only for that which is guaranteed to all citizens in a democracy. But the actions of those people at Burntollet was inexcusable and completely unexpected.”

Was it? Something about the way he told me made it seem like all I was hearing were half-truths, and to me that was the same as lies. So I thought to ask him to lie about something else.

“Why was Father Demian sent off?”

He looked at me, taken aback. “What has that to do with the Loyalists -- ?”

“Was it something with Danny that got him sent away?”

Father Pat looked ahead and slowed down for the next checkpoint. “I was under the impression you were happy he’s gone -- Father Demian is gone.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t. It just sudden-like, and I’m wondering why. I hear he was sent to America. To a place in the desert. Is it because he drank so much? Was he getting Danny Gallagher drunk, too?”

“You have no right to ask such questions. None of this is your business.”

He was right. It wasn’t. But his refusal to answer my questions told me the rumors I’d heard were right -- that it wasn't just drink but Father Demian had been sent to a place in America to make himself right, again. Right about what was unclear.

“You knew,” I said. “You let Eamonn and his mates walk into a trap.”

“That is a horrible thing to say to me, Brendan Kinsella! Why would I even think of doing such a thing?”

I couldn’t put it into words, yet, but I knew it had to do with the publicity of the attack and the world’s reaction. It’s like he wanted that but I couldn’t make the connection to understand why that would be such a good thing. Knowing what was happening in Derry and Belfast, knowing how close everyone was to betraying their neighbors and hurting each other and laughing about it in the most obscene way, knowing that people could have been killed not just at the bridge but around the Guildhall the night before, with the mob close to anger enough to commit slaughter and the RUC ready to crush anyone who even so much as looked at them wrong -- knowing all of that, he hadn’t expected something like the Loyalists putting deed to their loud threats? A man as smart as Father Pat? When even I could see what was coming and was afraid for it. And then his finely worded answers to Father Demian’s departure? I finally understood I could not trust anything he said to me.

Oh, I know I had suspicions and concerns before this, but it still was a shock to me. He’s one of the holy fathers. The direct representative of the Pope, the man who spoke to God. I’d taken communion from him and he’d said prayers with us and seen to it I was well cared for when I’d been in hospital, six months back. He was known by all in my neighborhood and loved and tended to by all the married ladies as well as a few unmarried and knew the bible from cover to cover -- and he was lying to me. And he knew what he told me was a lie; it was obviously so.

And what did it mean? If Eamonn had been killed, the bastard would have seen it as bad for my family, true, but also a good thing for the Republican cause.

My mind went blank, at that thought. I know we went through another RUC checkpoint after this one and had to get past a barricade put up by the local lads. I think I heard Colm calling to me, once. And we might have caught the tail end of a confrontation between constables and a few rock-throwers. But I swear, I cannot remember another honest thought in my head until he’d pulled up in front of my home and Mairead was at the car’s door, wiping her hands on a towel, her face white as a sheet.

“Brendan, are you all right?” she asked, her voice pitched high in near terror.

I smiled at her and said, “Never better.” Then I got out of the car, tossed a “Thanks, father,” over my shoulder and went into the house.

Rhuari and Caera met me, breathless. “Brendan, you’re home and safe.” Both of them saying the same thing, so much so you’d think them twins. “Mam’s been in a temper. She tore through your room, looking for something. What’s this all over you?”

“I’ll tell you all about it at supper, if you eat well.”

Mairead followed me in, saying, “We’re about to sit down. Just fish fingers and potato nuggets but -- .”

“Sounds brilliant,” I said, still smiling. “Is Terry unhurt?”

“A few bruises on his legs and back is all, but not for lack of trying on their part. He says there were B-Specials there. Wore regular clothes but had white armbands. And the RUC helped the bastards. Some had cudgels with nails in them. Nails!” I just nodded and started up the steps. Mairead stopped me. “Bren, that blood on you -- is Eamonn bad hurt?”

I smiled at her. “He’ll be fine. He got a nasty eye and his head’ll be bad for a fortnight, maybe, but he’ll be fine, again.” She looked closer at me, wary. “What?”

“There’s something different about you.”

“Is there?”

“I don’t know. It’ just -- something’s not the same.”

“Let me wash up and change my clothes. And I’ll tell you everything at supper.” Well, not everything. But enough to make you happy. “Maybe that’ll explain it.”

She nodded and I went upstairs. And I told them most of my adventure. And moments after we finished the dishes we heard the first can lids clamoring a warning. The RUC was on its way, out to reassert their domination of the Bogside, and without question would do so in the most violent manner possible. Father Pat would be pleased.