Oddness and impassivity

Ideas are beginning to pop into my mind over "The Lyons' Den."  Off-beat things that may add to the clarity of the story and clean up the opening.  Some of the feedback I've gotten I agree with; some I do not; some I don't even begin to understand.  But it's all good because it frees my mind from too close a link to the story and lets me question its telling and the teller -- not me but Ace.  He and I are going to have fun with this.

Something that gave me a surprising boost in awareness was watching "Born Yesterday" (1950), again.  It's a neatly constructed comedy with some brutally serious moments that has the typical message of how corruption is ruining everything America stands for.  Still a salient problem in the country, today, but lately its less because of money and more because of a corrupt ideology taking hold.  However, it was a quiet moment halfway into the movie that gave me a good smack.

Some background on the movie, first.  It's how the crass, dumb girlfriend of a crass, corrupt wheeler-dealer guy starts being "educated" by a newspaper reporter and winds up realizing she's been sleepwalking through life and wants to make a change in her direction...something the wheeler-dealer doesn't like.  It's all "if you read books you'll learn" kind of thinking -- with great reliance on the works of Thomas Payne and Thomas Jefferson and the like -- but the movie slyly points out that sometimes well-intentioned writers get so lost in their words they forget their meaning.

So what happens is, outside the Library of Congress the reporter (played by William Holden) asks the girlfriend (played by Billie Holliday) if she read an article he wrote.  She did, and she didn't understand any of it.  "And I looked up every word!"  He has her read it aloud to him and it's full of elegant thought and five dollar verbiage and I understood it, perfectly.  She still doesn't get it.  So he explains it to her in a simple, straightforward way...and the light goes on in her head and she says, "Why didn't you say so?"  And he has no answer.

That's then LD started knocking at the back of my brain.  And a little whisper started in my head saying, "You know, sometimes you obscure the simple facts with a lot of crap."  And I think that's what I did with the beginning of the novel, hiding it behind Ace doing his verbal dance.  I don't set the story up right, and that's why the opening is slow and difficult to connect with.  So...that's where I start.  And I've already got ideas of how to bring clarity to confusion and obfuscation (See?  I know big words, too).

I'm rewriting the books 4 times.  That should help clarify things.  Or not.  You never know till you know.

Some decisions made

Looks like I may be in California sooner than I expected.  Today we learned that big packing job in NYC is off; they couldn't justify the expense for the books that were going to be shipped out to London.  I'm still doing a 2-day trip to ship over the cream of the crop, but that's it.  Meaning I may be sent to handle the Pasadena Book Fair on the 6th with followup on the 7th.  We're discussing that, tomorrow.  Thing is, I'll then need to be in San Francisco on the 10th to handle a new deal we're offering...so it's going to be interesting, to say the least.  But I may have a couple days to visit family and friends instead of just an evening.

It's going to be bittersweet, being in LA.  I've given up on writing screenplays but, like an addict, still have the urge and the dream.  Don't get me wrong, I like writing books and love digging into the characters...but some things in my stories can only be done on film to get the full effect.  And it pains me to think I wasn't able to do that.

For example:  I wrote an update of sorts on the "Beauty and the Beast" story, setting it in a private school in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the winter.  Beauty is named Charl (Charlotte), whose father is being driven to bankruptcy, and "the beast" is Mitch, a boy who's mostly deaf and very ill-kempt.  Things happen to where Charl is forced to go on five dates with Mitch, even though she doesn't have the time (she's taken over as maid to her older, spoiled brother and sister).  Things do NOT go well on the first two and Charl almost breaks the third date (to a Christmas dance) but then her father tells her Mitch is downstairs and she decides to keep her agreement.  So she gets dressed in a Princess gown that was rejected by her sister and starts down the stairs and sees Mitch...and he's cleaned up and adorable.  And it's this moment...using a one-handed, Sati-like piano rendition of George Auric's elegant melody from Cocteau's "La Belle et La Bete"...as Charl descends the stairs and lets Mitch pin a corsage to her dress and slip a coat over her shoulders and lead her outside to see their chariot is a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible with a chauffeur as he gently escorts her down to it and makes sure she's comfortable and warm before they drive away, all under her father's gentle gaze...all done in one shot with the camera softly gliding around them and with them and not a word of dialog...I can just see it.  I know it would have been magical.

Cocteau did a brilliant version of the story, all elegance and magic and poetry.  I'd watch it, now, but I don't have my Criterion copy of "La Belle et la Bete" anymore; I sold it while living in San Antonio because I was broke.

I have to stop this.  I'm in a different world now. 

Holding pattern

Seems I lost the thread for "Crazy Is" and can't figure out what to do next, so I'm just sort of floating along waiting for this mood to dissipate and brilliance to slap me on the back of the head and snarl, "Get with it!"

Quick quiz -- is the fox howling, yawning or calling out, "Hey, baby, hey, baby, hey, baby"?  Not the best looking yipper I've ever seen but he does seem intent.  I can be intent.  And my hair's about the same as his.  Maybe we're first cousins.  No...he's too close to a dog and I've always been more of a cat lazing about waiting for something to do.

Y'know, under the new rendition of the horoscope, I'd be a Cancer.  Considering how crabby I can get and how unlike a Leo I've ever really been, that may explain a lot.  I don't laze like a kitteh; I walk sideways into the future.

Just meandering, still.  No coherent thoughts to share beyond the idea it's time to finish LD and shift my life back to POS.  This sojourn has been illuminating and may color the story differently...but I won't know till I return to it.

Almmost back to normal

Everything is correct on Amazon except for the paperback edition of volume one of RIHC6.  That's still not listed.  The publisher knows and is working on it.  I guess I'll wait till he's done his thing before I say anything more.

I also got the cover art from them for BC-3 --

They sent it to me, today, with a note that if I really wanted something like the mock-up I'd sent them, yesterday, they'd have to have it done special and would delay the publishing of the book.  And it's already WAY behind the other two volumes.

Thing is, I sort of like this one.  It's not as intense as mine, but it does have Eric front and center with both Bobby and Allen in the background, and it fits in with the whole look.  So I said run with it.  My ego's not that big...not yet.

BTW, blogging the Golden Globes live is nowhere near as much fun as watching it live.  I felt more like one of those reporters watching the teletype wire in a 1930's crime movie and almost screamed for a "copy boy" twice since I was writing at the same time.  You'd have to watch something like "His Girl Friday" to understand.

Still no word on if I'm going to NYC this Friday or when I'm off to LA.  We're waiting for this auction house to okay the cost for the packing job, first.  Again...waiting and waiting.

BTW -- I let B&N know my name was spelled wrong on Friday, it's already corrected.  Amazon made me jump up and down and hold my breath till I turned blue before they'd change it.

21st century my ass

I tried to stream a broadcast of the Golden Globes, since I don't have a TV, and guess what?  You can't.  It's blacked out.  I can get blogs updating the show every few minutes or so, but can't watch the show itself, not even on NBC's own site.  How dumb is that?

So...hat's off to Chris Colfer for winning supporting actor in "Glee."
Annette Benning for winning best actress for "The Kids Are All Right."  I hope she gets the Oscar.

And I'll let the bloggies fill me in as the night goes along.

I had another idea for the cover of "Bobby Carapisi-3" thanks to Michael W.

This actually works ten times better than my previous idea, because it has the three principle characters on the cover and emphasizes Eric.  (Just to make it clear, these are models I culled off the interweb for my own mock-up; the art department of the publisher will make use of their own models and, hopefully, get close to this set of poses...or may ignore me completely; you never know.)

I worked more on "Crazy Is" while doing my laundry; one of the joys of having a laptop.  I finally understand what the story is about and it's settling into its new meaning...or actual meaning, since I didn't know what the meaning was before...except I did, I just couldn't figure out which synapse of my brain it was in and then had to find the proper code to release it and I think I better stop talking now.  But it's up to 6500 words and I still have no idea how long it will be.

Okay..Al Pacino and Aaron Sorkin are now winners.  Not unhappy.  But now I think I will get a TV.  I want to watch the Spirit Awards when they broadcast since they have a fun time mocking everything.  I may watch the video of the Golden Globes just to see Gervais in action.

Wow

A quick thought for the moment --

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large -- I contain multiples.)"
-- Walt Whitman

If any single phrase ever defined a writer, this is it.

UPDATE:

I finished the proofing of "Bobby Carapisi, volume 3" and sent it back to the publisher along with my idea of how the cover should look.

This book finishes the story, completely, with Eric confronting his attacker and coming to some surprising conclusions.  And nobody is let off the hook, here...nor should they be.

The main thing is, I've done right by Bobby's story...and Eric's.  They'll be out there to be read by anyone who wants to.

I'm still having issues with Amazon over the re-posting of my banned books...though they are slowly addressing the issues I bring up -- like spelling my name wrong.  I just don't understand why that's so hard to do correctly.  It's on the friggin' cover, for crying out loud.  But it's not just Amazon; I'm having the same issue at Barnes & Noble...which makes me wonder if it's the publisher just uploading it wrong.  Which makes no sense; they KNOW my name and how to spell it correctly since it's done right in the contracts.  If it wasn't, I might be able to get out of them.

But I'm not just being a prima dona, here.  If my name's not right in their systems, the books don't link up with the Kindles and Nooks so people can't see everything that's offered.  Which may hurt sales.  So this is more mercenary...for the hope of eventually being paid something in the way of royalties.

Another problem is, the Kindles don't have prices.  When you go to those listings of my books, they say the pricing is not available.  I asked the publisher about this and he said he'd tried to correct it, already.  Well...until there's a price, nobody can buy the download.  So I'm hitting Amazon over that one, too.

I got my last bit of feedback on "The Lyons' Den" and need to rework the opening third.  It seems to be the weakest part for everyone.  Oh, well...I may have let Ace get a little carried away with some of his ways and word plays.  Let's see what consensus he and I can come to.

 Man...it seems the more I write the sloppier my typing becomes, and it was all over the place on LD.  I dropped words and letters and reversed meanings and forgot entire sentences.  Either my brain is too fast or my fingers is too slow...or a combination of the two.  Maybe my dyslexia is finally catching up to me.


 

Nothing is easy

Well...five of my books are back up on Amazon but not RIHC6v1 in paperback.  And while the three Kindles are back, there's no pricing information on HTRASG or RIHC6v1 so you can't buy them.  I guess I just need to keep pointing out the problems and eventually they'll get fixed...but it IS irritating.  Still it's better than being banned completely.  I keep telling myself.

I got the contract and PDF for proofing of "Bobby Carapisi, volume 3" today.  I've already gone over some of it and found one typo.  And I had an odd moment where I was reading it as if it were someone else's writing.  I'll get it done this weekend and ready to be finished.  Unfortunately, this set doesn't sell very well, and it's the one I'm -- well, not that I'm proudest of but that means the most to me.  Well...now I can feel I've done right by all the characters in it, by at least getting their stories out there and available to share, all in one continuous set.  Now it can be let rest.

I'm fuzzy-brained, right now, after going over all this stuff.  TGIF.

Waiting...waiting...

Seems I've spent my whole life waiting.  Waiting to hear what my schedule will be fore the next four weeks.  Whether or not I'll be in NYC packing books.  When I'm headed to California for either the Pasadena Book Fair or San Francisco.  When I'll get all my feedback back so I can get to work on draft 3 of LD.  If Amazon's really going to republish my books like they said they were.  Will I ever make money at this writing crap?  On and on and on.  And it wears on you.

So I worked more on "Crazy Is" -- and it's back to being a scream, again, albeit in a weird way.  I now have 5600 words and no idea how long it's going to be.  One character -- the ex-con -- has softened himself at the beginning but now is back to being spooky.  His interrogator presented herself as one thing and now might be another, but has yet to be truthful and honest about anything she's done or said.  And this one is going to mess with gender identity.  A lot.  And the hell with how sex has been politicized.

I watched the rest of "Pornography, a Thriller" and somebody needed to be told that to carry off a David Lynch style film, you at least need some style like David Lynch.  And understanding.  This movie violated its own truth so many times in so many ways, it was like someone just wrote a bunch of scenes, chucked them into a blender and formed that into a screenplay, and don't worry about connecting anything because obscurity is our friend.

To me the purest example of dishonesty in a movie is when someone is being chased and attacked.  If the victim just presses back against a wall and lets the attacker come up to them and grab them and then somehow be able to stick a needle into them and inject some kind of drug and all that crap -- it's bullshit. It's the truest revelation that the filmmaker is lazy or just doesn't care.

There's nothing new or unusual about this sort of stupid moment.  I remember seeing "The Spiral Staircase" on TV years ago, about a girl driven mute by a tragedy who's being stalked by a serial killer.  It was made in 1946 and has Ethyl Barrymore and Dorothy Malone in it and nice big production values, but early on the movie lost me because when one girl is strangled, she holds her hands up in a beautiful pose that is backlit and elegant and meaningful and nonsense.  She'd fight like a maniac as she's being choked to death.  But that's not pretty and way too real.

The same thing goes for gun violence.  On TV and in movies, the hero fires one shot from his pistol and kills the bad guy, and people think pistols are really that accurate.  They aren't.  Rifles are, but pistols can send bullets all over the place.  That's why so many innocent bystanders get killed in drive-bys and why some maniac firing 30 bullets into a crowd only hits half his targets even though he's in the middle of the crowd.

Hmm...weird rant going on here.  I think I need to shower, shave and go to bed.  And dream of sugarplums that look like Chris Evans.  And get past a part of "Crazy Is" where the ex-con talks about just wanting to be with someone for a little bit.  Someone who'll have his back and he can feel safe with. It's affecting me weirdly, this story.

Say...Brendan...is this feeling of need a test run for Evangelyne?

"Crazy Is"

Shifting slightly in tone and timbre, to my surprise.  I had a bit of a narrative prologue to set up the story, but that changed to all dialog, too, and suddenly it's not just a scream, anymore, but a keening and a siren's call and a whisper in the shadows.  I'm up over 4300 words with no real structure for to what's coming out.  It's so much like the back and forth between two people who don't trust each other, one of whom is being duplicitous as the other shifts his stance every few moments to reflect his distrust of his partner in this dance.  They don't even have names, so far, nor do they seem to want them.  Very odd, for me.

Thinking about it, I don't even have an image of how they look in my head.  Both are like quick, indicative sketches that maneuver about each other in ways that seem human but only barely.  I wonder what I'm saying here, not having the distinction of observation?  I wonder if the whole point is that it should be like you're in a restaurant and you overheard two people talking at a nearby table but you have no concept of what they mean or intend even as the conversation grows deeper and more intense and a bit scary.  You can't see whose voices they are; your vision is obscured.  And it takes everything you have to figure out what is really happening even as you think, "I shouldn't be listening in on this; it's impolite."

I wonder if this story is being told by ghosts...

First crack in the silence

I got a response from Amazon, today...and they say they're putting my books back up.  That me sending them snippets of the books and telling them what the stories are about (and just plain not shutting up like so many people told me to on the blogs I visited) gave them the excuse they needed to reverse their decision.  I'm leery of believing it until everything's back online...but the fact is, they did say they would.  And now I'll just wait and see before I do any more screaming.

I am pretty battered by this whole business, however.  This one thread I was invited to join in on to discuss my books being banned turned into a nasty back and forth, with many of the posters telling me Amazon could do as it liked and I hadn't been really harmed by it and even accusing me of making up the entire situation to try and get sales for my books and that I was stupid for putting those titles on them and I really was nothing but a pornographer.  Without specifically saying so (for the most part), I was made out to be a liar, idiot, whiny baby, naive fool, asshole and all-around manipulative jerk.  Some people agreed with me but the anti-Kyle crowd was louder.  And now the thread's been shut down due to "personal attacks."

The internet is great because it gives you access to anything you want.  Information, ideas, images, individuals you'd never be able to meet in your lifetime.  But it also is vile because it provides anonymity and that destroys civility.  I won't say I've been innocent of being uncivil; on more than one occasion I snapped back at those who snapped at me.  What I will say is I do not do the anonymous commenter crap.  I own my comments.  Sometimes it's hard to do, but I will not lower myself to the level of a cockroach and scurry into the woodwork when a light is shined on me.

So now I'm tired.  My scream of a story is closing in on 4000 words and it's all dialog between two people...and I don't know why it's like that, but that's how it's coming out.  And you want to hear the title?  "Crazy Is."  Does that make one damn bit of sense to anybody?

Oh.  Wait.  Maybe it does, considering I'm the one doing the writing.