Christopher Lee 1922-2015

I'm late to the wake on this, but rather than put up the usual assemblage of film clips from Christopher Lee's wide-ranging work, I found this great bit when he was the subject of This Is Your Life in the UK.

This is from 40 years ago. Hard to believe. Look at the sword-play at the very beginning; it's still amazing.

An elegant man who, like Peter Cushing and Vincent Price, played the devil so well in fiction while being a gentleman in reality.

RIP

Getting there, I swear...

I have 72 pages left to input, then a spell-check, then it's out for feedback. I'd thought I'd be done, tomorrow, but I won't have a chance to work on it till Sunday. Saturday, I'm heading down to Scranton to say good-bye to my aunt. She's close to the end stage of her cancer, and I wouldn't feel right if I didn't go.

It's 280 miles each way, so I'm renting a car for the trip. My Civic's making some odd growly noises, lately, which could be transmission-related. Which would cost an arm and a leg to fix, so I'm driving it as easy as I can. I have points with this one agency, so I cashed them in to get it. All I pay for is the taxes and insurance. It's covered, to an extent, by my Amex and personal insurance, but it's worth the $12 not to have to worry about filling out forms and crap. And I'm getting one that's maybe a bit better on gas, too.

This ain't gonna be a nice trip. I got the strong hint that I should call instead of come. I had to ask for the address of the hospice a couple of times. I can also just imagine getting all the way down there and her not being in a condition to see me, but I don't care. I'm doing this for me, no one else.

I've been through this so many times before. Friends dying of AIDS or cancer. And my own mother. It's always a bit surreal to me. Like it's a shadowy reality I'm not privy to...haven't the ability to accept as fact. Of course, it also reminds me that I haven't got all that much time left to me, either. My only hope is I go fast, not drift slowly into death.

But not for a few years, yet; I've still got too much left to write.

John Waters for Bernie's VP...

This man is a treasure.

I'm either brilliant or stupid...

I can't decide which best applies to me, because often the same thing I write gets comments that it's the best thing ever written or it is so bad I should never write anything ever again. And I have gotten both ends of the spectrum. When I posted Find Ray T on Triggerstreet years ago, back when it was still an interesting concept, I got lots of praise and wound up in the top five screenplays, thanks to reviewers who loved the script. I also got some people who would tear the script apart, including one guy who went through it page by page to show how bad it was.

And as I noted on here, months ago, The Lyons' Den had good reviews but then one guy so hated the book, he used one quote on a page near the end to show how bad my grasp of English grammar was. Even warned people against reading it. I'd laugh, but that's when sales dropped. So how do you know which way you're being? I like to believe I'm great and wonderful as a writer, but that could just be my arrogance or ego talking. I guess it's good that I am at least aware of that possibility.

Anyway...I've begun to think I'm caught in a series of waves that take me up to the sky in beauty and then dump on me, moments later. When I'm peaking on that wave, I write stuff that I'm still impressed with. When I'm at the bottom, nothing I do is any good. So it's better not to write in the valleys because it's just a waste of time and effort.

I've been through all of this with The Vanishing of Owen Taylor...and currently have no idea where I am in the cycle. To me, it flows and works and builds and builds. To someone else, it might come across as tedious or self-satisfied or even ignorantly confusing. It'll be interesting to find out what the consensus is.

As of now, it looks like I'll be ready to send out the "first" draft Saturday. I've input 192 pages of changes, so far, and dropped 3 pages from the total. It's going the right direction, at least, and I do think I've added a bit of clarity to the story. I've also taken out as much as I can of a quirk of mine, from writing scripts -- using dashes in place of ellipses or simple periods. Broke up some Faulkner-esque sentences by doing that, thank God. I can't stand his writing...so why should I wind up writing like him? Maybe it 's me being brilliant.

Or not.

Done...again...

Okay...the latest draft is red-penned. Now just comes inputting the changes. And fighting off the desire to do another draft to make sure I've got it right. I could keep rewriting my work till the end of time, if given half a chance. Instead, all I will do once I've got this one set is spell-check. That might catch some of the typos I've committed to bytes.

It's still going to be more than 500 pages. I'm not sure what that translates to in actual book size. 300-350? Which is a manageable length. I'll worry about that later. Right now, I just want to get this done.

God, I just hope it makes sense to someone besides me...

I did something crazy and probably pointless. I sent a copy of The Lyons' Den to Chris Salvatore, in LA. He's an out gay actor who's been in some low-budget gay-oriented movies. I have no idea what good it will do, or if his representatives will even forward it to him, but he mentioned on his facebook page my offer was sweet, and if I hadn't done it I'd be kicking myself in a few months. So off it went. Signed. Nothing more. No letter or anything. I want him to read the book. I think he'll see himself in Daniel and maybe take it to someone to get made.

Yeah, crazy idea, but I've done crazier.

Almost there...almost...

I've got 150 more pages of OT left to red-pen, then comes the inputting and sending it off to be read and critiqued. There were a lot more changes than I thought there'd be, mainly adjusting sentences so they make sense instead of ramble. Simplicity is good, at times such as this.

So is removing repetition. I found more points where I say the same thing more than once, just in slightly different ways. A bit is good, to keep the reader abreast of the story, but what I'm cutting was superfluous. I doubt I'll drop much in the way of pagination; I'm also adding in bits to help keep what's happening easy to follow.

I'm behind schedule by about a week. My freak-out kick-dropped me, good. I wound up doing a marathon viewing of the Bourne series to break away from it. The Matt Damon ones; I haven't seen the Jeremy Renner sequel, yet. Didn't even begin to look interesting. I thoroughly enjoy the first three movies, though the last one doesn't hold up as well as the first two. It still makes no sense as to who shoots Bourne at the very end, story or character wise.

I've been thinking more about having The Lyons' Den taken out of publication and re-issuing it, myself, as a second edition with a better front-cover and back-cover blurb. I found this fun little photo online that's given me some ideas. Get a shower curtain with fish on it; put a dozen characters behind it, looking out; have a head & shoulders shot of Daniel with a goofy expression. Holding a gun in one hand and wielding a pen in the other. The shower raining cash. That would fit the chaos of the story pretty well.

And only cost a thousand bucks to set up.

Shake, rattle, roll, and get the hell back up...

Not much else you can do when your brain locks down, as mine did over the last couple days. It's a writer's ailment -- fear coupled with confusion laced with a touch of paranoia and served with the conviction you have no idea what you're doing. Took me till now to even start getting past it, so...nothing's been done on OT except a lot of gnashing of teeth and staring into space.

That said, I think I can get back to proofing my current draft...and correcting inconsistencies while clarifying illusory thoughts and intentions. I hope. I have the feeling I'll be doing a fair amount of rewriting once I get feedback on this story. I know what I'm aiming for...I think...but I don't know if I'm achieving it, and that is what started the whole crash and burn.

I wonder if part of my problem is the focus of my stories is the emotional connection between people and how sometimes that gets abused. And also proves to be a saving grace and stronger than anything in the universe. Sometimes I get lost in that so the story seems to meander, to its detriment. Or else, it fails to do what others think it should.

When I wrote The Alice 65 as a script and asked some friends to read it, one made the comment that she sat down expecting the story to be about a bookish guy going on a search for this rare book and becoming a hero in the process. Indiana Jones as a Librarian. And she was disappointed when it didn't do that...so couldn't give me any serious feedback. To me, it was never about that; what drove the story in my mind was the growing emotional connection between Adam and Casey, even as he's caught in a world that's down the rabbit hole, to him. How she softens and shifts into human mode as he opens up and lets go of past events that haunt him. Maybe that was a mistake, but that's what made me want to write the story.

In OT, it's about Jake coming to terms with things he's done in the past and getting to where he's strong enough to stand on his own two feet, with Antony as his partner and not just his support. Even thought Antony's fighting him every step of the way. I don't know if I achieve that, and my uncertainty overwhelmed me. Which made me afraid to even think about letting people read it till I'd rewritten it a dozen more times.

It's the same fear that keeps me from returning to Place of Safety. The knowledge that I don't know that much about Derry society between 1966 and 1981 so I'd be setting myself up for failure...again. Why bother if all you're going to do is screw it up? Problem is, I have the other side of that writer's ailment -- the need to tell the story...and that, in and of itself, is cause for madness.

Color me chaos, right now.

Something from Adam...

As in Adam Alexander Aloysius Verlain, of The Alice '65. He's begun reposting on his facebook page.
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I finally found the photograph of Paul Pelliot sitting amongst a trove of manuscripts he discovered in China, in 1908. They were near the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang and had been walled up in a cave for centuries. He'd learned of the possibility of this treasure thanks to Aurel Stein's visit to the same area.

Stein had found some of the manuscripts but had no awareness of their extreme value, nor was he allowed to peruse the majority of them, whereas Pelliot was fluent in Mandarin and suspected they held works from prior to the 11th Century. He needed special permission to breach the wall, but there he found tens of thousands of scrolls dating back to as early as the 5th Century. They dealt with Buddhism, Manichaeism, and Daoism, but also a version of Christianity and Judaism. Some of them were in the old Uyghur language as well as Hebrew and Sanskrit.

He bought many of these priceless items for the equivalent of about 8,000 GBP, today, and they are still being studied at the Bibliothèque nationale de France as well as The British Library and the National Library of China.

____________________________________________

Adam is having fun, again...

Summer's heating up...

Now I've got a possible job in Florida, for a few days, later this month. I was thinking of taking some time off in August, even though I can't afford it, because I need some space to catch up with myself. I won't be unhappy if I wind up working; it'd be a lot better for my finances. But I'll need to take at least a few days to myself. Maybe around Labor Day, I dunno. I'm one of those people who doesn't get paid for vacation time.

When I was at Heritage, I was able to amass 3 weeks paid vacation and use it all at one time, in the Spring of 2006. Spent most of that time in Ireland, including an rental car for 10 days. Driving on the right wasn't much trouble at all. I'd love to do that, again...

Now that I'm getting closer to a final draft of OT, I'm feeling the need to plan my next project...which is dumb, because half the time what I decide to work on winds up being put aside while I do something else. But now...now I've got an open space in my brain and my other works are trying to take it over.

I found this image on Tumbler and like it so much, I may see if I can do something with it in the cover for OT. It's the animal spirit of the book.

Maybe of me...

Sunday, Sunday...

I printed out OT -- double-sided -- at work and now will go through it, one last time, to make it as close to complete as I can, right now. I chopped out one entire subplot because it was getting in the way. And I'm wondering if the last chapter is too brutal a note to have so close to the end. I softened it with a memory and set it up a bit more in the bulk of the book...but I guess I'll find out.

First lesson learned from this project? Do NOT write a mystery unless you have it worked out, already. Too damn many people will want to jump in and say, "Make me the killer!" While others will say, "That's ludicrous. Get a grip and make it me., idiot." Which makes it hard to figure out the right way to go.

I finally just simplified it...but even my simplification is probably too complex to work. Either I've done too much explaining or not enough...or both. You never know. I remember reading The Name of the Rose years and years ago and getting lost in it, sometimes. The life it built was fascinating enough for me to keep reading, but I'm still not sure I understand or accept the revelation of the mystery.

Maybe I should reread it.