Re-reading to remember...

 I've begun re-reading the Derry portion of APoS and had forgotten some things I put into it. There was also some repetition and actions that didn't quite make sense, but I'm only making notes, right now. Re-familiarizing myself with the story so I can be sure to work it out in the proper timeline. I know there is a lot more to add and re-arrange.

I'm up to 1969, when the People's Democracy march takes place. It was a group of college students walking from Belfast to Derry to highlight the need for political and societal reform. Brendan's brother, Eamonn, joins them and Brendan is sure something will go wrong. Which it does...did...brutally.

In truth, this is when The Troubles really began, not the Battle of Bogside, 8 months later. The Protestant response to a group of peaceful marchers showed the world how vicious things have become in Northern Ireland, and those in power refused to learn from their mistakes. Instead, they continued to repeat them. Over and over, until London had to send in troops to quell the growing chaos. Which, eventually, made things worse. But that is normally London's way.

Unfortunately, that's how people in power work. Still work. Take the stupid, blundering, arrogant path, every time. The Republican Party, here, has shown they will do anything to gain and maintain power, no matter how illegal or evil it might be, and can't see they've already lost. They honestly think acting like third-rate fascist thugs will get them what they want when all that does is anger people...and that anger leads to violence...as it did in Northern Ireland.

If Stormount (the NI center of government) had actually followed through with some reforms, none of this would have happened. All Catholics wanted was decent homes and good jobs to feed their families. Protestants could have quelled support for the more radical demands if they'd just made sure those two things were made right.

But the Protestants, goaded by Ian Paisley, who was in thrall to the devil, howled at even those minimal changes in the power structure and what happened? Thirty years of murder, destruction and an explosion of the criminal elements on both sides of the divide...and they still wound up giving Catholics pretty much what they had wanted, at the beginning. It was so damned stupid on all parts.

When men become mad dogs, there is nothing you can do but isolate them till they die off...and that's pretty much how it worked.

Something different...

 Today, I finished preparing an adult coloring book and uploaded it to Ingram Spark for printing. If they accept it, the book will be offered through Ingram Content Group for order, and possibly through Barnes & Noble and Amazon. I won't know for sure till they add it to their sites. It's 25 sketches I worked up, cleaned up and arranged in a little series of erotic fantasies, and I like how they turned out. Not as clean and simple as most coloring books, but could be lots of fun. My hope is to have it out and ready for order by the end of September.

It's gay oriented, of course, but I've long known there are a lot of women who like gay literature and images. Many even write gay romance...whoa, use the current term, Kyle -- MM Romance and Erotica. Some of it quite deep into kink. Reading them, I've found that what I think is extreme in my books is fairly tame. The closest I get to water sports, for example, is near the end of Hunter, when the MC is being deliberately humiliated by it. I guess I led a very sheltered life.

I did the coloring book to clear my head after Dair's Window blew up on me. Art has always been my refuge. I was never good enough to be considered a fine artist, but it did well enough for me. I even made money doing storyboards for films. But focusing on these sketches, and the tedious job of cleaning up the dirt in the image after they've been scanned, blanked out my confusion and anger at what happened with DW and let me see clear, again.

I'm still setting that book aside and finishing at least the first two parts of A Place of Safety -- Derry and Houston -- before I return to it. I got to thinking about them and they really are two halves to a whole. I can do the third part -- Return to Derry -- after they are set. My goal now is to have a readable draft ready for these two by the end of the year. No guarantees, but it's something to keep me moving forward.

Baby steps...

Understanding is slow...

As I dig into the books I bought to help me center APoS in Derry, between 1966 and 1972 in the first book, I'm finding how some of them provide minimal information...but even that can be useful. I have a copy of The Brow, the Brothers, and the Bogside by John Ledwidge that is, ostensibly, about an important Catholic boys school in Derry, but it only has a bit more than 5 pages of text devoted to the troubles, covering October 1968 to 1971 in the most superficial of ways. BUT...there is discussion in this section about the appalling living conditions in the Bogside area of Derry (where Brendan lives) and a photo of a woman at a hearth with an iron crane used to hold a pot for cooking over an open turf fire. I need to find out if turf is the same as peat, but that alone made the book worthy of having.

I'm also reading Last Orders, Please! by Macgufin...and it's bizarre. Caricatures of people in more the Belfast area but also Derry and the surrounding countryside, following a functional eejit of a drunk named Brian Arthur, who hasn't a bone of sense in his body. At least, I was thinking they were exaggerations, but in reading Kidnapped by A J Davidson, I wonder. This book deals with real kidnappings between 1971 and into the 1990s...and the way some of these things are, first, planned and plotted and, second, how the Garda and the RUC go about investigating and trying to catch the kidnappers makes me think the Irish really are dumb as bricks.

Of course, a lot of the problem was poor communication and lack of proper training on the cops' side, sometimes with fatal consequences. Another part was bad luck. But overriding all of this is the clan aspect of it all. "I can work with this man's brother because his Da once worked with my grandfather..." and all that shit. On both the Protestant and Catholic side. It's mind-boggling...and I already had a fair idea of how nonsensical things could be in that part of the world.

I'd make this a satire were it not for the nonstop death and destruction that occurred...and yes, I know Irish playwrights work that sort of thing all the time...witness The Hostage by Brendan Behan and the absurdity of what happens to the British soldier taken prisoner by the IRA in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game. I'm not sure enough of my ability in writing humor to pull that off, and I don't want to do the story a disservice.

If my Brendan wants it to happen, it will. He's already leading me down new paths... 

It's been nearly two years since last writing in this blog and more than eight months since I stopped working on A Place of Safety and focused on Dair's Window...but then DW blew up on me and I had to stop that and take some time to think things through. In the meantime, I sketched up an adult gay coloring book with some rather dangerous bits in it, and that seems to have helped. I'm back to reading my books about N. Ireland and have decided to treat each section of the novel as its own book.

Brendan's family lives on Nailors Row for part of this section.

Derry will be first, of course, and is the hardest to write because I'm still uncertain about the sociology of the town and her people. Their humor is dark and a bit defensive, which I'm not sure I can replicate...but I won't know until I actually get into it and do it. I also have an idea as to why Brendan's mother is so disparaging of him, but need to see if this is something that can be put forth in a realistic fashion.

So once the coloring book is up and running, which should be by the end of September, I'm digging into Derry and rewriting it until I no longer can. Houston is 75% written; I just need to add a few things to it and polish it up...and Return is about 80% completed...maybe 85%. It was always going to be the easiest part to write because it takes place during just a few months, during the hunger strike of 1981. It's also the harshest, so far, because it includes a long torture section at Castlereagh Station, in Belfast.

I don't know if I'll be posting daily...but these blog comments do seem to help clear my head and focus me.

The Alice '65 frames for the first 2000 words...

Chapter One

Getting Dressed

 Oxfords Brushed

Adam Pulls on Mac

 Heads for train 

 Reads on Train

 St. Pancras

Merryton College

 Adam Arrives

 Sir Robert Butterworth

 Merryton's Research Library

Tracking Down When Volume Written...

But So Lost in Research...

 Question Asked

 "Sorry? What was that?

Library in School's Old Chapel

Adam Enters

Adam's cubicle -- # 3

Winding down...

I think my interest in this blog is at an end. I just don't have anything left to say on it. Maybe I'll start another one, once I get going with A Place of Safety...but as of now, it's done.

My thanks to those who followed me.

Here it is...the last...

Final six frames...

Adam startled to learn Elizabeth doesn't like to read Henry James, even as she's cataloguing some letters he wrote. She doesn't take kindly to being questioned.

But he realizes she's not a book person...so is willing to help her learn to be one, if she's interested.

BTW, the mark on his chin is a scrape from a rugby match; Adam likes to play on weekends.

Now comes separating and numbering them and prepping them for the slide show.

Such fun this will be...

All done...

I've got 60 frames, repeating a couple means 62 edits to cover ten and a half minutes. Or dissolves. We'll see how that works. I still need to go through to make sure of consistency in everything, but the images now have flow and I think illustrate the story nicely. We'll see if it does any good.

I wish, sometimes, I'd never strayed from art. I know I'd never have been the next Picasso or Rembrandt or even Sergeant or de Kooning, but I'd have felt like I was achieving something. I have my books, sure, and I'm proud of them...even the ones I didn't do 100% right by. Once I'm gone, those will still be around, even though they aren't selling at even a fraction of what Steven King sells.

I'm proud of several of my scripts, but those...those are not something to leave behind. They're dead if they don't get made into a movie. Meaningless. My characters are left with nothing unless I turn them into books, as well. Which I plan to do for many of them...However, at the rate I work, I doubt I'll get them all done.

But my art...I was building something with that. I'd done commissions...sold some of my work. Was building a reputation. I worked in visual merchandising and it fed into me doing more art after office hours. A few pieces of mine are in private collections, and that's while I was still late teens and early 20s. I graduated High School at 17 and didn't start college tillI was 21. In those 4 years I was setting down a path to be a real artist.

Then came film. I stupidly thought I could translate my artwork into movies, like Alfred Hitchcock did. But it was too different. Too collaborative, and I've never been good at collaborating on my work; it feels like compromising lessens it. It only took me 35 years to come to terms with that reality. But then...I never was a fast learner....

I'm beginning to wonder if I'm an undiagnosed Dyslexic...

Closing in...

Six frames left to fill in for A65. I'd post the ones I did today, but they're all out of sequence so would be confusing. Halfway through I realized I needed another couple of set-ups so put them in, numbered them correctly, and noted to myself what goes where when I get down to making them into individual jpgs. I'll still need to go through the whole series for consistency, but it's nice to be so damn close.

Of course, now I'm conflicted about posting it on YouTube. They've been letting right wing scum attack gay men and women and post videos calling for all sorts of shit to be done to us, saying it's freedom of speech. I'm a big First Amendment person, but hate speech should not be tolerated. Period. It goes way beyond opinion into intimidation and violence and that is not acceptable. So I may look into alternative venues...maybe even see about setting it up on my website, if I can.

It got kind of intense at work, today, considering it's the end of Firsts, London's Antiquarian Book Fair. I wound up with one of my slow-building headaches but had to take Tylenol, which barely works, instead of Advil because I've been close to a couple of nose bleeds, again, and Advil's not good for that.

I'm also caring for the office cats till Monday, next. Nice little beasts but they can be demanding. Fortunately, I like cats so just pop some Claritin and smack one of them around while the other watches, judging us. Good tension release, usually.

I've learned the art of making turkey Reubens on pumpernickel. Butter the bread, slop on carved deli turkey, 2 slices of Swiss Cheese, some sauerkraut, and slow-fry it on a skillet till the bread's toasty and the cheese melted. Add some Russian Dressing and It's almost as good as the ones I used to get at Canters, in LA.

God...Canters...I haven't been there in years...

Bitchin' can be badass...

Seems complaining about myself, yesterday, unblocked me and reset my equilibrium and I got a bunch more frames done. If all goes well, I'll be completely done in the next couple of days.

So continuing from where Elizabeth arrives for work, she and Adam discuss her having a weekend in Paris...

...then she can't get her computer to wake so he suggests she do a restart. She heads for the kitchen...

...and he gets to work, has his lunch, checks the time for his meeting with Vincent...

...and finishes another book, which he takes to a room they call The Dark Chamber...

I have more frames done but they're out of order. I realized I'd lost the track of the story and did some renumbering.

Watching Vera seems to help...