Done reading...

 Well...I've gone through the nearly 1000 double-spaced pages of A Place of Safety and now have everything in my head as to what is needed, where. Lots of sticky-notes. Red pen corrections and comments. The usual crap. All three binders are on my table and I'm amazed at how much I've finally been able to do.

Book 3 -- Return to Derry -- is the one in the most need of work, then Houston, then Derry in Book 1. But that's how I work. I rewrite the beginning of my stories over and over and over while the ends tend to get short-shrift. Not this time. Every part of this book has to ring true for it to work, so I'll be redoing Book 3 over a lot.

What's got me going closer on the story, a bit, is how the current political situation in the US so closely parallels Northern Ireland's. A group of radical politicians are trying to maintain power through lies, tricks, questionable legal maneuvers, threats, favoritism and intimidation...and I do NOT mean the Democrats. I haven't voted for a Republican in the US since 1980, and that one was John Anderson, who was running against Reagan for the GOP nomination. When it was handed to Ronnie Ray-gun, he left the party and so did I. I could see the writing on the wall, and damned if it hasn't come true, in spades...

Sometimes I wonder if that's part of the reason this story got going. I've been working on it for decades. A lot of time was wasted with me telling myself I couldn't do it because it's set in a part of the world I may have visited but never lived in and, honestly, I don't think I'll ever make it sound right for someone from Derry. I've even had people tell me it's not possible, but still I kept coming back to it. So I've finally accepted that I'm to be the author of this tale and am just telling it as best I can.

I have no idea why Brendan stuck with me through all the years of worry and fear and ridiculousness, but he did...and it's slowly moving towards being completed. I won't have it done this year, I know that, but next year...yes. 2022.

That will be a cause for celebration!

Book 3 of APoS is...okay...so far

I truly did skim through writing book 3 of A Place of Safety, which is still obvious even after 3 drafts. Parts are repetitive and Brendan repeats himself so many times, I got sick of it. I can imagine how a reader would feel. I mean, each time it makes sense, but still... Needs a LOT of work to smooth it out.

That said, I'm about halfway through it and the structure is good. I see spaces where I need to dig a lot deeper, but no need to rework the spine, so far. What helps is this takes place in a shorter period of time than books 1 and 2 -- just a few months during the hunger strikes of 1981 -- and the story's drive is more immediate. And it helps that he's been out of the loop so doesn't need to know everything that's going on.

Something I did miss out on is making sure Brendan is being honest about his feelings instead of putting them aside to keep the story moving. That is NOT acceptable. He's faced with a life-altering betrayal and I have him seemingly little more than miffed about it. That needs to be addressed, for sure. Same for his brothers, in this part of the story; Rhuari is okay enough, but Kieran needs to be better integrated since he figures in a lot near the end.

But this is just a read through to remind myself of what I have. I find myself making notes to add something, then a paragraph later realize I addressed it, already. This book has grown so complicated, for me, I can't keep all of it straight in my head.

But I am closer to thinking I've been doing it up right.

Book 2 of APoS is read

 I've finished re-reading the Houston section of A Place of Safety and can see it will need a great deal of work. It skates along on the surface far too much, and I have notes throughout to expand on this or add to that. I'm even thinking of another chapter to give the relationship between Brendan and a young woman he becomes involved with in Houston a chance to really flourish.

He's in the city just as it's really gearing up to become the city it is, today. 1972-1981, just over 8 years -- though for the first 6 months of his time there he's damaged and nearly catatonic. A lot of this is him coming to terms with what Derry had become and realizing that, even though Houston is more on an even-keel...a lot of the same hatreds and anger exist in the city.

Still, the structure is solid. Not as exact as Derry is, but still no need to rework anything. The characters are in place and well-established in themselves. The vague parallels to actions in Derry are there to be expanded upon and alluded to. Brendan's voice changes a bit as he becomes more and more Americanized, though that I'm not sure about, now. I may keep him the same, all the way through.

I was able to do this despite having a nagging little headache, all day. One of those irritating things that doesn't pound but won't let you ignore it, either. I get those, every now and then, usually after a tough day but not always. I may have arthritis in my neck and that's causing it.

Getting old is not for sissies.

Real life is a pain...

 I hate it when aspects of my day-to-day life intrude on my writing or working...but sometimes you have no choice but to shift focus to the mundane. For example, the apartment below mine became infested with bedbugs, some of which migrated up to my place. I've never had bedbugs so didn't know what I was seeing when I saw one, so didn't kill it. Not smart.

They got into my box spring and I was getting bit, then I learned...and this was a couple weeks after the issue in the apartment below was known...about them and cleaned my place nearly from top to bottom. Problem is, most of my flooring is carpet and I think they got into it.

I've now had three treatments by an exterminator, but I still got bit by one, yesterday. So I've washed and dried all my clothing and such, covered both my mattress and box spring with bedbug-proof slip cases, and just finished scrubbing the carpet around my work table with a power-vac cleaner. I'm lying in bed with my laptop and a printout of APoS, waiting for the carpet to dry.

Good thing about this is, making my work space ready for the cleaner showed me how much crap I've got that I can just get rid of. Tons of shit that means nothing or is unusable, or that I haven't even looked at in years. Soon to go by the wayside.

I'm currently working on the Houston section of the story, and while I like the flow of it, it's still on the superficial side. The point of this part of the book is to show how, even though Brendan's escaped the horror of the Troubles in Derry and thinks the city is a beacon of peace and safety, it's just the same in too many ways. Just a bit quieter, is all.

I feel like it takes a bit too long to get to the point where events begin to parallel what happened to Brendan in Derry...to an extent. I don't want exact replications, just general or similar in quiet ways. I'm trying to make a point but not be loud and harsh about it. I've read books like that and they drive me nuts.

Well...more nuts that I already am.

Structurally sound...

Today was spent solidifying the basic structure I have set up for Derry, and it works nicely. It should accept any changes I make to deepen and expand upon the actions being taken in the story. There is a quiet flow to it that gives it a quiet surface...but like the Mississippi, the undertow is fierce.

It's not going to be easy to work in the details I need and keep them seeming normal and natural. I want this to read as a memoir, not an historical tract. No jamming of info, just Brendan's observations and thoughts at what he's witnessing. He misses a couple of big events because of various reasons and knows of them, second and third hand. Of course, he's in the middle of the Battle for Bogside and Bloody Sunday, but those are massive wide-ranging occurrences that no one could avoid becoming involved in.

What's helping work out the logistics of it all is the CAIN website and its gallery of photos from 1968-1974. This one is by Eamon Melaugh, and its description is -- Two children sitting on the 'Roaring Meg' cannon. The cannon is located at the 'Double Bastion' on the City Walls overlooking the Bogside area of Derry. During the Siege of Derry 1688-1689 the cannon was said to have made the loudest noise of any gun, hence the name. The street in the background, Nailors Row, was demolished as part of redevelopment in the city.

He has hundreds on the site, and I have a couple of Willie Carson's books of photos of the time, not to mention several put out by Guildhall Press. What's driving me nuts, right now, is I used to have a large paperback of women's stories about being arrested by the British Army, during Internment, called something like Strong About it All...and I can't find it. I'll have to dig through all my books, now, to see if I mis-shelved it...but I may have the title wrong because I can't get it to come up on ABEbooks, at all.

As a last resort, there's always Walled City Books, in Derry.

Turning into quite the beast...

 I have 23 chapters written for Derry in APoS. 318 pages and 74,000+ words, and I get the sense it will wind up close to 450 pages and well over 100K in wordage. I can see so much that needs to be in there, still, and parts of it read too superficially. Smooth and easy, without a sense of the location or the people. Meaning probably adding another chapter, as well, and working at least one additional rewrite.

But there are sections I'm very proud of, especially the last chapter, as Brendan's preparing to leave Derry, and his walk to Claudy. The sloppiest parts are in the beginning chapters, right now, and the one dealing with the Bloody Sunday massacre. That one's going to be hard to write, but it's very, very important because it happens just a few days before Brendan's 16th birthday. It breaks through his reserve and builds his anger, but he remains clear-eyed enough to see the IRA has become just as oppressive as the RUC could be. Sometimes more-so.

This image is of Derry in the early 60s, just as the city was beginning construction of the Rossville Flats, which will figure greatly in the Battle of Bogside. They'll wind up just to the left of the triangle made by two roads meeting, in the middle left side of the image. Brendan's home is in that line of houses just to the right of those roads, atop the hill.

I sort of lose track of a couple of his friends in the middle chapters, so that will need to be addressed, as well, since they haunt him in the Houston section and later. And one bit happens too easily; I need to work that so it's more realistic.

I still feel like I don't have the sense of the people of Derry, yet. I've watched Derry Girls, which is set in 1994 and 1995, more than two decades after the majority of the story, and it's geared to be a comedy...but I did catch glimpses of their hard-edged humor in it. That is going to be a bitch and a half to make work.

My job is cut out for me...dammit...

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.