Fried Windows bathed in a Light White Sauce
Sometimes when I first wake up in the morning I scramble to write down an idea or something that still lingers in my mind after experiencing a dream. Later on in the day, if I read whatever I jotted down it usually doesn't make a lot of sense. Occasionally, thought things that I have dreamed have been of use. Regardless how unusual, the ideas connect to another idea. It is alsmo like finding a piece from a puzzle that looks almost right in leading to the overall solution, but it is not. However the right piece happened to be resting on the table beside it.
I had a dream last night. Overall it was about the Theory of Special Relativity. I have never professed that I am anything but a nurd and perhaps the subject of my dream unsderscores and even emboldens the test of that label. However, the dream was not really about physics. It just happened that the c oncept was in there and there was a reference made to Einstein. In the dream I was talking about Albert they were talking about Haim, that nice little Einstein boy who lives on the otherend of town.
In the dream I was driving, trying to follow the directions that someone had given me to their house. I was trying to deliver a computer system and I was a little pressed for time. Anyway I felt urgency and frustration in the fact that none of the directions made sense. The customer that I had spoken to over the phone was an elderly lady who seemed incapable of giving a coherent direction, or even her address for that matter. So I did what anyone in my position would do. I drove to the area that I thought I knew and looked for a letter carrier.
"Oh, oh, Mrs. Fields," he said and I was elated that he apparently knew not only the name but the lady. "Well, well, then you are lost. I used to deliver her mail, then they brought me in from the rural routes," he explained further.
"Well what it confusing is that she told me to drive to the edge of downtown and up the hill and just before I reached the top, make a u-turn and look for a street on the right. When I find it turn left, no the first left but the second left, the more crooked raod of the two."
"Yes, and you drive straight down that road."
"Straight down a crooked road," I mused.
"Yes, exactly," he confirmed. "She was giving you the right directions. The second road is crooked but it is the striaghest way to her house."
"Okay. Then she says to look for a farmhouse with one door and no windows."
"Yes, that would be her place."
"A house with windows?"
"Well, there was a tough season, a while back. The crops were not up to expectations and money was hard to come by."
"What does that have to do with why there are no windows in their house. Did they sell them?"
"No they ate them."
I thought I had miunderstood. "They ate their windows?"
"Fried and bathed in the light white sauce," he smiled. "At least that is what she told me.
"That's crazy."
"Before you pass judgement, go meet Mrs. Fields. She is a gem. She has a story to tell everyone and anyone but the story that she tells is just for you."
"I really don't have the time..."
"Make the time," he said. "Just have an open mind, I mean a wide open mind. She has a rare gift."
"And she eats windows?"
"Well, I don't know that for a fact. It was what she told me. Maybe she just has a bizarre sense of humor. But once you get to know her, really know her, you will never look at the world in the same way."
"If that is a sales pitch, it is not working."
"Hey you make your own decisions," he said. "Look I have to go. You think you can find it now?"
"I'll give it a shot."
"If you get lost, drive until it starts to get dark. Pull over to the side of the road and you'll be there."
"You're as crazy as she is."
"And you're not?"
"Well I have had my doubts at times. Everyone does."
"You think that everyone does."
"Well, maybe that too."
"Look, I said open mind. Wide open mind. Do not judge anything or anyone. Get past that. It is what is holding you back. If you down't open your mind to every and any possibility, you will be frustrated the whole time and your experience will be tragically wasted and personally painful."
TO BE CONTINUED
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Moving Right Along
It seems that the War Against Terrorism has had an unexpected impact on me and my family. Due to the decisions in Washington over reorganizing the military, my landlord has to reclaim his residence and my family will have to find another place to live sometime before November 1. Here we go again.
I don't think we have been completely settled since the last two moves. This will be the third place for us to live since 2002. I hate moving so at some point I probably need to make enough of a living to buy a house... again. It will not be easy. My credit is ruined - it is hard enough finding a place to rent. I am not whining or anything, just stating a fact.
Writing has served as an anchor for me, buffering me against the influences of the world that might otherwise push me over the edge. It permits me an escape, definitely but it also provide me with an channel for venting some of my frustration. I don't know why my books haven't sold well except that the promotional side of things has been haphazard at best. I think I know what needs to be done but finding the time to do it is another matter. I cannot afford to quit my job. I can't always take time off when I need to in order to promote a book. So I have had to resort to word of mouth.
Certainly there are a lot of people in the world that have better things to do than read my books. I get that. I am not famous enough that whatever I have to write about seems compelling. In the past few months I have attempted to 'fix' other things that might have been hindering progress.
This blog is part of an overall attempt at self-promotion. Even it has been haphazard. When I am editing and revising it is very hard to find a few minutes to write a blog post. What I want to maintain here is a body of relevant submissions of interest to writers, friends, readers and hopefully a growing body of fans for the One Over X series.
I have succeeded in rewriting Book 1, From The Inside To The Closer. My daughter Amanda has read some of it since the fairly extensive revisions. She found a typo on page 8. Otherwise she says it is an easier read. Her only other comment thusfar has been that I need to have other people read it and get their opinions. She knows a lot about where the story is going and what I am trying to do with the series. So she thingks that her opinions though useful might not be an relevant as those of strangers. Friends and co-workers can probably be excluded for some of the same reasons. I have 'bored' all of you with more of the details of the plot and how things are supposed to fit together in the larger scheme. One Over X as a body is a little over 2500 pages in 6X9 format, 11pt type. For the most part that is really the way it was intended to be presented. There are reasons for why he was broken up into a serialized presentation, some of them economic but most of them very practical. These days it is hard enough to sell a 200 page book. Still it remains that One Over X is written to be one big book that combines three major, interrelated plotlines. It is presented in a vignette format, as if it were really a collection of stories about events in each of the characters' lives. Because one of the main plotlines is about someone that is lost in the events of his life (Andy Hunter) and the progression follows his point of view for the most part, there is a strange relationship from one vignette to another that is not chronological at all. I don't know if anyone else has ever attempted to do this; perhaps Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Slaughterhouse Five is a little bit like it. I am certain that no one has attempted to create a cohesive work that has so many apparently tangential elements. It all gets tied together. Some of the plotlines demanded to little more play to settle, including what I refer to as the 'Wolf Stuff'. That prompted Books 7,8 and 9 that are part of the Two: The Power of X trilogy, that is a sequel to One Over X.
You might ask why I didn't just make Books 7,8 and 9 into an extension of the One Over X series? I thought about that. I debated it for some time. Book 6 really does have a fairly clear ending. A lot of the plotlines have a point of rest there. More than anything else the curiosity over what happens to Rotor compelled me to write anything at all that became the second series. There is a very clear tie in in Book 1 to the second series, something that I enhanced a little in revision but it was there from the outset. Things like that confirm that this body of work needs to be completed and in print. Even if only one other person ever reads it, it needs to be in print.
Last year around this time I was in the process of finishing Book 9 and writing a new book called Spectre of Dammerwald. I have mentioned it several times before so I will not go into it further than to say that it is a prequel to the Wolf Plot in One Over X. I had to write it in order to complete Book 9 and some parts of Book 8. I could no longer create from a few pages of notes. I needed a real story. Parts of that story as it played out affected some of the things I had written in One Over X. So I am currently in the process of reading all the Wolf related things in the first series to bring everything into concordance. I suppose it is good, therefore, that hardly anyone has read Book 2 and that Book 3 was delayed from publication. I had to revise a good bit of the earlier portions of Book 2. It wasn;'t until I started reading the 'Wolf Stuff' that I realized just how much of it I put into Book 2.
There are structural differences between Series 1 and Series 2. Because Series 1 deals with Andy Hunter and to a lesser extent with Lee Johnston, Terry Harper, Carline Henderson and even Brent (my alter ego) it cannot be presented in any other way than it has been. The Wolf Stuff is mostly Chronological but even it follows essentially three subplots. For those that may be critical of how the various plotlines were cobbled together, keep this in mind. When I wrote the base material for the Wolf Stuff, From The Inside To The Closer was completed for the most part and in final revisions over which I had next to no direct influence at the time. So I had a lot of free time to be creative.
The Wolf Stuff began as a tribute to a rather strange but very fun cyber-adventure time that I had been a part of from May to August 2000. Some of the characters in the storyline are adapted from that experience and even though the story was written without the few pages of notes that Ela'na later provided to me, it was amazingly accurate to the personalities of the characters that I had chatted with online. I wrote it because I had promised the person responsible for playing the Wolfcat Ela'na character that I was going to write a Wolf Story. As I rarely write anything that is less than 25 pages, it came as no suprise to me at least that I wrote and wrote and wrote until I felt that I had completed a story. The first rough was about 430 pages.
Despite the Wolf Pack's vows to one another never to lose the faith and to stay in touch after August of 2000, most of us moved on. Ela'na no longer had regular access to the Internet. Several of us stayed in touch from instant messenger porgrams and groups. We used that as a source of news. It was December before I made any direct contact with anyone that knew personally Ela'na. In the interim, there had been 13 week periond during which I had written the Wolf Stuff. I wrote it while I was still a vendor rep and traveling almost daily to and fromn Orlando, driving through draught spawned fires. I revised it during my free time in the day or at night before I went out to deliver newspapers. In November I found the full time day job that I still have and was able to finish off the edits and revisions to the original version of the Wolf Stuff.
The Wolf Stuff was written in chapters and the 'book' that I had envisioned it to be was tentatively titled One Pack. At the time that was all that I thought I would ever do with it. It was nothing like my other writing. It was mostly a fantasy tale and even though it took plac e on the same world that Andy Hunter ended up visiting in From The Inside To The Closer, I had no though of ever merging it into the overall plot of One Over X, which at the time was envisioned as a series of 3 or maybe 4 books. I made contact with Ela'na through her friend and I told her I had written a Wolf Story for her. She responded that I should send it to her. Our correspondence lacked communication of scale, perhaps. She thought she would be receiving something that was 2 or 3 pages tops. I had told her that I was a writer and that my first book was almost ready to be published. She might have believed me, I don't know. In chat anyone could be anything. Obviously, each of us had prenteded to be members of a Wolf Pack. Anyway, I emailed Ela'na a Word document version of the entire Wolf Story. Apparently she picked up the email at a friends house and didn't undertand how large the document was, even began to print it out but after a while she cancelled the print job. She replied to my email, sometthing to the effect, 'How large is this thing?' and also 'I guess you really are a writer.'
I was elated that she realized that I was a writer after all but a little disappointed at her reception of my work. I had intended the Wolf Stuff to be her book, even something for her alone, perhaps. But she was not inclined to even read it. She said she would wait until it was made into a book.
The Wolf Stuff became a back burner project at that point. I had to review the latest revisions of From The Inside To The Closer, attempting to reduce word count. Some of the choppiness of the first few pages was the result of this futile exercise. In the process of reading From The Inside To The Closer, I found something that was very odd. There was a reference in one of the oldest parts of the text, something that I had written in the late 1970's even, regarding a wolf-like creature that was held in stasis beneath the ruins of a city. I remember reading it as if it was the first time I had ever seen it. It was certainly the first time I had ever realized why it was even there.
I thought about working the Wolf Stuff into From the Inside To The Closer. I even mentioned it to my publisher. He asked me if I had lost my mind. I had written a couple of shorter things that were more recent. I had intended to throw them into Book 2 or 3 but for some reason as i read From The Inside To The Closer for another time, just to clean up any lingering mistakes before sending it back to the publisher, I decided to splice them into the text. They were a story about a boy running away from home to stow away in the wagon of a magician and his lifelong infatuation with the magician's beautiful assistant. When I revised those parts to make them fit into the storylines, I decided that this was something that had happened in Brent's life. Brent was a character I had started to play around with while revising Book 1 but even at that point there was very little Brent in the book. Brent was an acquaintence of Andy Hunter. Andy stayed in his house in Connecticut.
Everything cascaded into place. I had a wild idea of feathering in the Wolf Stuff. I had even mentioned it to my publisher but he had told me to leave Book 1 alone. I had sneaked in the two additional sections and once he realized they were there he at least had read them. He felt as I did that they were pretty good and needed to stay in the book.
So I started the feathering process with Book 2. I had titled it A Game of Hangman. Although everytime I had told anyone the origins of the book titles they had thought I was joking, I really did come up with the titles when I was stitting in a boring class at Purdue University in 1977. I had no idea what there was about the book that reflected back to the title. I have never worried much about that as the book eventually writes itself through me to create that linkage.
I had finished Book 2 to the point that I felt it was pretty much ready. I think I had even sent that version to the publisher and he had read some of it and liked it. As an experiment I took what I had of Book 2 and I feathered the chapters of the Wolf Stuff evenly between the other plotlines. I did it even through the other material that I had for the later books, although everything that was in some state of completion sort of ended at Book 3, An Extreme Departure.
The insertion of the Wolf Stuff cascaded some finished material from Book 2 into Book 3 and so on. Suddenly, Book 3 was further along the way to completion than I had previously believed. I had returned From The Inside To The Closer to the publisher yet again and started working on Book 2. I read it with the Wolf Stuff and was amazed that it worked pretty well. Then again the overall structure of the series tends to lend itself for inserting seemingly unrelated or tangential material. What I discovered as I read Book 2 was that it was grossly lacking anything about Brent. Why else even mention him in Book 1 if there wasn't something about him in Book 2. That had been my basic argument for including the material that I had added into Book 1 so as to provide some additional linkage to the Wolf Stuff that was to come. Amazingly what I added into book 1 provided a better linakge to the second series that at the time I did not even yet envision.
The first fifty or so pages of Book 2 were largely written in two 8 hour sessions. The basic product was about 30 pages. In editing and revising it I embellished, explained and detailed the story out to its present length. For those who had read Book 2 and commented back to me to the effect: "What does this have to do with the rest of the book or even Book 1," this is blog post is something of a response. Again, you have to view the series as a whole book. As for the basic Brent material that I wrote, I wrote it on Friday The Thirteenth and Saturday the Fourteeth. It ties in very well with the second series as well even if I did not know at the time that that should be a consideration.
Some of you have also commented that there is a large chuck of Wolf related story that immediately follows the Brent material at the beginning of Book 2. The beginning of the Wolf Stuff required a lot of revision and over the course the story evolved with a lot more detail. I had to break up the story into sections like the rest of the series was organized. If the material throughout the series was returned into the chapter formatting with which it began, then it might make a little more sense as to why what is placed where. From The Inside To The Closer was organized into numbered Chapters until it entered into final revisions in 2001. One of the editors suggested that formatting as the chapters were very long.
I hope this helps a little toward understanding the way the series was put together. I will go into more details later about when and how the later books in the series, 4, 5 and 6 were completed. The entire series was written in 2001, except for 175 pages of Book 6 that was written in 2003.
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