Turning the Page

On finishing a novel during the pandemic.

Gave this pen a workout this weekend.

Some personal news. This week I finished writing a novel. 

Several years ago, a friend of mine published a short story and for his bio he wrote he “recently” “finished” a “novel.” (Hi, John!)

He must have penned that bio 15 years ago and I’ve never forgotten it because it’s funny and it’s true, but it’s never felt truer than it did for this project. 

I started this novel in the summer of 2012. I’d finally quit my job at the tribal casino that served as the inspiration for my first novel. That summer, I attended the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and started the first chapters of the novel in a tiny little apartment I rented whose windows were draped with bougainvillea. 

The inspiration came from an article I read in the L.A. Times about a disturbing new practice in Nigeria: hospitals that were run like debtor’s prisons. I immediately started to wonder, “What if it happened in the U.S.? What would that look like?”

Of course, they wouldn’t call it a debtor’s prison. They’d call it something corporate like “conditional release facility” and they wouldn’t roll it out in hospitals but it places like rehab. 

From there I was off and running. I came up with a character named Melanie who worked for an underground organization who busted people out of these prison-hospital-rehab centers. The only other thing I knew about her was that she struggled with her sobriety. As a relatively fresh sober person, staying clean and sober was very much on my mind. And still is. 

Then life, as they say, got in the way. I found a home for my first novel and that required some rewrites and lots of attention that I was happy to give. Then I got hired to work on My Damage with Keith Morris, which was a dream come true. All while working for an ad agency, going to shows, traveling with Nuvia. You know, all the stuff I used to take for granted. 

I resumed work on the novel, completed a draft, and my agent sent it out on submission in 2017. There was some interest, but no takers. It’s not the first book I’ve failed to sell and probably won’t be the last, but it stung. My agent said, “The world isn’t ready for a fucked-up superhero for the clean and sober crowd” or something like that. 

I was hired by Bad Religion to work on Do What You Want, another dream gig, and that stook some of the sting away, but I couldn’t let Melanie go. I felt like I had a really good idea for a book, but I’d failed to execute it. 

I felt like I’d let her down. 

Last year, I teamed up with Keith Morris and Paul Rachman and adapted My Damage into a screenplay, and while that project has been put on the backburner due to COVID-19, I had so much fun working on the screenplay that it gave me an idea. What if I adapted my novel into a TV series, took everything I learned, and put it in the novel?

Was that crazy?

Yes, that was definitely crazy. Individuals don’t write TV series. Teams of writers do because it’s a ton of work. Plus, I’d never written a pilot before, much less an entire TV series. I struggle to finish watching most series I start, and now I was going to write one? 

Madness. 

It’s actually a cake

So I wrote a pilot. Two things became immediately clear. Actually, many things became clear, but let’s call it two things.

1)    Adapting your own work is even more fun than adapting someone else’s.

2)    All the missteps I’d made while drafting the novel immediately became crystal clear. 

All the mediative chapters with no point? The conversations that went nowhere? The underdeveloped characters and overheated prose?

It all had to go. 

There’s a maxim among fiction writers that sometimes you have to kill your darlings, meaning you have to cut things you like because they don’t serve the story. They’re there for your own entertainment, not the reader’s. 

I have a friend who is a film and TV writer (Hi Josh!) who told me in scriptwriting there’s nowhere to hide. Either you can see it on the screen or you can’t.

Obviously, a novel is a different animal than a screenplay. It does things that no other art form can do. But if you have a story about a woman who is busting into prison-hospitals, obviously it’s going to be more plot-based than, say, Remembrance of Things Past. 

My novel has fight scenes, car chases, and a showdown at a punk rock show in Hermosa Beach. It’s not Ulysses. So the exercise of adapting it for the screen taught me a lot.

But it sure did take a while. 

I worked on the various episodes throughout 2019. I’d write an episode and then revise the novel and then move on to the next on. By 2020 I still wasn’t done.  

Then everything happened and nothing happened: COVID-19, the pandemic, the endless election. 

With the help of a friend’s encouragement (Hi Joe!) (Apparently I only have friends whose names begin with J), I kept plugging away at it. In recent weeks, I picked up the pace because I didn’t want to drag this novel into 2021 and now, somehow, it’s finally done.

Again, but for real this time.

It’s called Make It Stop. 

I learned a great deal from this project and I’m prepared to accept that this may be the extent of it. I already sent it out once and it’s not like I can send it out again. Just because I made it doesn’t mean the world owes me something.

While the book has undergone transformative changes, at its core it’s the same story with the same fucked up characters who are trying to make the world a better place without succumbing to their demons. 

For people who need that kind of story, I think it could be a valuable, maybe even life-changing, book. 

But is this the kind of story that will find a home in today’s publishing climate?

Who knows? I’ll keep searching for a publisher (and I’m open to ideas, invitations, and outside-the-box thinking), but I’m not in a hurry, and I’ve got other projects to keep me busy in the meantime. If nothing else, my time with Melanie has taught me how to be a better writer. It has also refreshed and renewed my commitment to my sobriety. These are enormous gifts for which I’m immensely grateful.

My sobriety has granted me the wisdom to know the difference between things that are within my sphere of control (like writing a book) and things that are beyond it (virtually everything that happens to it afterward), but, with a little luck, this won’t be the last you hear of Melanie. 

K.O. 2020

If my tale has inspired you to pick up one of my books or zines, now through the end of the year I’ll include a personal note written on one of these K.O. 2020 cards. We’ve all had enough of 2020, right? KAPOW! Down goes 2020!

One of my resolutions for 2021 is to make more visual art. This is kind of a cheat because I made this stamp a while ago, but I’m hoping it gets the juices flowing.

Perserverance

Today is Edna O’Brien’s 90th birthday and the Irish Times has some lovely tributes. Here are a few words from John Banville:

Throughout her writing life she has stood up against censorship, petty-mindedness, envy, and simple—simple!—nastiness. She wrote at the start with honesty, seeing to the very heart of her characters, and deep into the murky undermind of a people; in recent work she took on international, and terrible, themes, and did not flinch. Gaiety always, beauty, and mischievousness, and simple love of the world, the world not as we would have it but as it is.