 This is my New Year's post, which was inspired as I stared at the bonfire you see here on our property during our Christmas Eve celebration. "How far I've come," I whispered to myself that night after everyone had left, standing over the glowing embers with my hands in my pockets. But this is a mantra I say often.
I remember one trip back to New Orleans in late 2006, during which time I was still displaced and re-establishing my life in Birmingham, Alabama, when someone I barely knew asked me when I was coming back to the city. My reply must have had something to do with Hurricane Katrina keeping me away, and I remember his response being almost as if he was under some spell, as if he was part of some communal group hug that the entire city was locked into during that period, one that prompted him to say, "That was a year ago!" Yes, it had been a year ago at that point, but it was still fresh in the minds of those like myself who for whatever reason couldn't just "come back" to New Orleans. It was an ironic time of great desperation and tremendous growth as I took care of my ailing mother far away from anything we were accustomed to. I would in fact spend the months following the storm in a hotel room in Tuscaloosa, Alabama before moving farther north, and it is that balcony that I still consider the starting point to where I am today. And today I am sober, with the only new comment I have on this subject in the new year being the realization that I would give anything to be this way for parents that are still alive. Even though I know they realized I was sick, how wonderful would it have been to engage them at this level of maturity (pushed into existence as the result of Katrina) rather than the semi-volatile person that they knew as their son? My mother would in fact have to endure this person even in her latter years, with the event of her death meeting some quota of piled-up tragedy that would help push me toward sobriety. Well, that's not entirely true. The decision, as is always the case for the recovering addict, is the decision of the addict alone. But the decision was a good one, kick starting a period of productivity and awareness that has filled up my journal pages exponentially. My journal for 2006 was 109 pages. My journal for the year 2011 is now well over 500. And how strange it is to think that the documented year following the storm had so little activity, or at least, activity worthy of writing down. The city of New Orleans has long loosened that communal group hug, replaced instead by a version of the city perhaps not entirely as it was before, but close enough by the resident's standards. Therefore, it is more than possible for Jessica and I to "come back," and our future plans include just that. But for now I am revoking my "Katrina card," satisfied here, as are my people in New Orleans, that we are all where we need to be for the time being. Those are my reflections. What are yours? Happy New Year.  And she really does have the authority, doesn't she? When one stops to think about it, after she single-handedly provided the modern vampire fiction blueprint with the 1976 publication of Interview with the Vampire, it's almost unheard of to know that she's gotten little to no credit in the wake of the not-so-recent-anymore vampire craze that finally may be showing signs of stopping. Rice, in fact, has been quite vocal when it came to Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, criticizing among other things the idea that Meyer's immortals inexplicably felt that it was necessary to attend ... high school. It's the stuff that's made Rice fans like myself furious in a way that one gets when they watch someone take credit they didn't deserve, especially when the real credit may go to a friend or a family member, or in our case, an author that you think of almost as family! It's like hearing someone claim to invent a brand when in all actuality, the brand exists because it's being targeted to a market that had no prior knowledge that the brand already existed! Vampires have become afterschool specials and we're all sick of it, and apparently, so is Anne Rice.
It's no wonder that she's given up on the genre for the time being and has instead moved on to werewolves with the February 2012 release of The Wolf Gift, a book that I guarantee will redefine the mythology. And I haven't even read it yet. I don't have to. That's just what she does. She turns legends inside out and fills in the holes that have existed for centuries. She did this reworking with vampires, witches, mummies, an ensemble of ghosts (most all of whom were from New Orleans, by the way), oh, and a marginal literary character by the name of Jesus Christ. And guess what? Anne Rice is about to do it again, readers, and no one has earned the authority to do so more than she has. I've also seen recently that Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt is being adapted into a film to be directed by Chris Columbus, and I may have this wrong, but it looks as though she may have some casting pull this time around. This, as some of you may remember, is a far cry from when Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat in the film version of Interview, a complaint that she later retracted, but one that I suspect kept her out of the creative meetings that resulted in the horrendous 2002 film adaptation of Queen of the Damned. I certainly hope that this is the case, which would give Anne Rice the "author"-ity that she has deserved from Hollywood for well over thirty years now, taking her place as the reason why vampires are still around to make sparkly and send to proms.  Have you ever seen one of those shows on any of the various home and garden channels where they tear apart and remodel a house? Or maybe they bring in a celebrity inspector to point out all of the various problems and then proceed to rip down walls, all the while in a frustrated huff, even though you know these guys will be able to do the very labor-intensive work required, and even enjoy doing it? My girlfriend, Jess, has turned me on to these shows being that she is quite the handywoman herself. But I find inspiration not from gaining knowledge on home improvement, but from the obvious metaphor, the idea that "constructing," or in my case, "reconstructing" a fourth draft of a novel is very much like going into a building, finding where the leaks are coming from, and then going to work to patch things up.
The good news is that rarely does a novel written in such a meticulous way as my third book was written see anything beyond a fourth draft. As I've stated earlier on this blog, the third draft was the one that I was going to build on, the foundation that will hold the structure together just long enough for the inspectors to come in and snoop around. This is where, in my case, the trustworthy beta reader came in, pointing out that certain parts needed to be developed, and that the piece could benefit from as little as a few more lines here and there. I have made my construction plans via sticky notes (index cards are traditionally used here, but hey, I have a "Stickies" app on my computer) arranged like a storyboard with each chapter getting its own, color-coded note. The notes put on these sticky notes will be inserted into the manuscript via what I call "prompts" typed in bold, cueing me to start there and write those few lines, or whatever is needed to make that part work. This is where I am, and it's a good place, being that the beta reader admitted that it was the "cleanest" manuscript they'd received in a long time, and perhaps more importantly, that the novel was more than salvageable and "needs to be represented." Which brings me to a decision I've made recently that you can read more about in the "A Brief Disclaimer" section of this blog, and it has to do with the previously self-published versions of my work. Basically, I've realized that nothing is going to happen with them in the form that they are in now, that is to say, stigmatized as self-published works. If I am to recognize the integrity of my past work for what it is and what it could be, I need to take it out of the market for now, knowing that they are simply not ready to be consumed. They are early works that tie into this third work-in-progress, one that is designed to stand on its own, and one that will still stand as my potential launching pad into the industry. But since I cannot un-publish those novels, the novels exist now in my mind only as manuscripts (self-publishing companies should make clear that you still own the rights to your book) and nothing more. As a result, these novels have been unlocked, giving me the freedom to go back and change minor punctuation and grammar, things that had previously fallen victim to both my inexperience as a writer, and the heavy hand of copy editors assigned to make my book more "marketable," and thus destroying any stylistic consistency. It is because of this, you will no longer hear me acknowledge these editions as even being in existence, and it is my wish that these editions no longer be included in my body of, as of now, un-published work. These manuscripts have in fact already been altered, but only in matters of the above mentioned grammar and punctuation with the content remaining the same, and I've sat down to do this in wonderful new writing locations. As you know, I love finding new spaces to work, and I have recently discovered the University on Montevallo's Carmichael Library in Montevallo, Alabama as the place where I will more than likely write most of my next novel. It reminds me very much of the university libraries that I've worked in throughout the years as both a student and a post-graduate alumnus, sometimes choosing to immerse myself in its academic atmosphere of desks and cubicles and campus tranquility instead of drinking it up on a Saturday night. Nowadays, the drinking part isn't even a factor, but revisiting a college campus not only gives me the inspiration that I need in such a rural part of the country, but it allows me to tap into my natural wiring as an academic, working in the environment that at one point in my life, I'd planned to become a part of. It's good to know that these constants exist around me to mirror the constants of my artistic sensibility. It's very much like when you hear of an artist's career in some retrospect documentary, where the artists themselves are talking about their work as if its relevance to them has never dissipated. They are able to pick apart and dissect their movies or songs or books as if they had just created them, and you realize that this is the case because the artist lives with the art that they create, and the places where they were created, and the reasons that they were created, for the rest of their lives.  I don't remember exactly when it happened, but I do know that it coincided with another transition that was happening at the time, at least in my world. The year was 1991, and I was only then exploring life outside of what I already knew. As was the music industry. The timing was perfect.
Nirvana's "Nevermind" was just there one day, as was the first and most earth-shaking single off the record, "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The song was soon followed by most all of the remaining, radio-friendly tracks that played like the soundtrack of my life then, along with Pearl Jam and everything else that was being pushed through the system. But I was oblivious to the actual sequence of events, knowing only that I really liked the music and never really making a noteworthy transition in my mind that what came before was dead and that I was no longer a part of it. It just became "not real" anymore, replaced instead with the spirit of the music and the musicians who were making this new music, very much akin to the spirit of the 1960s in my opinion, where a Romantic introspection was taking place that was designed to eventually change the world. It was why I latched onto the charismatic Kurt Cobain as my generation's John Lennon, a perspective that wasn't unique to people my age, but one that would eventually play out in a grim parallel of death and martyrdom. It would also raise a discussion only a few years later that stayed with me to this day. The year was 1994, and I was in one of my writing courses at the University of New Orleans when the topic came up of what Kurt Cobain meant to the youth of his generation in comparison to what John Lennon represented to his. And I remember being shocked that so many students dismissed Cobain as just another troubled addict who ended up doing the inevitable, claiming that he "took the coward's way out," and all the other stock reactions that people have who seem almost jealous that they possibly didn't have the courage to do what they really wanted to do (this is generally a very strong opinion of mine when it comes to reactions to suicides, but that's for a different piece). The result was that John Lennon -- who keep in mind, I hold absolutely dear -- won out in a landslide as to the more influential artist, and for some reason, this sent me right to our assigned journal exercise that night, an assignment that I knew would have to be turned in, and one that I knew was going to make a ripple. I don't remember exactly what I wrote (if Hurricane Katrina hadn't claimed all of my college notes and materials I'd be a much happier man, that's for sure), but I do remember the line: "Back off. We don't want or need your sympathy." And I'm absolutely positive that this was aimed directly at the Lennon sympathizers, or to those who just didn't understand what it was I did then, to the point where I felt the need to refer to myself as part of a "we," as if being a member of some Cobain cult! This was what Nirvana's "Nevermind" and the records that followed did for me, or more to the point, to me. It was an interesting time. But perhaps more interesting was the mark in the margin made by my professor, right next to the line I mentioned, where she simply drew a red exclamation point. Yeah! At least I had one.  Not that I was ever really out of the game, but by way of a quick update, the manuscript that I've been chronicling the production of here has not only been completed, but is now in the hands of beta readers and editors alike. In addition, I've been preparing to begin writing a new book, my fourth, and it's a novel that will mark a certain departure for me stylistically. This new one is completely under wraps, however, and probably won't get mentioned here again for quite some time. Shhh!
But this puts me in the first-time position of being in both post and pre-production on two separate novels, and when I factor in the calendar event of my two-year sober point back on the 9th of this month, never before have I felt so back in the game. My first two books had been written, re-written, and then re-written again and again by the time I made the haphazard decision of self-publishing. Once again, I don't recommend it, even though back when I did it -- and I'm only going back to 2001 on the first novel -- self-publishing meant that a publisher would actually print your book cover to cover on a "print-on-demand" basis. Nowadays, eBook publishing has put a nice little dent in the business model for both vanity presses and traditional publishers alike, being that it seems that self-published eBooks are actually making money for their authors. I really don't know that this new trend has loosened the grip on the very secured route of traditional publishing. That is, has the process for getting a manuscript through the system, from editor to agent to publisher gotten any easier simply because of competition with the growing online industry? I suppose I'm going to find out, because the thought of self-publishing online or in any other format again is an absolute last resort for me at this stage of the game. It's all or nothing. Either way, someone has to write the books, right?  With only two nights to go in Key West, I wanted to post a quick something about this scene, nighttime on this section of the island, only hours after the bustle of the tourist-friendly Duvall Street closes and the customers and employees scatter. This is the "Blanket," Key West style, and it is a time of night I've grown accustomed to while here.
It is in fact so safe to walk these streets late at night, that for me, it's a little unnerving. The area in and around Duvall Street reminds me so much of New Orleans, with Duvall being closer akin to Bourbon Street, and the neighborhoods surrounding looking like parts of the Garden District. But in no way would I consider taking to either one of those neighborhoods in New Orleans on foot after hours, especially when there seems to be not a living soul around! It truly is amazing. Where does everybody go? Walking through the French Quarter for so may years has wired me to check for movement in passing car windows and to keep a steady, peripheral awareness that produces a special kind of tunnel vision. Here, I lapse into that pinhole-size perspective, and it makes it quite hard to sightsee. But the points of the late-night walks have been all centered around a certain centering, for processing the night on stage, for exploring the storefronts and points of interest for any daytime outings, and more importantly, for walking around inside of my writer's mind. I felt like Owen Wilson in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," and what a coincidence it was that I was in the land of Hemingway. I was looking for that old Rolls-Royce around every corner.  Greetings from Key West, Florida.
Been here for three days now, performing nightly with my band at Sloppy Joe's Bar, the alleged place where Ernest Hemingway tied quite a few on in his day. But if you eavesdrop on one of the tour trams that pass every now and again, you learn that the original Sloppy Joe's, and Hemingway's liver, have remnants further down the block in an entirely different location. But I digress. Key West has gone off my radar as far as rants go. It is what it is, and I'm here first on business, and second, to get lost in my imagination for a solid week. Which brings me to this post, which was inspired by a Twitter feed in which a fellow writer blogged about their influences. I'd never thought to do that myself, usually reserving that information for when I was a drinker and would talk many an ear off about literature and writing and the best of both. But those days are gone, and with it went the bravado of a loud drunk. Nonetheless, I'd like to take this time to mention the latest book I've read (pictured above), which I found very inspiring for reasons I'll explain, and then say a little something about what influences me as a writer. First and foremost, I have to mention the Queen of the Damned herself, Anne Rice, my surrogate mother of letters and inspiration to this day. Her contemporary fiction is what put me on the path of the novel as my primary means of storytelling, and I admit it without shame that she has been most all I've read in that field to date. I can't remember the last book I've read (fiction, mind you) that she hasn't written, with the exception of one (again, pictured above). I just recently saw a YouTube video of her in her little office in the California desert, and it made me think about perseverance. Anne used to live quite the extravagant lifestyle in New Orleans, but apparently lost all of it due to bad investments and a crashing real estate market. That information came from a separate interview I read recently, but when I put it all together, it made me think, "I can and will write everywhere." Anne used to write in a Garden District mansion, and now, by the looks of it, she writes in a small room in a suburban California condo. Now, before I go further off track here, let me mention The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (that's right, pictured above), a wonderfully written and structured book that inspires me in its simplicity. I'm sure Mr. Davidson himself would not be so kind with my calling his work "simple," mainly because according to the background information on him, the novel took seven years to write. But the book is simple only in the fact that it manages to carry two story threads framed in a plot-space that is really uneventful. Without reviewing the book, I just want to make the point that it showed me how less can absolutely be more, and Davidson is very much akin to my approach. It's vivid, beautiful, and internalized in the Romantic tradition. Back to what inspires me, I have to mention the very same Romantic tradition, more specifically, the English Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Even more specific would be the second generation led by Byron, Keats, and Shelley. It would be downright weird for me to claim that as a novelist I was influenced by them stylistically, being that they were poets. But their philosophies are what molded me, and the study of their time and work is what gave me the Promethean flame that I write so much about. That flame, in my opinion, was carried centuries later as the writers of the Beat Generation -- another great influence on my work -- internalized their passions and made the written word like new, post-World War II monuments of expressive achievement. William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg truly believed they were changing the world, like the English Romantics before them, and in a way they did. Only it was the world inside. Yes. The world inside. Writers can't move into any other words unless they're satisfied with the one inside. That is what inspires me. What inspires you?  The third time is the charm! Here is the draft on which I'll build, the one that will be placed gently into the hands of beta readers and potential agents. The Internet was down when I completed it, which is probably a good thing. It reminds me of stories of mass conceptions during power outages. It has been nine months between drafts!
Anyway, this one clocked in at 422 pages, which means I was able to chop 44 pages from the previous draft, a statistic that only now in finishing I realized. I would never have expected that. There was numerology involved in today's completion, today being August the 3rd, 2011 (8+3=11), and as if to punctuate my belief that my work tends to be in sync with the universe, by no effort of my own, the novel was completed at 11:11 a.m. My "Silver Screen" channel was on in my office, and while the final pages of the manuscript slipped out of the printer, triumphant soundtrack music accentuated the event! But in all seriousness, today is the culmination of quite a bit of personal growth, and it is a testament to how far I've indeed come. I love you, Jessica. As is one of the main purposes of this website, there will be more posts to follow regarding plans for the future of this piece. We will track my pursuit of agency representation, and ultimately, of legitimate publication. Let's do this together, shall we?  Thought I'd post a little something here about my recent week spent in Key West, during which time I edited my new book during the day and played music at night. It was wonderful in this regard. As long as I have this opportunity, my Key West weeks will double as writing sabbaticals.
But I do want to mention the literary significance of Key West, namely, the well-documented fact that Ernest Hemingway lived on the island for a short time during one of the most prolific periods of his life. The Hemingway House is a tourist attraction, and I did make the trek on foot to the house, and I did take the tour, and I did buy a souvenir coffee mug. Now, I did all of these things during my first trip to Key West (sans the coffee mug), and I have to report that the Hemingway mystique was much more potent that first time around. I think I know why. Simply put, I grew up as a writer in New Orleans, the same city as a literary idol of mine, Anne Rice, also lived. I'd pass her house on a regular basis in the Garden District of New Orleans, the mansion sitting behind the gates on the corner of First and Chestnut, the residence the model for the Mayfair house in Anne Rice's own The Witching Hour. I even had the privilege of being inside two of her other properties, one being her house on Third and St. Charles during the Bacchus parade back in 1997. I remember walking around the house saying, "This is what words on paper built." I actually imagined the walls themselves being made of pieced-together manuscript pages. It was something to aspire to, an atmosphere that even now I try to reproduce in my own home. I dream often of being in her house, roaming the halls in search of her writing space, just to have a look. I can't say the same for the Hemingway House in Key West, and to be fair, I'm going to assume that the main reason has to do with the fact that it is not a very well-kept place. Window fans circulate what little air there is in there, and aside from evidence of a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom, the house doesn't really look lived in. It looks like what it was, and that was a place for Hemingway to entertain and then eventually crash while on his never-ending benders in Key West. He does have a "writing studio" in a separate small building that the tour guide said was once connected by a walkway straight from his bedroom, but even that looked stifling and uninspiring. But the six-toed cats that roam the property were ... well ... there were six-toed cats that roamed the property. Therefore, Key West for me is just as I had mentioned earlier, and that is a place that I have the luxury of going to twice a year (for now) and spending a week inside of my writer's mind. I saw very little of the island aside from certain streets that were essential for me to roam in order to survive. Unfortunately, Key West represents everything that I no longer am as a man two years sober, yet I will move confidently into the midst of this beautiful part of the United States and take from it what I can. Thank you, Key West!  I'm writing this after only moments ago finishing Chapter 20 of 30 of my new book, and in the moments between then and now, I've already taken the news to Facebook and Twitter, and now here to TedTorres.com. This is the excitement of a project drawing to a close. This is the vision of another black binder materializing in my office with another snapshot of where I am as a writer inside. This is why I do it, and it's why you should do it, too.
From here on out, the chapters are shorter, and thus, I can more easily incorporate my "edit, insert, read, and move on to the next chapter" regimen with an accelerated sense of progress. I've worked through the clunky prose, passed the point of my sobriety, and now I'm sharing the drive and enthusiasm that the writer of the pages I'm editing right now had when he worked in a trance-like state at the Hoover Public Library. However, this is also usually the time when I start planning ahead, although this time around, my aspirations are more grounded in reality. Five years ago, and weeks after my mother and I settled into Alabama after Hurricane Katrina, I had in fact had most of Scenes from the Blanket written and edited. Only the final three chapters (if I recall correctly) needed to be written, and I remember carving out a workspace and going to work in the very small apartment I had rented, downing cup after cup of coffee and pounding out the rest of the book. But the planning for the future part was all about getting it published as quick as possible, using the crutch of having survived the ordeal of Katrina as my justification, or more to the point, my reward. I was going to self-publish yet again, and this time, I was going to do it right … whatever that meant. Well, as I've preached over and over again here on TedTorres.com, self-publishing is not the way to go. It creates an instant stigma in the industry, and there is no amount of promotion that can be done, either by yourself or through outside agencies (I actually hired a publicist during this time) that is going to blur the reality of that stigma in the eyes of anyone even coming close to taking you seriously as a novelist. It took two knocks upside the head with this lesson to finally learn it, and it is why this third book will be worked into the system legitimately, and it is the only plan I have for this book as of now. But this is not to say that I haven't made other plans! They are just the more constructive kind, manifested in the form of a stream-of-consciousness Word file that I started yesterday (this is primarily how I outline my novels) with notes for a fourth book. It will mark a departure for me, leaving this Blanket Trilogy I've created behind as the first part of my literary canon (while, of course, still pursuing legitimate publication for this new one), and marking my launch into a genre more akin to dark comedy. The new book has a working title, but it will change. It has to. Like everything else in life. |