Vampires At The Beach

Before I settled on Klara, I had asked a few other attractive young women to help me with the book. My routine generally consisted of approaching members of the target audience--as Carolyn is 24 and single with no boyfriend when the book starts out--to ask them what they're reading. To answer, most would show me the cover of the book. Then I would either guess what the book was about from the title or ask them to describe it. This in and of itself helped me a couple of ways. One pretty young lady, who seemed a little too eager, was reading a book titled Love the One You're With. I remarked to her, "Now we know what that's about, right?" Another desirable young woman's book was titled Flawless. My guess that it was about the fashion industry or models turned out to be wrong, but the reticent soft-spoken brunette I questioned did allow it was about some girl, presumably without imperfections of any kind. The working title of my book at that time was The Secondary Refraction. Based on these experiences, the more I thought about it, the more that seemed too cryptic, so I changed it to Paradise Regained, because that's what happens at the end of the book--Carolyn and John along with Brandy and the gang get to their South Pacific island before the U.S. military does, deploy the bubble machine from the aliens' specs and bingo--instant impregnable island fortress. I did a http://www.dogpile.com/ search on it and was surprised to learn that no one since John Milton had used that title in the 1600s, so I thought, Why not--it's shorter and more positive, implying the requisite happy ending, in addition to being truth in advertising.
Another more intelligent college-aged young blonde honey coolly and tersely advised me that her book was about vampires. This became a recurring theme. I remember when I was working at the call center up in Juno Beach, across the street from the turtle place, ten years ago when I was getting the first draft of my book together. The general manager kept asking me why I hadn't come up with the books on the magician's assistant as he called it, referring to the Harry Potter series. The answer to that question which I never gave him is that you have to be into something like that to be able to write convincingly, persuasively and passionately about it--and I'm just not into witchcraft and spells and warlocks and all that, the same way I'm not into vampires. But I am into science fiction.
What I think has happened in the last fifty years is that science fiction has gotten way too technical for the average person to understand it. My first book was a spy novel with a romance subplot set in real time--1994. The second was a young adult coming of age story set mostly in 2012. The third book takes place in 2042, but I have taken pains to make it as accessible as possible, more back to basics. Whether this was a mistake, whether I have outsmarted myself, we shall see.
Allow me by digression to explain. Yes, fiction is a brand-name business. The same way most people would patronize a McDonald's rather than an independent restaurant in an unfamiliar locale simply because as bad as McDonald's is, it's nevertheless a known quantity, so also have publishers realized that they can make more money from one million Stephen King books than from ten thousand titles of ten thousand lesser-known writers. The flip side of that, however, is that publishers always need genre books, because some people go through these things--romances being the obvious example--as if they were going out of style. My general impression of all the people that I've polled and those that I haven't is that people are desperate for something--anything--to read that is well-written, so much so that they're willing to read what they consider mediocre until the proverbial good stuff comes along again. So many girls' judgment of what they were reading was, in dreary tones of world-weary resignation, "It's O.K." And when I followed up with why they were reading it to begin with, the answer was always that a friend or close relative, i.e. their mother, had recommended it.
Everyone always thinks his or her book is different. The market's never been worse for first-timers. Even if the book does get published, I am going to have to work full time or more at making it sell. I was invited to join Toastmasters a few years ago by one of their members but since I didn't have a salable book at the time, I thought I'd hold off until I did. That's my ace in the hole--that and the book fair in Miami in November. If I could just get one person to write me back, to ask to read the book, then I would have more confidence about this whole thing. I remember this is what drove me crazy last time--the waiting.
It's mostly cloudy outside now but there's no way to know how it is at the beach except by being there, as where I live is six miles inland and as previously stipulated the weather in Florida is very strange. My expensive mixed nuts--toasted but not salted--from Sunnyland Farms in Georgia arrived a little while ago via UPS. I can keep this routine up for about six more months before money is going to be a problem. I should know whether the book is a go or not a long time before then. I know rationally that one way or another, I'll do the right thing, but knowing it emotionally is something else. The future remains a scary place but it is the only place I want to live.

Stealing

Everyone steals from everyone else but no one wants to admit it--except me. For example, I've stolen the format for these posts from Humbert's journal entries in Part One of my favorite book--Lolita. But if you never read that book, you'd never know it. Incidentally, if you never have read that book, I entirely recommend it, if for no other reason than the sheer entertainment value. Whatever else it is, it remains the funniest book I've ever read. But that aside, the reason that I read that and the John Updike Rabbit books is because of the descriptive narrative passages. Descriptive narrative is something I'm not good at and thus detest--my strong points are characterization and dialog, so that's what I like doing the most. But one of the things I've learned in trying to get my books published is that not everyone skips the descriptive narrative sections of a book as I routinely do. Some people actually get into them--and many of these people have high ranking places in publishing, it appears. Stealing first came to my attention when I started watching Akira Kurosawa films. I saw Ran when it first came out and I really liked it a lot. When I mentioned this to a friend, he suggested that I check out Seven Samurai. I did, and the rest is history. But the more I watched these and other Kurosawa movies, the more I became aware of how much they had been ripped off by Hollywood and elsewhere. Now, I realize 'rip off' and 'stealing' are highly negative and may sound harsh, and other people have nicer words or less stigmatized phrases for what I mean here, such as 'borrowing' or 're-imagining' or 'derivative' or even 'inspired by' or 'homage to.' But what this comes down to is the extent to which the original source material has been mined. By way of colorful contrast, Kurosawa himself stole liberally from Shakespeare for the scripts to his films--after all, if you're going to loot, why not plunder the best? But to me there's a big difference between, say, Kurosawa taking the story of Macbeth along with plot devices from Hamlet, Richard the Third and Henry the Fifth and him coming up with Throne of Blood as compared to another major studio ripping off Yojimbo for the nth time to come up with the latest wise-cracking hero action adventure Bruce Willis/Sylvester Stallone/Arnold Schwarzenegger et al. vehicle. Another example of what I mean is the source of where I ripped off the plot to my latest completed novel--Gall Force, which is an animated Japanese series of movies that didn't get a wide release in this country because the English dubbed version is so bad. In their story, the scientist on the moon who finds the ancient aliens' data chip simply announces it to the world--and is subsequently aghast when everyone starts fighting over it. I thought, Hm--suppose he didn't tell anyone--how would this play out? I was off and running. I mention the Gall Force series specifically because I'm not the only person to have stolen from them. James Cameron, the man behind the Terminator movies, who also did Titanic, stole actual dialog from Gall Force Earth Chapter 3 for one scene in his third Terminator movie. This is bad. Borrowing plot ideas is one thing, but when you can't even write your own dialog, this exposes to me the shameful bankruptcy of your creativity for all to mournfully witness. But enough of my soap box. Beach report: mostly sunny with lots of people having fun on Labor Day. No baby sea turtles but some actual honeys were sighted. Fisherfools vastly outnumbered fishermen in Juno. The sky was so beautiful that words cannot describe it, nor can mere photographs do it justice, but I thought I'd include one, just for the heck of it. Before I left for my eight-plus hours of walking, though, I found and corrected one mistake that I discovered in the manuscript for the 'completed' book--in a part I had gone over with Klara but neither of us had spotted the typo--an omitted 'd,' reducing God to Go. And they say women's work is never done. This is why James J. Kilpatrick in his weekly column would always lecture us aspiring writers to Read Your Copy--and then Read It Again. Repeat as necessary. World without end. Amen.

Edit: Federigo, or The Power of Love by Howard Nemerov is a very funny book as well. The writer deftly blends realism with surrealism to produce a very entertaining novel that very few people have even heard about. This is one of those books that come out of nowhere and just demand your attention; it's like a very large and incredibly gentle giant who bursts through the wall, shaking off the rubble, and lifts you up by the scruff of your neck and casually imparts, "I will not release you until you have finished me.". If I had more money I'd take out a full-page ad in the New York Times and various other still intact newspapers to advertise how incredible it is. But what would that prove? Ah, well. It is to laugh. Ha, ha. And yes, it is out of print, so good night ladies.

The Book

When I asked Klara to help me with my book, this was not a line. This was the truth. I still need help with it but less so now, as I feel more confidant about it. It is in better shape now than it was a month ago, so if someone asks to see it, it will be more prepared.
Which prompts the question of when something such as this is actually done. Books are an enormous amount of work, so much so that at some point you start asking yourself if the game is really worth the candle. I am to the point now with the first book that it is difficult for me to even look at it any more, let alone enjoy it. I could do some more work on the sequel, but even that is starting to get on my nerves. Which is why I need a diversion.
I mentioned before that I am waiting. What I am waiting for is a response back. This is the really hard part. As much as doing the book wasn't easy and then getting the manuscript in shape was difficult, so too is it practically impossible to not want to rush the process at this point. Which is what gets a lot of people in trouble.
This is why you need a diversion--something else to do. At one point I was doing so much work on the book--because it needed it. Now I've gotten to the point where I need a response--because if I don't get one, that means this isn't going any further and I need to start making alternate arrangements. I can hang, but it's not easy. I see now why some people don't ever want to finish their work--because then it's away from you, much as a child that grows up and moves out on his or her own. Empty nest syndrome. If I can get something going on the first book, I'm sure my interest will pick up again in the second.
Klara was helping me with the book by sitting next to me, following along as I read it outloud. Then she would take a turn reading outloud and would write down words that were unfamiliar to her in her notebook and I would correct her pronunciation when she needed it. A little less than a hundred pages into the book, there's this scene where Carolyn seduces Brandy, but no on-camera sex, so to speak--it's all fade to black. That's when I felt Klara pull back from the book.
We skipped to the end just before she left, but by then the book starts getting complicated, when the subplot merges with the main story, and then just following what was happening became a problem. By the time I got my we're-too-different kiss-off from her, she wanted nothing more to do with me or the book.
She told me her last relationship had been long distance, with her last boyfriend living in Sweden when she lived in the Czech Republic, and maybe she didn't want to go through that again. The nice drive that we were having that one morning when we went to Hobe Sound beach, she did make one comment to the effect that she was going to be leaving soon anyway. I suppose me coming along with her was out of the question or didn't even occur to her. But then I wouldn't have been here to do all the work that I have gotten done. Such then is the mess.
But Carolyn's happy, right? She's got her boyfriend and her time on the island in paradise, so that's all that matters. Again, I'm left holding the bag.
But I can't complain, because I know that there are so many people who wish they could do what I've done and they just can't, for whatever reason. It's easy to fall into the trap of being bitter. I'm not going to do that.
At one point, after reading a part in the book that she liked, Klara asked me about my spirituality. She told me she believed in reincarnation. I countered that if you do believe that, then you have to also believe you're here to do something. I told her I was here to do books and I asked her what she was here to do. She said she hadn't figured it out yet. I told her that was fair.
I know it sounds awfully corny, but when I did the ending for the first book, I felt as though I had done something that I had been born to do. If the book is just for me, because there is nothing out there that it really resembles, then that's what I need to know. We shall see.