Bullshit Holiday Break Novel Intermission

So we’re six chapters in.  Forty thousand words, give or take.  I say “we” because it is you and me.  I haven’t written a novel and you’re not reading something that’s been completed and carefully wrapped in consumable pieces.  It’s coming to you direct week by week.  This thing doesn’t even have a title yet.  It’s just an assortment of paper airplanes thrown out the window in the general direction of a target six blocks away.  There is a story, there is a meaning, but I find it’s changing sentence by sentence.  This was, in the end, the only way I was going to get myself started again.  Improvise a novel, and post it step by step.  No room to hide, only room to run.  The product is assembled under a deadline.  The by-product is excitement.  I’m writing again. 

Nacho has been prodding me for years now to work again.  Four years ago, almost to the date, I began work on a novel, my second, that would be at the very least considered for his newly formed Santa Fe Writer’s Project Press.  This was before Moody Food was even on the shelves, back when SFWP had a small team instead of a one-man inbox.  The future was still bright; unknown and desperately guessed-at, but bright.  I set to work on a Very Serious Story about college kids who never left their college town reuniting ten years later under auspicious circumstances.  There were love triangles, personal vendettas, shared truths and horrors.

It wasn’t very good.

It was supposed to be all about finding your way out of a trap, but the book became one instead.  I had a year to finish it, so I just poked away a little at a time, always figuring I’d catch up later.  I didn’t know any better, that it took real commitment, real discipline, to keep the threads from fraying.  Your mind can change a lot in a year.  What made sense in January might not dovetail into your December frame of mind.  The book and its inconsistencies came with me to New Orleans on my first move here, August 2005.  The computer it was stored on was one of the only things I took with me when I evacuated for Hurricane Katrina 25 days later.  I didn’t know any better, that Category 4 is massive, huge, and not to be trusted.  We had put up cardboard over the windows.  My house flooded to the rooftop.

I was in limbo for three or four weeks.  Nacho brought me to Ohio for a weekend of booze, comfort, and stuffing SFWP envelopes.  We didn’t talk about the book.  The fool.  He should have known that what I needed then wasn’t a warm and casual atmosphere.  I needed guidance, a goal, a martinet shoving my nose down in the keyboard.

October and November of that year I continued to work on the book, but everything started to mildew.  The characters that I barely liked began to wander aimlessly.  The ones I did like fell into hopeless, bizarre circumstances.  The day of the deadline, the thing was 300 pages long.  A just barely satisfactory conclusion would’ve taken another hundred pages and at least six weeks of brain sapping.

It still sits on my hard drive, ¾ complete.  Its innards, the few good parts here and there, have been amputated and turned into a few stories.  The rest of the offal is abandoned and dormant.

After failing Nacho horribly (or, perhaps, saving him from making a huge mistake by publishing a completely unmarketable, melancholy novel written by a struggling mind and causing him to move on to Alan Cheuse instead), I felt zero passion for writing anything, not even little throwaways for this site like I used to.  It took months and months, after the depression subsided and my life was stable again, for me to even think about creating again.  I knew I could be good.  I knew was capable, but I lacked the motivation and every week that went by that I didn’t write, I could feel myself getting rustier and rustier.  I believed that if I could just strike upon one really good Big Idea, then I’d be able to get behind it with a moral imperative.  But the Big Idea never came.  Lots of nebulous items drifted through my mind late at night, and  I wrote out notes for a few, but I always succumbed to the Worry: I’ll lose interest in this and let it wither away like the last one.  Or the Fear: my skills just aren’t up to a story like this…I won’t find the right tone, won’t be able to make this really dance.  That would be a great idea for so-and-so to write.

Why do they call it self-defeatism?  You can’t outsmart yourself.  Sometimes you just have to switch sides.

I went to Mexico and came back with a girlfriend.

I left the stagnation of my home state behind and moved further south.

I fell ass-backward into a job I love.

We have a house, a cat, and a dog.

Still, I don’t attribute my current happiness to stability, or love, or financial flexibility.  I attribute it to New Orleans.

You always read about people falling in love with New Orleans.  The other transplants here will tell you the same thing over and over.  They love it.  They need it.  There’s no place like it.  Blah blah blah.

I love it, too, but not because the trees or the lampposts or the charming facades or the food titillates me.  Those were all the initial attractions, but now I love the city like a man loves his wife after ten years of marriage: a strong attachment underlying an exasperation with all her faults.  New Orleans can find ways to annoy you when you’re just trying to be yourself and can give you the red ass without a moment’s notice.  The city can let you down when your expectations are high and not even think to ask for forgiveness.  The city can spend your money on shit it doesn’t need.  But when you think of the alternative, you quickly backtrack, put your head down, and say, “Yes, dear.”  At the end of the day, when you settle down into bed, you’re glad it’s right there: the port noise, the sticky air, all the history accumulating like cellulite.

So I’m happy.  Happiness fills me like a survival instinct.  The entrapment is gone.  There’s no cycle of worry.  I decided that if I want to write, then I should write.  But if I write, it should be often and I should be under supervision.  I’ve made fun of National Novel Writing Month before, but mostly for the people and attitude it engenders.  The marathon part, though, has merit.  I knew I wanted to do something like that to jumpstart myself again.  And in order to do that, I’d need a story that was close at hand.

Uptown New Orleans.  Rich homes and crack shacks can share the same street.  You can get carjacked picking up your kid from one of the most exclusive, expensive private schools in the country.  You can eat out at a restaurant every night and never hit the same spot twice in a half a year.  For bars, that would be three years.  The property taxes are as high as the potholes are deep.  This whole area of New Orleans used to be plantations.  They freed the slaves, divvied up the land, and brought in integration, but you’d think that was all just a bunch of lacquer on the mantelpiece if you talk to the right people, white or black.

There’s the way it was and the way it is, and that pisses off a lot of people.

I don’t have all the answers.  I don’t have all the angles.  Writing about New Orleans when you’re a two-year rookie, that could be foolhardy and dangerous.  I’m bound to get something wrong.  But goddammit if every movie, TV show, or book set in New Orleans recently hasn’t been some Nicholas Sparks-type family feel good trash, another requiem about Katrina, or a superficial genre piece running high on lingo but low on emotion.  This city needs to have its eyes poked.  And a transplant could be just the person to do it.

All I know is I’m having a hell of a good time punching the keys.