So we\u2019re six chapters in.\u00a0 Forty thousand words, give or take.\u00a0 I say \u201cwe\u201d because it is you and me.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t written a novel and you\u2019re not reading something that\u2019s been completed and carefully wrapped in consumable pieces.\u00a0 It\u2019s coming to you direct week by week.\u00a0 This thing doesn\u2019t even have a title yet.\u00a0 It\u2019s just an assortment of paper airplanes thrown out the window in the general direction of a target six blocks away.\u00a0 There is a story, there is a meaning, but I find it\u2019s changing sentence by sentence.\u00a0 This was, in the end, the only way I was going to get myself started again.\u00a0 Improvise a novel, and post it step by step.\u00a0 No room to hide, only room to run.\u00a0 The product is assembled under a deadline.\u00a0 The by-product is excitement.\u00a0 I\u2019m writing again.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
Nacho has been prodding me for years now to work again.\u00a0 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\u2019s Project Press.\u00a0 This was before Moody Food<\/em> was even on the shelves, back when SFWP had a small team instead of a one-man inbox.\u00a0 The future was still bright; unknown and desperately guessed-at, but bright.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There were love triangles, personal vendettas, shared truths and horrors.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t very good.<\/p>\n It was supposed to be all about finding your way out of a trap, but the book became one instead.\u00a0 I had a year to finish it, so I just poked away a little at a time, always figuring I\u2019d catch up later.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know any better, that it took real commitment, real discipline, to keep the threads from fraying.\u00a0 Your mind can change a lot in a year.\u00a0 What made sense in January might not dovetail into your December frame of mind.\u00a0 The book and its inconsistencies came with me to New Orleans on my first move here, August 2005.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know any better, that Category 4 is massive, huge, and not to be trusted. \u00a0We had put up cardboard over the windows.\u00a0 My house flooded to the rooftop.<\/p>\n I was in limbo for three or four weeks.\u00a0 Nacho brought me to Ohio for a weekend of booze, comfort, and stuffing SFWP envelopes.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t talk about the book.\u00a0 The fool.\u00a0 He should have known that what I needed then wasn\u2019t a warm and casual atmosphere.\u00a0 I needed guidance, a goal, a martinet shoving my nose down in the keyboard.<\/p>\n October and November of that year I continued to work on the book, but everything started to mildew.\u00a0 The characters that I barely liked began to wander aimlessly.\u00a0 The ones I did like fell into hopeless, bizarre circumstances.\u00a0 The day of the deadline, the thing was 300 pages long.\u00a0 A just barely satisfactory conclusion would\u2019ve taken another hundred pages and at least six weeks of brain sapping.<\/p>\n It still sits on my hard drive, \u00be complete.\u00a0 Its innards, the few good parts here and there, have been amputated and turned into a few stories.\u00a0 The rest of the offal is abandoned and dormant.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 It took months and months, after the depression subsided and my life was stable again, for me to even think about creating again.\u00a0 I knew I could be good.\u00a0 I knew was capable, but I lacked the motivation and every week that went by that I didn\u2019t write, I could feel myself getting rustier and rustier.\u00a0 I believed that if I could just strike upon one really good Big Idea, then I\u2019d be able to get behind it with a moral imperative.\u00a0 But the Big Idea never came.\u00a0 Lots of nebulous items drifted through my mind late at night, and\u00a0 I wrote out notes for a few, but I always succumbed to the Worry: I\u2019ll lose interest in this and let it wither away like the last one.\u00a0 Or the Fear: my skills just aren\u2019t up to a story like this\u2026I won\u2019t find the right tone, won\u2019t be able to make this really dance.\u00a0 That would be a great idea for so-and-so to write.<\/p>\n Why do they call it self-defeatism?\u00a0 You can\u2019t outsmart yourself.\u00a0 Sometimes you just have to switch sides.<\/p>\n I went to Mexico and came back with a girlfriend.<\/p>\n I left the stagnation of my home state behind and moved further south.<\/p>\n I fell ass-backward into a job I love.<\/p>\n We have a house, a cat, and a dog.<\/p>\n Still, I don\u2019t attribute my current happiness to stability, or love, or financial flexibility.\u00a0 I attribute it to New Orleans.<\/p>\n You always read about people falling in love with New Orleans.\u00a0 The other transplants here will tell you the same thing over and over.\u00a0 They love it.\u00a0 They need it.\u00a0 There\u2019s no place like it.\u00a0 Blah blah blah<\/em>.<\/p>\n I love it, too, but not because the trees or the lampposts or the charming facades or the food titillates me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 New Orleans can find ways to annoy you when you\u2019re just trying to be yourself and can give you the red ass without a moment\u2019s notice.\u00a0 The city can let you down when your expectations are high and not even think to ask for forgiveness.\u00a0 The city can spend your money on shit it doesn\u2019t need.\u00a0 But when you think of the alternative, you quickly backtrack, put your head down, and say, \u201cYes, dear.\u201d\u00a0 At the end of the day, when you settle down into bed, you\u2019re glad it\u2019s right there: the port noise, the sticky air, all the history accumulating like cellulite.<\/p>\n So I\u2019m happy.\u00a0 Happiness fills me like a survival instinct.\u00a0 The entrapment is gone.\u00a0 There\u2019s no cycle of worry.\u00a0 I decided that if I want to write, then I should write.\u00a0 But if I write, it should be often and I should be under supervision.\u00a0 I\u2019ve made fun of National Novel Writing Month before, but mostly for the people and attitude it engenders.\u00a0 The marathon part, though, has merit.\u00a0 I knew I wanted to do something like that to jumpstart myself again.\u00a0 And in order to do that, I\u2019d need a story that was close at hand.<\/p>\n Uptown New Orleans.\u00a0 Rich homes and crack shacks can share the same street.\u00a0 You can get carjacked picking up your kid from one of the most exclusive, expensive private schools in the country.\u00a0 You can eat out at a restaurant every night and never hit the same spot twice in a half a year.\u00a0 For bars, that would be three years.\u00a0 The property taxes are as high as the potholes are deep.\u00a0 This whole area of New Orleans used to be plantations.\u00a0 They freed the slaves, divvied up the land, and brought in integration, but you\u2019d think that was all just a bunch of lacquer on the mantelpiece if you talk to the right people, white or black.<\/p>\n There\u2019s the way it was and the way it is, and that pisses off a lot of people.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t have all the answers.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have all the angles.\u00a0 Writing about New Orleans when you\u2019re a two-year rookie, that could be foolhardy and dangerous.\u00a0 I\u2019m bound to get something wrong.\u00a0 But goddammit if every movie, TV show, or book set in New Orleans recently hasn\u2019t 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.\u00a0 This city needs to have its eyes poked.\u00a0 And a transplant could be just the person to do it.<\/p>\n All I know is I\u2019m having a hell of a good time punching the keys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So we\u2019re six chapters in.\u00a0 Forty thousand words, give or take.\u00a0 I say \u201cwe\u201d because it is you and me.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t written a novel and you\u2019re not reading something that\u2019s been completed and carefully wrapped in consumable pieces.\u00a0 It\u2019s …<\/p>\n