Stranger Than Fiction

As I have discussed here before, people often accuse my novels of being thinly veiled accounts of things that have actually happened to me. I suspect this is common enough for authors who portray characters and events which could reasonably have been drawn from the writer’s own life.

Usually, I bat away these suggestions and even affect some indignation at the apparent lack of faith in my creativity and imagination. The dirty little secret, as you might suspect, is that some of the things depicted in my books really did happen to me. For example, in my teen years I did go to Mexico with a friend. Unlike what happened in Maximilian and Carlotta Are Dead, though, we did not drive all the way to central Mexico in a ’65 Chevy. Instead, we drove to Calexico in a Volkswagen Beetle, then walked across the border to Mexicali, and took a train as far as Hermosillo. We had fun, but it was not nearly as eventful as the adventures of my characters. And that particular friend, being quite sensible, was nothing at all like Lonnie.

In truth, most of the stuff in my books did not happen to me. I never lived in San Francisco, as Dallas did in Lautaro’s Spear, although I did work as photographer (among other duties) for a while at a small-town newspaper. I also had some involvement with a weekly urban newspaper like the one where Dallas worked, but that was in Seattle not San Francisco. To this day I have never set foot in Deauville, although I would like to go someday. My experiences as a student in Bordeaux did come in handy in writing the book, but unlike Dallas, I never spent a night with any of the prostitutes on the rue Ste Catherine.

A couple of things in Lautaro’s Spear, though, were drawn pretty much verbatim from my own experiences. For one thing, the character of Marty is based on a real person. I do not know what his actual name was, but I used to get lunch from him sometimes in Seattle during my noon break at work. As was my habit at the time in Mexican eateries, I tried practicing my Spanish on him, but like the fictional Marty, he replied only in English. When I mentioned that I had lived in Chile, just like his fictional alter ego, he began dropping dark hints that he had had some kind of personal involvement in the coup that toppled Salvador Allende. When he said, “We did a job on him,” I could never be certain whether he was referring to the United States collectively or to himself and some kind of CIA commando unit he might have been involved in. Over the years my imagination went a bit crazy conjuring up what his story might have been and wondering how he wound up operating a humble Mexican eatery.

The one episode in Lautaro’s Spear that was drawn most exactly from my life was the events in chapters 26 and 27, wherein Dallas and Ángel find themselves sharing a train compartment with three other people and end up collectively finishing an entire bottle of scotch whiskey. This mostly really happened. Instead of Dallas and Ángel, it was just me traveling with the young American and German women and Swiss lad. And the bottle of whiskey, though very nice, was not the fabulously expensive label conjured up for my story. Also, it was not the year 1980 and we were not traveling to Berlin. Our train was making a journey from Zurich to Vienna just before New Year’s 1974. There was plenty of security, though, which was explained to us as having to do with a concurrent visit to Austria by the Shah of Iran. Otherwise, it all pretty much happened the way I described it. In fact, I drew the details so completely from life and made the people involved so recognizable that, given the pervasiveness of the internet, I nearly half-expected one or more of my three companions from that night to get in touch with me to find out if the story was indeed about them. So far none has.

As for my upcoming book, it is safe to say that no events depicted therein were drawn from my actual life. The narrative does visit a surprising number of places that I have known well, beginning with Seattle, and even finds it way all the way to Ireland. I am still, as reported last month, about halfway through the first draft. With the Christmas/New Year season now well behind us, I am back at the writing and hope to plow through to a completed draft in the next few weeks. The weather is certainly cooperating by providing a gloomy, damp atmosphere compatible with the tone of the story.

I need to finish before spring arrives and brightens things up too much.

Darkness Over Puget Sound

There was a time when I not only hoped but expected to have another book out in 2018. After all, I had impressed myself by managing to get Lautaro’s Spear out in 2017 after publishing The Three Towers of Afranor in 2016. I flattered myself that a new book each calendar year might be my new default schedule.

That obviously has not happened, and I will not bore you with the reasons or excuses. On the positive side, I am now about halfway through the first draft of my fourth novel. This was meant to be the fun, easy, throwaway book that was meant mainly to amuse myself. As such, it was not supposed to require huge amounts of time or mental, intellectual or emotional expenditure. It was to be an amuse-bouche or palate cleanser before getting back to the hearty literature of my nearly-accidental Dallas Green trilogy.

I should have learned my lesson with The Three Towers. That was also meant to be an “easy” write which, set in a pure fantasy world, would not even need any research because it was all being made up out of whole cloth. Yet that one did not actually see the light of day until about two years exactly after the previous book. That probably had more to do with what was going on my life than the book’s subject matter, but it may have also been related to a sense of decompression—if not mental exhausation—after finishing Maximilian and Carlotta. Something similar may have been going on in the wake of Lautaro’s Spear.

For an unbearably long time I was mired in the first couple of chapters, trying to get the characters and the tone as right as I could. The writing and rewriting was probably necessary in the long run, but the eventual breakthrough only came by taking to heart the wise words of novelist Richard Bausch, whom I quoted here in April: “When you’re stuck, lower your standards and keep going.” I overcame my tendency to not move on from a chapter until it was “perfect” and just started plowing through. That was much better for my output and a lot more gratifying. The worry, of course, is that I will end up going back, perusing it, and finding that it is all unreadable rubbish.

The old rule of thumb for writing novels is that the first fifty pages are the hardest, and that is once again proved true. Since getting past that amazingly important milestone, it has been clear sailing. It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that the book is now writing itself, but that is what it feels like. Plot turns and twists seem to occur organically, as if I am channeling someone else’s story. The characters take on their own inner lives. I am looking ahead and seeing plot threads magically weaving around each other and coming together nicely. The other day the final paragraphs of the book came to me, as if delivered on a silver platter, so I know definitely what I am writing toward. Critically, in between writing sessions, I can scarcely wait to get back to it. That is a feeling I have to bear now for a few weeks since the holidays will necessarily leave little time for daily writing. Fortunately, the timing is not too bad because I have paused at a natural breaking place, and I need to be working out further plot details in my head anyway.

Even though this book is another fantasy, I have had to engage in a surprising amount of research. Unlike The Three Towers, this one takes place in the “real” world—specifically the region around Seattle, which I happily know well. There are flashbacks, though, that have sent me scurrying to be knowledgeable not only about Pacific Northwest history but also that of 17th century England and Ireland. Somehow I have even managed to bring in the area where I currently live and in a way that I feel works quite well for the story.

As I have said before, this is my homage to the Gothic and supernatural stories that delighted me in my misspent youth. Specifically, it shamelessly but lovingly reworks many of the elements of my beloved adolescent object of fascination, the TV series Dark Shadows, while aiming to be something original. It also veers self-consciously in the most opposite direction possible to the adolescent-male-infused world of Maximilian and Carlotta. (By the way, did anyone actually catch the deliberate Dark Shadows reference I incongruously placed in my first novel?)

There is something wonderful in being at this point in the creative process. Most of the hard work is either behind or ahead of me. It is now thoughts of my current story that flood my brain in idle moments—instead of images for the third Dallas book, as was the case until a couple of months ago. Most delightfully, during this relatively short—and no doubt temporary—span of time, this feels as though it is going to be the best book I have ever written.