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Saturn Devouring His Children by Goya |
By James Kendley
There’s a
monster in my office, and it gnaws at me.
This monster
lives in the twilight world between life and death, never daring to crawl out
of the shadows. It’s too hideous for the light of day; it’s bloated and
grotesque, with far too many bizarre and malformed appendages flapping
spastically about. No wonder I keep it in the dark.
If you ever
looked closer, as several people have, you would see that most of its
individual parts are quite lovely, even if they don’t fit together like
clockwork. Were some of the extraneous bits sliced away and the remainder
stitched up neatly, we could see what massive reconstructive surgery might make
this creature viable.
For now, the
monster remains in the shadows. I lock the bottom drawer to keep it from
wandering out.
It’s my
first novel, The Wine Ghost, in which
we consider the terrible freedom of Frank Boyles, the last Baby Boomer. Set in
Arizona, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, and Thailand, The Wine Ghost was twelve years in the making. I wrote at least
350,000 words on three continents to get the present 110,000, and I learned
lessons in writing that no classroom can contain. The Wine Ghost is so dense, challenging, and chaotic that it's
unpublishable in its present form, but writers who've read the whole thing (and
the handful of agents who've read the substantial pitch and excerpts) have said
it's a remarkable achievement, despite the fatal flaws.
Here are
some of those fatal flaws (from my current perspective):
• The first
half of the novel is a nosedive, and readers begin wishing for the final
collision 30 pages in. As it is, it takes 60,000 words for Frank Boyles to fall
off Japan.
• The upward
spiral of the second half has stronger structure, and it’s less relentlessly
depressing than the first, but the pacing is crippled by chapters up to 9,500
words in length, chapters ending like short stories rather than ending in
thrills, chills, or cliff-hangers that might help keep readers turning those
pages.
• Even at a
slim 110,000, it’s nearly Dickensian in the number of characters and subplots,
a ridiculously overdrawn expat milieu
that drowns a simple tale of disgrace and redemption.
• It’s
written in the first person. Along with its many other indiscretions,
first-person treatment brands it as an irretrievably vomitous semi-autobiographical
first novel.
I’ve moved
on, I sometimes tell myself. I can’t start draft five anytime soon, especially
knowing that it would take a sixth and seventh draft to get this monster on
its feet. I have too much going on.
After 30
years as a professional writer and editor, I put aside
The Wine Ghost as a “hobby novel” and started my fiction career in
2009. This stage of my career as a “seasoned newbie” is all about the
foundation. I’ve completed a stint as senior editor of an online litmag. My
first website is up (
http://www.kendley.com),
and the more competitive, more sales-friendly version is under construction in dry
dock. I’m a member of a professional organization, the
Horror Writers Association. I’m
working social media, and I’m guest-blogging (and grateful for the chance). I
have a small backlog of stories for reprints. Most important, I have a
completed and competitive genre novel,
The Drowning God, making the rounds of publishers, and I’m a quarter done
with its sequel,
The Hungry Priest.
As for
The Wine Ghost, I’ve mined it for short
fiction (“
Dry Wash” in
The Bicycle Review, “
Coolie
Tales” in
not from here, are you?)
and poetry (“
The
Algerian Witch’s Abandoned Brood” in the
Danse Macabre e-collection
Hauptfriedhoff,
for which I also penned the foreword), and I’ve lifted setting elements and
whole characters for my genre series. I sometimes want to just strip off
everything I can repurpose from
The Wine
Ghost and leave it like a car on cinderblocks.
If only I
could. The Wine Ghost never stops
gnawing at me, so much so that I’ve planted crossover elements in The Hungry Priest such that my literary
novel and my genre series will occupy the same time and space. The Wine Ghost intrudes on my other work
in ways I won’t even reveal; I’m constantly laying Easter eggs and setting a
breadcrumb trail that leads back to The
Wine Ghost, back to my monster in the bottom drawer.
This monster
still gnaws at me. It’s not that I think that The Wine Ghost will ever, ever make me more money or even gain me
more critical acclaim than a genre book. It’s not that I miss the freshness and
urgency of the literary expression that led to my writing The Wine Ghost; I’m a much better writer now than even a few years
ago, when I wrapped up the fourth draft.
This monster
gnaws at me because it’s an important book, the book that called me to write it
because it may speak to some teenager as confused and depressed as I was when I
first got a little relief by reading Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren or Lord Dunsany’s Pegana tales. It may show some kid a
path out of a darkness that almost took my sanity and my life.
This monster
gnaws to tell me that I must keep honing my craft in order to do the story
justice. Every genre chapter I write, every blog post I submit, every short
story that goes over some indifferent editor’s transom — it’s all training to
deal with the monster in the drawer.
I’m lifting
weights here, people.
And it may
sound perverse, but I hope you have a monster in your drawer to keep you moving
as well.
If you have
a monster in a drawer somewhere, take it out during this season when monsters
abound. Thank it for keeping you moving, keepi
ng you
writing. Promise it that you’ll visit it more often, and that you’ll eventually
bring it to life and set it free on an unsuspecting world.
It doesn’t
hurt to make these promises, even if you don’t intend to keep them.
Don’t worry
if you forget to go to see your monster every once in a while.
If your
monster is anything like mine, it will come to see you.
Happy
Halloween!