A Defense of Stupidity

The manuscript I just completed was good for me in many ways. First, it showed me that I can still complete long works in a decent amount of time even though I work full-time and have a wife and new baby to love. It also got me over a major bout of the yips and a crisis of confidence in my ability to complete anything. Also, this books is better than the one I wrote before it (and the two others I abandoned after 60,000 words for many of the same problems) and infinitely better than my first attempt. With a good amount of revision I think this could be a decent book, the sort that ten years ago would have been a nice paperback original. But I don’t want to write or publish a good book. I want a knock you on your ass, pass the book around to everyone you know book as my first appearance on the publishing stage and I’m now realizing that’s not going to happen with the type of book I’ve been writing.

I always joke about how I want to write a novel without a plot, but I don’t think that’s it. I want to write a book without a mystery plot. I just don’t have the natural gift for mystery plotting. I suck at motives and clues and the intricate working of that kind of story. But I want to write a book with a story where exciting things happen, just without a whodunnit or whatever. I’m reading The Ice Harvest right now and I know I can pull something like this off with Murder Boy. I do well with stories that turn on small motivations that blow up into bigger things. I like to write about people reacting to wacky things around them, not trying to figure out what wacky things have already happened.

I think I’m writing this more to justify to myself why I’m going to throw away five months work on a project with plenty of potential that just doesn’t match my skill set. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my weakest short stories are the PI stories and they suffer from the same problems as the books. My strongest stories, the ones that have been reprinted in anthologies and nominated for awards, play to my natural strengths and I think that’s where I should go with my books. Charlie Huston, Sean Doolittle, Victor Gischler, Scott Phillips, Duane Sweircznski, I think this is the direction I should be going.

I’m also very happy that this books showed me I don’t need to be in such a hurry to get something out there. When I started this book, the end seemed sooooooooooo far away and then longer after that to find an agent and then longer than that to get a deal and then longer than that to have the book come out. But here I am just five months later with a completed manuscript that if I knew how to make it great could probably have an agent and a deal within a year. That makes me happy. And I haven’t been happy with my writing stuff for a while.

So today starts a new chapter. I’m no longer writing first person mystery novels that come in around 70,000 words. I’m going to write a lean, fast, darkly funny book that might hit 60,000 words and could very well be THE book I was meant to write. I’m very excited and this will probably be the last I talk about it until it’s finished.

Mental Buckshot

(cross-posted from First Offenders)

I’m still in that post first draft state where I can’t keep a coherent thought together for very long (and let’s be honest, I’m not all that good and keeping a coherent thought together regularly). While I read through the current manuscript, cutting junk and wasted trips and making notes about threads I need to explore more, I’m also chipping away at a few other projects just for the fun of it to change things up. I’ve got a rather mean or possibly depressing short story, a non-crime humor book, and a screenplay all in the fire with very little accomplished on any of them but I’m having fun. Here are some of my other thoughts

-Why is football season so short? Every other season seems like it lasts the whole year and they play almost every day, but football, once a week for maybe four months. And college is even shorter – especially this year for Michigan fans.

-Spenser for the most part is a very well-behaved baby, especially out at restaurants which is key for us, but for some reason, every week night when I get home from work around 6pm he screams and screams and screams unless you hold him and move around. If you do that, he’s fine, but the minute you stop, scream mode on. We’ve come up with a few ways to distract him short term so we can get things done, but overall it kinda sucks.

-Best line last night from 30 ROCK is when they’re talking about all of the different things New York might need protection from and Pete says Cloverfield monsters

-I think we’re going to get an easily assembled pre-lit Christmas tree this year. Beck has an old tree where each individual branch needs to be assembled and I’m just not on board with that. My mom brought a big box of all of my individual ornaments that have been bought for me over the years so we have something to hang on the tree

-Tinsel has to be the worst decoration idea ever. Whose dumb idea was that?

-I want to go to the movies a lot over the holidays. This always seems to happen and I love it, but I have a baby this year to work in the mix so that could be interesting. I still have yet to see HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3 and one of the new ones I want to see is RACHEL GETTING MARRIED with Anne Hathaway in an independent adult role. Maybe if I’m working heavily on the screenplay I cam go to the movies more as “research”

-I finally had a really good barbeque sandwich last night at a place in Ann Arbor called the Blue Tractor. They even put the coleslaw on the sandwich like it’s supposed to be. I wasn’t as sold on the sweet potato fries though

-33-

After five months and some change I finally finished novel number three RUINS OF DETROIT. Dave White debates that completion time because the opening of that book has been bouncing around in various forms for almost a year before I started adding to it as a book. But I’m counting from the first day I added new words and started writing on a consistant basis, May 28.

This is not the first novel I’ve attempted in the two years since I completed the last draft of my second book. I wrote two novels that I abandonded after 60,000+ words. I then went through a crisis of confidence and wondered about my future and stopped blogging for a while. And then I had a baby. I was pretty sure I’d never finish anything again. But slowly, 200-300 words at a time I started writing every day, and I didn’t talk about it with anyone and I didn’t blog about it, and now it’s done.

I’m itching to start something new right away, but I think my brain needs a rest and I need to spend more time with my family for a while. I’ve got a third novel in the can and nothing but time and potential to make it great.

Stuff

First: Daunte Culpepper + Calvin Johnson + Kevin Smith = The Future of the Detroit Lions.

Second: Halloween was fun with Spenser. I talked on Friday at First Offenders about why I like Halloween and I feel even more so now that I have a family.

Third: Becky and I took advantage of my mom being in town on Friday night to go see ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO. I was excited to see this movie because I’m a huge Kevin Smith fan and this sounded like vintage KS. But I was also a bit worried because the more press I heard about it, the more it sounded like it might be trying too hard to be part of the Judd Apatow juggernot.

Well, after seeing it I can say it truly is a Kevin Smith movie, and probably one of his best. Even though the casting and maybe even the setup seemed like vintage Apatow, it was the dialogue that truly made this a Kevin Smith film. Judd Apatow is a movie guy and he writes very good movie dialogue. But I’ve always thought Kevin Smith was a writer at a different level. He’s got a more literary style if you will. It’s not as slick and flashy as Apatow’s and is rooted in more than just endless pop culture references. And one of the reviews pointed out something that most people tend to gloss over when talking about Kevin Smith, he’s one of the truest romantics we have out there.

So go see it, you’ll enjoy it. And maybe Kevin Smith will write a novel one day, I’d love to read that.