July 07, 2006

Merlot

Until last September, for nearly fifteen years, I was becoming, day by day, not only a miserable writer, but a miserable person. Yes, there was the obvious -- I aspired to write for a living and hadn’t yet discovered the elixir that would get me there. And writing books, particularly when you’re as slow a writer as I am, saps the mornings, nights, weekends, and all remaining energy period. But it wasn’t just the fact I needed to keep working in a “day job” and toil at night to pursue my dream. Hell -- in some ways, the struggling artist dynamic was more inspirational than exhausting.

No -- what had begun to bother me was the creature I was turning into. In particular, the way this new creature -- who I’ll call Adult Me -- seemed in no way to resemble the being I once was.

Kid Me, at least the way I remember him, wasn’t anything like Adult Me. Adult Me had fallen into quite a routine: get up, get ready for work, drive an hour in the car, push pencils, paperclips, and deals for ten hours, drive another hour home, argue boisterously and for no apparent reason with his wife, spend a few minutes with his kids, decide against exercising, then maybe, on the right night, sit down at the computer for a couple hours to fiddle with a novel...then pass out, only to start Groundhog Day all over again the following morning.

Kid Me, if I recall, used to write short stories. Assemble plastic models of trucks. Paint watercolors. Play on a soccer team. Play pickup basketball with bigger kids. Stay up all night battling friends in marathon Dungeons & Dragons sessions. Collect model trains -- first HO scale, then N -- and coins too. And here’s the annoying part: Kid Me had school, too. This being the annoying part why? Because school took up just about as much time as work, right? Not quite -- but close.

In other words, there seemed no excuse, no viable explanation, for the evaporation of Kid Me -- and the horrifying appearance of Adult Me. Maybe it was just the metabolism slowing, or the cumulative effects of various disappointments, or a form of ambition seeking excellence and money rather than a balanced, jack-of-all-trades (read: poor) sort of existence. Maybe it was even noble -- in morphing into Adult Me, I’d tell myself, I’m giving my kids all kinds of opportunities to be Kids Themselves.

But there’s a reason they call people around my age middle-aged -- reason being, we ain’t dead yet. And if you’ve got your antennae up, you’ll sense it coming...there’s that moment, when it strikes, that tattoos you with a midlife crisis imprint across your forehead. It’s on your forehead so that you can enjoy staring at it whenever you look in a mirror. There I am...having my midlife crisis. Wondering what happened to the person I used to be. To Kid Me.

Some people respond by busting up their marriage. Or buying a red sports car. Or turning to the bottle. Or worse -- some ignore the tattoo painted on their forehead, then self-destruct later. One way or the other, there’s pretty much no getting around it. You hit your late thirties, or a little deeper in, and you’re stuck with facing the fact you’re halfway there. You gonna slide down the slippery slope to the end? Suck up the disappointment (if you aren’t already Donald Trump or Dan Brown) and give up on hoping for anything better with only half the game left to go?

I read something from Paulo Coelho in his own introduction to The Alchemist, and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing him badly, but what I recall of was the following rule of life: If you undertake risk to pursue your dreams, you may experience pain and disappointment. It will hurt, but you will forget the pain -- it’s only an instantaneous sting, which is gone once you feel it. Stay in a job or environment that is contrary to your character, however, and over time, the job will rack up a permanent effect -- it will turn you into a bitter, miserable person. The pain that comes when you’re pursuing what you care about can’t really change you...but failing to heed the inner voice of your dreams can, and permanently, and for the worse.

This notion rang true with me and I determined, after a while, that it didn’t matter how much money I made, or how "easy" career success might come from the “day jobs” -- the fact is, if I didn’t make a run at becoming a professional writer and filmmaker, as I’d intended to do since my teens, I’d never reverse the course of this odd, alien appearance of Adult Me. And I, as Coelho warned, would become miserable, bitter, and unpleasant. I was already well on my way.

And so -- as much in a quest for the time to dedicate to hobbies the way Kid Me used to as for the desire to write and get paid for it -- I decided it was time. The consequences be damned. I figured out how it would make sense for my employer to retain my services as a producer and writer, get more productivity out of me in the process -- and under which plan I could work from my home office and dedicate more time to writing Public Enemy and subsequent novels. I assembled a proposal; we made a deal; with that former employer as my first client, I now have a producing company, am writing a new novel, and crafting a screenplay I intend to direct.

Don’t get me wrong -- as Paulo Coelho predicted, there has been pain. There has been disappointment. For instance, I can be the first (or last in a long line of writers) to tell you that you don’t make much of a living as a novelist -- not until some freak accident occurs to land you on Oprah or for some big-shot producer in Hollywood to decide Painkiller will be Hollywood’s next big franchise.

Slowly, though -- day by day -- I’ve found myself to be more pleasant. And with the commute gone -- with the creative juices flowing for more hours each day -- I’ve also seen the creature that is Adult Me begin to infuse its life with pursuits previously relegated to the roster of activities belonging to Kid Me.

Writers need ways to procrastinate, you know. My preferred means? Four-mile runs, a model train layout beside the laundry room, and a hobby Kid Me would have had to wait till he turned 21 to pursue: I took a distance learning class, contacted a Sonoma Valley nursery, and -- thanks to a small patch of dirt my wife allowed me to seize behind the garage -- planted 35 Merlot grapevines this spring.

There’s been the pain of heavy rains so far this summer. Neither the climate nor the soil here in Connecticut are tailor-made for vitis vinifera varietals. Plus, it takes three growing seasons before you reap a half-decent harvest. And more than a few of the leaves were ravaged by aphids.

But those vines behind my garage are coming along nicely, thank you...

And so is the gradual return of that person I used to know. We’ve called him Kid Me here, but really, he’s just me.

Posted by Will Staeger at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

July 06, 2005

Menace Lost

When the Cold War ended -- when the Berlin Wall came down -- the west lost an enemy. By most arguments, this was a good thing. But for those who write spy novels -- and, more important, those who read them -- another loss was incurred. A loss that from all indications was grave . . . if not fatal. No, it wasn't just the Soviet Union that fell -- that clang we heard, the sound of the iron curtain dropping to the floor, kept echoing, and resonating, and if you listened closely enough, real closely, you know what you heard?

You heard the plots of international thriller novels shattering into a thousand pieces, fading away into vapor, and blowing away in the wind.

What the hell were the likes of Robert Ludlum, Fredrick Forsyth, Tom Clancy, John le Carre, or Ross Thomas to do? Horribly, we've lost a couple of these lads since. But once Gorbachev and his perestroika, his glasnost, and maybe even Reagan and his containment took hold and shifted the balance of power, the spy novelist's art perished too.

Or so it seemed.

It's not that there aren't always bad guys, evil intentions, and -- sometimes -- weapons of mass destruction to work with in constructing plots that race to the end of stories with relentless aggression. But what you had, as a spy novelist, during the Cold War, were the secret ingredients destined to make every dish a delicacy: two parts menace, and one part fear. You see, back then, it wasn’t just cops, or spies, or secretive administration spinmeisters who knew who the bad guys were -- everyone knew. Nearly every soul in the western world had been conditioned to fear the menace that lurked behind the curtain . . . theirs was a totalitarian regime, one that controlled its people, a dark, oppressive alternate universe we knew intrinsically to be vigilant against. Every day of our lives, we, the reading populace, faced the very real prospect of nuclear annihilation, potential imminent takeover, and totalitarian domination by an evil foreign empire.

That was a time when spies had something to do.

Hell, if you think about it, working as a spy novelist during such a time of menace must have resembled the work routine of a staff writer on "Law & Order": Here, writer -- take this headline I just ripped out of the paper and give me an episode!

But those days are gone.

Crime fiction, on the other hand, has always been a rich genre in its own right, and in my "layman fiction reader's" view, it was the mystery novel that took the place of the horrible void left by glasnost. If you’re a gearhead like I am, you’ll get the analogy I'll draw to NASCAR and the Indy Racing League: the former took over while the latter just plain died. Michael Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Robert Crais, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen now race to the top of the charts -- where before, they or their predecessors had been busy fighting for the delightful scraps you can find if you creep around below the radar of the all-powerful New York Times Best Seller List.

But for me, as a reader -- a reader, mind you, hooked on the candylike heroin of flavor, depth, authenticity, quirkiness, and character found in the works of the mystery greats -- I have missed the menace. The page-turning, sleep-deprivation-inspiring, walk-around-thinking-it-could-very-well-happen-to-you, pervasive ferocity of the classic spy novel.

Some have dared to enter the space, even fared incredibly well -- Baldacci and Silva come to mind -- but what I yearn for . . . what the kid inside me who stayed up late reading those classics through high school, college, and the years afterward when I pretended to be awake at work . . . what I crave is the next generation of menace.

And fear.

Not the real-life kind -- that we can do without. No -- what I seek are plots that bring back that dread . . . the threat . . . the dark, oppressive enemy lurking in the alternate universe behind the curtain.

Maybe Lee Child, or Vince Flynn, or somebody else new to the scene can feed this long-starved addiction of mine. Maybe Michael Connelly will try his hand at a classic espionage thriller for today. Maybe I'll write one myself. (Confession: I did.) But I'll tell you this . . . once that wall went down, and the regime that lurked behind it collapsed, I knew immediately, as a reader of spy novels, the bounty I'd be spending the rest of my late-night reading sessions searching for. You know what I'm looking for?

I'm looking for some menace.

Some good old fashioned dread, oppression, and fear.

Got any ideas?

Bring 'em on -- I've got all night.

Posted by sjbmt at 03:23 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

The Vermonter

Combine the business tasks required of you as an author with an approaching publication date, add in a four-person family and a fairly overwhelming day job, and let's just say it’s a bit of a challenge to advance the ball on book number two, month in, month out. And because I seem to find less and less regularity from the windows that do roll around, I’ve established a few ways of motivating myself. Forced discipline, I guess you could say. Among these methods is a monthly page count requirement – hit the goal each month, and I'll have the first draft finished in time to go through it a few dozen more times before delivering the thing. (It only takes me fourteen or fifteen drafts before my writing becomes legible.) Miss the goal and – well, I'm not sure what sort of punishment will be exacted, but it'll be severe. But to date I haven't missed any targets –

Until the last week of May rolled around.

Panicked – and frustrated at my usual laziness – I examined the calendar in search of hope. Weekends don’t work well – too much going on with the kids, and with the few friends you are able to keep when you work all the time and write the rest of the time. (Plus, somebody's got to be taking care of the kids while you're doing all that stuff all week, and that somebody needs some goddamn relief on Saturdays and Sundays). Ah-hah – I spotted a Thursday and Friday that appeared fairly open. And Thursdays, anyway, we’ve got a babysitter most of the day . . . done. I would take two days of vacation and catch up on the page count.

But then again, by day, the house is busier than the office – what was I going to do? We weren’t talking coffeeshop here – I needed hours upon hours. I'd read recently that Harlan Coben really cranks in the latter stages of writing his books – that his record was 55 pages in one day. Granted, I'm a one page per day kind of guy -- fifty-five will never happen, not even if they strap a dictation/transcribing machine directly to the synapses at the base of my brain – but I figured I had a shot at five or ten if I could muster eight to ten hours of isolation. Starbucks or the home office upstairs? Not a chance. Too many distractions. Plus I get so proud of myself after two hours of work I'm ready to throw a party or eat some lunch.

But wait a minute, I say . . . there is something I’ve always wanted to do. I've wanted to do it more as a statement of my own freedom than anything else, but I've also romanticized how cool it might be unto itself . . .

You see, I'm a train buff. (Auto racing, too, if you must know. Look, I'm a lifelong two year old kid, okay?) I even have an N-scale model train collection, which someday I’ll have the time to look at . . . probably not ever actually assemble. And so this thing I'd had the idea of doing for so long was this: jump on an Amtrak train, plug in my laptop, ride to the end of the line, and turn around and come back. Write, think, brood, eat, drink, and listen to music the whole time – all the while watching the workaday shlubs such as I usually am get on, read their paper, get off, and be replaced by another set of them . . . and another . . . and so on. A feeling of total freedom . . . with nowhere to go. With nothing to do but write, or avoid writing and think about the fact that you’re avoiding writing and there's nothing else to do but get back to it.

I procrastinated making the reservations until the morning of my first of two days off, but find just such an "out to the end of the line" scenario I did: log on to Amtrak.com, check over the routes and pricing, and there it was: $62 each way, noon departure, nine p.m. arrival, an 8:30 a.m. return train getting in at five.

The Vermonter.

Bought the tickets, went for a run to avoid a heart attack during the voyage, got the OK from my wife, booked a room at the Comfort Inn in St. Albens, Vermont – thirty miles from the Canadian border – kissed the kids and wife goodbye, stocked up with a sandwich, and boarded that sucker out of Stamford, Connecticut, bound for nine hours of forced creativity.

Funny thing is, I spoke to a few people along the way, told a few others before and after what I had in mind, and nobody, except maybe my wife, really got it. Mostly, I heard, "Man, I can think of a couple better ways to relax than that," or something of that sort. And, yeah, it got a little dreary, eight hours in, with the train delayed an hour and the sun well down beneath the horizon . . . not much of that picturesque Vermont countryside to take in after dark. But you know what? I loved it. Missed my kids by the time I passed out in the hotel (same place where the crew stayed, by the way, nice bunch of guys as worn out as me by the end of that haul), felt like a bit of a weirdo riding in the cab from the train station to the hotel and back a few hours later – Why is he doing that? Is he a terrorist? – but I whacked out ten pages on Thursday. Got up early, ran at the sports complex across from the hotel to stave off total lethargy for another few hours, hoarded some coffee, Coca-Cola, and peanut butter sandwiches from the hotel’s complimentary breakfast layout, and jumped back aboard for another day on the Vermonter.

I wonder whether it's The Vermonter when you're headed south on the thing?

Anyway, long story somewhat short, I got 13 pages in on Friday. The last five were painful, but no worse, I think, than when I spread that pain across two or three days the way I usually do.

The verdict: crossed the page count goal three days before the end of the month. Even got to take two days off from writing, or, more accurately put, I got to take two days off from getting pissed off for not writing on those days.

Impressions: much of the northeast, particularly the swaths that lay along the train corridors, is almost grotesquely industrial – abandoned industrial, actually. Maybe everywhere is these days. Question: what happened to all those jobs in those huge brick buildings that used to be full of work and stand now in total, decaying disrepair, too hazardous to remove or use again? Suppose Lou Dobbs would say Chinese, Korean, and Mexican citizens have those jobs now, and Americans (regardless of heritage) may never have them back. Say what you will – there's nobody in those buildings anymore, and there are a lot of them. Think I lost count around a hundred and fifty, and I wasn’t even through Springfield, Mass. when the numbers started to blur.

Impression #2: not many people travel by train any longer, and you can kind of see why when it takes nine hours to travel the same distance that takes two and a half hours by plane. I think we stopped at four stations for twenty minutes plus, at one point turned around and switched engines, and at another point had to wait half an hour for the CSX freights – seems they own and therefore control a certain stretch of track north of Springfield – to laze on by. This is how Amtrak looks to remain competitive in 2005?

Impression #3: there are actual farms in Vermont. Living in the burbs outside of New York City, and spending a few years of my life in Southern California prior to the current phase of my life, I think I had forgotten that farms even existed, let alone what they looked like. (They look pretty much the way they used to, only with bigger, more expensive tractors. Built, no doubt, in China.)

One way or the other, I had a good old fashioned American taste of freedom for a couple days in late May, and I was a writer on those days too. There is no doubt I will do it again soon . . . may, in fact, be forced to, judging from the way the page count is inching along here in the new month.

Posted by Will Staeger at 04:28 PM | Comments (1)