I think the other reason I’m a little blah about my writing is that it just feels like nothing, in general, is happening. Things are out for submission, things are at the copyeditor, things are being written. But I like the part where I say “Hurray, go read this!!!” and you all say “Whoa, we read it and it was fun and awesome.”
And what if it never happens again?!
That’s my big, secret fear–that “Frank” was it. And that I’m too stupid to know it.
Redrafting the Ben & Sue project with a different narrator has been lately hard as hell. It’s both that I know the story really well–so that doesn’t feel like a first-draft–and yet here I am writing all new stuff that I’m not sure works or even needs to be there, which is a perfectly fine place to be in a first draft, but a weird place to be in a 8th or 9th draft, whichever this is for some material.
Another hard thing is that I’m still not sure there’s any narrative urgency. I’ve been staring at some parts of this so long that I have no idea why anyone would want to continue reading it from one sentence to another. I have no idea why scenes follow each other.
I think this is, in part, just a kind of narrative delirium brought on by being stuck in this story that almost, but doesn’t quite work for so long.
Anyway, last night I hit that same old scary spot with this manuscript–the ending, which I am, yet again, rewriting.
Ugh, I forgot that I was going to blog about this and now I’m not going to be able to remember the exact wording. This morning, on NPR, dude said, “blah blah blah grow the economy.” And I keep hearing this use of “grow” that just sounds nails on chalkboard wrong to me, but I’m hearing it so often that I’m wondering if I’m just wrong.
Let’s take this sentence, which sounds wrong to me:
Obama will grow the economy through taxing the shit out of you. Ha ha ha, conservatives.”
Or this:
Economists hope the additional jobs will help grow the economy.
I would write those sentences as “Obama will help the economy grow by taxing the shit out of you.” and “Economists hope the additional jobs will help to grow the economy.”
I think something like “The farmer will grow corn this summer” is fine. But “The farmer will grow his household income by adding corn to his crops” absolutely does not. I also would think that “The farmer fed his kids cheese in order to grow healthy bones” is fine but “The farmer will grow his kids by feeding them cheese” sounds wrong.
Weigh in here, people. Do you think this is just a regional variation in use of grow or are these fuckers misusing it?
It could be a regional thing. I mean, I think that you can go towards the door even by walking backwards and I can’t break myself of it, even though I know it’s more correct to go toward and backward. But man, it grates on me.
We’ve been rewatching Buffy–the Butcher, the Red-Headed Kid, and I–and I must say that I like it even better now than I did when it first aired. Part of it is that watching it in big gulps lets you see how things are connected. But the other thing is that it’s just so much better than, say, True Blood. The truth is that we still don’t have a good grown-up story about vampires on our televisions.
We’re also having fun IMDb-ing guest stars who look familiar.
It’s funny, too, knowing how much we love Warehouse 13, and that the two folks share creative people behind the scenes, because there’s really something similar about the writing, about how the long arcs are created.
I’ve also been writing. I think part of the problem I had, without knowing it, is that I was writing the story like it was a trip to Oz–lone person shows up in strange land, accumulates a group of rag-tag friends, and conquers the bad guy. And yet, even rereading it, I have so many references to Inanna in it. So, I must have known, at some level, that the shape of the story was wrong.
It must be the story of a girl who loses everything. If the only way out is through, the only way through is down.
So, I’m at the point where Sue and her sister get into a carriage and go to Maury County. It needed to be majorly rewritten, because you can’t get to Maury County from the Frist Center in one day in a horse-drawn carriage. But I then began to worry that you might not be able to get to the home of a son of William Macon’s (remember William owned Jack Macon, the “widow” of whom has sent Sue to find her mother). But I have never been able to successfully ascertain where the Macons houses were in Maury County. So, I’ve felt uncertain about whether it was even a trip that could be done in two days. Too far past Columbia and probably not.
How to find those fucking Macons? Now, obviously, if there were an easy way to find out exactly, I would have done it by now. So, the question is–is there a ballpark way? And then I got to thinking–I’m talking about people who lived before 1850. There are only three places they’re going to stick their dead people–1. in their yard, 2. in their church’s yard, in which case I have a neighborhood for them, or 3. in the city’s cemetery, in which case I learn they lived in town.
So, I Find-a-Grave all the Macons in Maury County and they’re all in the Zion Presbyterian Cemetery. Now I know they had to be within a few miles of here in order to attend church here. Ta-da. And who should be in that cemetery but John Macon himself, father of William Macon, owner of Dr. Jack. Though I’m sure it’s entirely a coincidence that William had a slave almost his same exact age named a nickname of his father’s own name. Nothing to see here, folks. Anyway, so I don’t know exactly where they were, but that’s close enough for fiction.
You guys, I had such a nice weekend. But I also am covered in bug bites, the worst of which are places I picked ticks off. I spent yesterday sleeping in and then writing a Pith post and working on a baby blanket for my cousin and working on the Sue Allen project. And then I went to bed early. It was lovely. Except for the seed ticks I had to pick off.
Seed ticks are the devil. The big black ones are annoying, but you can feel those. But those little red seed ticks will get right in the creases of your knees or at the leg band of your underpants and just… ugh… The Butcher told me he once found a seed tick on his dick. I was like “And you still go outside?!” Because, I tell you, the first time I find a tick in my vagina, that will be the moment I start walking outside with a flamethrower. Just FSSSHHHHHHHSSSHHHHHH to clear burn a twelve-foot radius of charred death around me wherever I go.
A tick on your genitals is how anti-environmental super villains get started. It’s an origin story no one would argue with.
Perhaps I should add that in to the Sue Allen project. The villain is evil, but it’s understandable because he once had a tick on his dick. It makes him sympathetic, I think.
God, I hope The Butcher doesn’t become a supervillain now.
Anyway, I have to laugh a little bit because, revising the Sue Allen project, I’ve come to realize that the ending still doesn’t work for me. It’s still where my hang-up is. But, the switch in narrator and my desire to focus on the characters who change means probably the middle third is going to change majorly and then the last third… I’m going to end up rewriting it again.
But let me just explain my failure to you. My goal in the old structure of the book was to briefly introduce you to John and his dad here in the present. Then we switch to focusing solely on Sue and her life at which point John reenters the narrative as the bad guy. Kind of like Hemlock Grove. But, while I don’t think that Sue’s story is actually that boring, the absence of John isn’t as much mysterious as it is confusing.
So, instead, I’m reshaping the story so that the narrative focus is on these two women who both see ghosts and who share a complicated relationship with both a ghost and Lee Overton.
I think it works better, but it’s a strange process–creating a first draft of something out of a failed eighth draft of another. I’m not sure how revisions are going to go.
I’ve made a massive change–John is now a woman. Well, a girl. But he’s she. Martha, called Moll. And, like John was, she’s our narrator. John isn’t completely gone, I don’t think, since I need my narrator to move freely through the Reconstructed South. But he’s just an identity, I think, not a character.
The part that I more need to fix in this draft (9th for those counting at home) is how to keep momentum. I really enjoy thinking about what it would be like to spend time with these character just walking around a Nashville that kind of looks familiar and kind of doesn’t. But I need a driving reason to include these stories and not others. And I think having a stronger narrator will make that happen. I hope, anyway. I’m kind of freaked out about it. But it must be done.
I think, anyway.
I’m going to give myself a month to see if this change in perspective helps.
My parents keep making me think up things for them to give me at various culturally appropriate times. So, I decided that I might want a print of a crow from Fat Crow Press, which is one of my favorite places in town. But when I was talking to her a few weeks ago, she told me she was going to have smaller, less expensive prints of two crows. Well, two crows are just about as good as two ravens. I’m going to hang these puppies right below The Hanged Man in the dining room and let those who know what they’re seeing have a nice smile about it.
Anyway, after we went and picked up the print, we stopped by East Side Story and one of the artists for Project X was there and we got to talking and… lord… she’s going to be perfect. And it was awesome to see how excited she was getting just hearing about it from me.
Things are moving along. And so I guess that’s good. I mean, it’s good. It’s just a bunch of stuff that’s out of my hands. So, that part’s scary. But cool.
I was going to spend all day yesterday reading The True Believer, but, at the last minute, I decided to go spend some time with John Overton, just to see what would be involved with getting back into it.
Holy shit! It’s a complete mess.
Reading it, I was struck by both how truly good parts are and how long just boring shit happens–boring shit I was happy to write, but boring shit. There’s no narrative urgency. People wander around and they do shit and they do shit for a reason, but reading it, it really felt like mostly a train being pushed from the back, not pulled from the front.
It’s kind of scary because I feel like, in order to fix it, I’m going to have to not just rewrite it, but reimagine it. John and his dad may need to go back earlier. John definitely needs to participate more in the past. And, no matter how good it is, some of the Sue stuff probably needs to come out.
But, on the other hand, I feel strangely grateful that things have worked out this way–if I hadn’t had the time off working on Project X and the short stories, I wouldn’t have the distance to see this.
Here is Sleepy John Estes’s song, in his own voice. And here’s the map between Durhamville, where Estes is buried (and likely grew up), and Brownsville.
Please note how, when you head out of town toward Nutly (home of Tiny Turner), to get to Brownsville, you do, indeed, take the right-hand road. I know that’s simple enough, but it makes me so happy. It’s a real place you can go and see. It’s a road you can take.
It just gives me a feeling that I want people to have when they read my work. I want people who poke around looking at the places my stories take place to find those streets and buildings and ways.
I get so very tired of having to talk about literature. I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and discuss the subjectivity in Wordsworth and Ashbery; I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever. — Mary Ruefle (via Amber Sparks) (I saw it on HTML Giant)
I had to come up with a short description for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. But it feels like forward motion, so I’ll take it. Anyway, I wanted to share:
For two hundred years, the people of Nashville have kept a deadly secret—a werewolf hunts among them. No one has been able to kill it and few have been successful in fighting it. But the people who faced it left a record of their misfortunes. Their drawings, journal entries, and letters were collected into a volume called The Wolf’s Bane, a book that, because of the bad luck that befell its owners, became almost as feared as the beast itself. The book was rumored to contain a spell guaranteed to summon the Devil, to tell the actual story of why Sam Houston fled Tennessee, and to reveal the true natures of many of Nashville’s most prominent families. It was said that possessing the book was a curse just short of being the victim of the werewolf. And yet, for a chance to know Nashville’s hidden history, who wouldn’t risk opening those pages? This is that book.
I’m kind of a coward, so I don’t often fail at things. In my whole life, I either did things I knew I was good at or I didn’t care about being good at or I didn’t do them. I really wanted to play football in high school, for instance, but when people told me I was going to suck at it, I believed them. And, you know, as a coward, I would have sucked at football.
But the school I finished high school at? Their team hadn’t won a game–not a single game–in decades. I would not have sucked worse than that! (Though I should say that, in the two years I was there, they did win some games and conducted themselves in a pleasantly mediocre manner on the field.)
Anyway, I don’t really regret not playing football. I’m just saying, I’m not someone who puts themselves on the line about things she might not be good at.
So this whole fiction writing thing just fucking sucks. I have to do it. Nothing at all makes me happier (except my dog and she’s been eating the cat poop lately and giving herself the shits). I feel like I have the brains and credentials to say “Yep, this sucks. Here’s how it should be better.” or “No, hey, this is really good. Someone will want it.”
But I don’t.
And the weird part is that it’s not even depressing. Like two years ago, it was kind of depressing. Now it’s just like “Well, on to the next thing.” Because there is no choice.
And the other thing is that I probably do have to suck for a while–possibly a long while–but I am not sure I’ll ever know when or if I stop sucking.
It’s just fucking ludicrous. I do this thing I love with no clue as to whether I’m good at it in any marketable way, no idea how to improve that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars and involve taking massive amounts of time off work that I just can’t do, at least, not for four or five more years.
And yet, I keep on keeping on. Just because I like it. Even though I suspect I suck at it.
Anyway, “Allendale” revisions. I have a rough draft of the revised part–the footnotes. I guess it’s not ruining it to tell you. The footnotes are written by poor George’s niece who has just discovered that he’s not in prison for Elias’s murder, but in a secure hospital, where she can go visit him. He was unable to aid in his defense because he believes his “life” since the night of Elias’s death is actually just an illusion implanted in him by the werewolf as it kills him in the basement alongside Elias, to keep him calm. His niece mostly believes he is a killer. And then he’s a ghost, the end.
Is it any good? Who the fuck knows?
Lord. What if “Frank” is the best thing I ever do?
…
…
…
Well, I guess that’s not such a bad thing.
And, really, it’s not even that I think I suck. I guess if I am honest, I think I write really well, things I enjoy reading. I struggle with figuring out how to improve things. I’m pretty terrible at that.
But the thing I suck at–and this is an objective sucking–is figuring out how to sell them. I don’t know what kind of writer I am. I don’t know how to look at a story and say “Yep, fantasy” or “this is horror.” I don’t know how, even when I read widely–and I read widely–which markets might want which of my stories.
And I don’t know how to feel assured, if they turn me down, that it’s because it just didn’t fit and not because the story needed something a little more.
I suck at the match game aspect of it. But since I don’t know how to improve at that, I fret over my work, like that’s the problem.
Everything’s a fucking knot, I tell you. This anxiety tangled with that anxiety wrapped around this fear. Trying to keep everything smoothed out so that you can work with it is the hardest part.
Sara Harvey wrote a lovely and interesting post about Tolkein and his myth-building. Considering some of the things I blather on about, you can see why this is of interest to me.
Since you already read me here, you already read this in less put-together-form. But here it is!
Ha ha ha.
I’m kind of in love with the idea that you are the folks who get to see my writing in its… shall we say… foundation garments.
Things are afoot. I feel like I have thirteen non-shitty short stories–”Bone,” “Frank,” “How Will You Meet People if You Never Leave the House” and “The Witch’s Friend” are published in some form or another. “Sarah Clark” is supposed to be published any day now. But the contract reverts right to me at the end of the year, so, if publication doesn’t happen, I can try again.
I’ve got two stories I’ve submitted someplace and I’m just waiting to hear. I think both are probably definite “no”s but I’ve decided to start getting turned down by bigger markets these days. So, that will be okay.
I’ve got a story I feel is pretty ready to go. I’m just working up the guts to send it out. I want to let it sit and then have one more good look at it.
Then I’ve got three stories that are probably in the stage right before that. I feel like they’re done, but I also feel like they might need another going over.
I completely gutted a story I had had out on submission and reworked it. Took out big chunks, added other big chunks, changed the identity of a major character. It’s better, a lot better, but it’s still probably got some work left to do on it.
And then there’s “Allendale.” I should say up front that I think I’d like to pull my short stories together and publish them, or try, anyway, which is why I’ve been thinking about how many there might be that don’t suck and how to get them out there and get them published individually.
“Allendale” isn’t ever going on the market. It is what it is and what it is is a straight-up rip-off of Lovecraft. I love the story. It’s incredibly important to me. But I’m not going to pass off something that is more Lovecraft’s than mine as mine. It just doesn’t sit right. But I have a nagging thought in the back of my head about this story–what if that’s your uncle who wrote it? Your uncle who’s sitting in prison for killing his uncle? And what if you recognize it as being a Lovecraft story? And yet, also a truth about your family?
So, now I’m considering whether there’s a way to run those two stories side by side. I might have to experiment with footnotes. Anyway, this would just be for fun, as obviously, it couldn’t go to markets that couldn’t handle the design aspects, even if they wanted it. But it could go in a collection, and I think that might be fun.
And then, I’ll have to insert corrections into Project X and then I think I can turn back to the Allens and the Overtons.
Is it wrong to call a story about a demon from Sneedville who’s a big Jimmy Martin fan “It Came from the Sunny Side of the Mountain?” I can’t tell you how much I want to laugh at that and then love it to death, but I’m afraid it’s cheesy and that people won’t get it.
Honestly, if I could have somehow both seen the Butcher in the past 24 hours and hugged him for disappearing for 24 hours, I would have. I came home with Warren Ellis’s Gun Machine and ate leftover Chinese food and a hot fudge sundae and then just read the whole thing through. And saw not another human being. I did talk to my other brother for a half-hour or so, but that doesn’t really count as having to see another person, I don’t think.
My poor other brother–he really does know how to make women who won’t leave him alone hate him. The thing I’ve noticed about the people my brother hangs out with–both for better and for worse–is that there are no parents. I mean, people have kids. But you’ve never seen a larger group of people who have kids and yet don’t differentiate themselves from them. I mean, not in that they are too much their kids’ friends or that they think their kids’ accomplishments are theirs. I mean in that their kids are their peers. There’s no thought given to whether someone is too young to do something or not emotionally ready or needs adults to help them. Everyone is just in the same sink-or-swim boat of not really having anyone to help them. I mean capable of helping them.
I’m developing a theory that this is why certain women gravitate to my brother and them come to loathe him. He presents himself as one of them–someone who has no use for parents (both in the sense that his never did anything for him and that he doesn’t want to be one). But he actually has parents who are willing to pour a lot of help in his direction and in the direction of the women who get entangled with him. That’s got to be attractive.
But then I think they start to resent that he has parents but won’t really be one. And by now they or one of their female relatives has a kid with him. They’re doing what was done to them, but he… I think he comes across like an interloper, someone who wants all the good parts of their way of life but knows he’s got a fall-back in my parents if things really do go completely wrong. And they come to resent that–that he doesn’t have the same skin in the game, but still wants the benefits.
Anyway, that’s a long way of saying that I got to hear about how my sister-in-law is having a fight with my brother through her son. And how neither party seems concerned about what a terrible thing that is to do to your kid.
And so, Gun Machine. I didn’t like that it seemed like the detective knew the things that I, the reader, knew even though I, the reader, was also reading the killer’s parts and, presumably, the detective was not. And it was a little hard to believe that, in a city as large as New York, that some of the necessary coincidences could have really happened.
But, oh, my god, I loved it. I loved the history of it. I loved how the geography was interlaced with the history. I loved the bad guy’s living in both this Manhattan and the pre-white guy Manhattan. I loved the idea of there being all these different overlaying maps of the city that most people don’t even realize are there, let alone how they overlap. And I love the idea that you don’t even have to be aware of them unless you get tangled up in one.
This is something I want in my writing about Nashville, for my readers to feel like they’re getting tangled up in connections they hadn’t even known were there.
I have turned it over to K. In a blue three-ring binder the Butcher bought for the occasion.
Which I guess means I have to get back to other things now. Ha ha ha.
Project X ends with a fictionalized me going to see a fictionalized Tom, who is drinking freezing tea while sitting out front of The Church of the Holy Trinity, that Episcopal church by the homeless mission. Tomorrow.
They/we meet up tomorrow.
And I have been checking the weather all week to see if it’s going to be warm enough for them/us to meet outside and have an awkward conversation while he sits in a church-basement folding chair drinking his tea. It’s, at best, going to be in the mid-50s.
The thing about this type of fantasy that intrigues me is that I like feeling like I’m creating something that’s almost, not quite, implausible. Like you know it’s not real. That’s a given because there’s a werewolf. So, there’s a line, obviously, that the book crosses into “not-real.” But what I like is the discomfort of knowing we’re straddling some real/not-real line. Of course there is no werewolf. But did the Allens really have seances? (Yes.) Is there really a black dog that haunts the Almaville Cemetery? (No.)
Still, it’s funny–that line. Here I am all “Oh no! It’s going to be way too cold for them to hang out in the churchyard tomorrow!” As if there’s ever a plausible time when Tom and I would hang out in an Episcopal Churchyard hedging about werewolves. No one is going to be all “I totally would have bought that conversation except I know for a fact that it was too cold for them to have it.”
So, whew, it turned out that we didn’t meet with artists, just rifled through their work at the studio and looked at samples online and talked about what our needs are and which artists had already expressed an interest in working on it.
Of course, I’ll say more as things get finalized, but right now I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. It’s going to be real art. Not just literal illustrations of what’s happening in the story at that point, but things that tell their own tales in their own ways.
And the best part is that quit a few of the works we looked at have a kind of perfect unsettling fairytale vibe.
It’s just a lot of moving parts and, to be honest with you, I’m feeling also a little overwhelmed by it, too. Not that my job is to bring all the moving parts together, but I really, really want this to happen now and it’s not just dependent on me to make it work. So, you know, I have to figure out how to let go of the desire to control every little thing.
Which is not in my nature.
Ha ha ha.
I think I can say that one of the artists we saw is working on pieces right now that imagine different plants as having what I interpreted as human souls and trying to represent those in art. They are amazing. I don’t know if anything like that will end up in the book, but you can see what I mean about having the right vibe, the right take on the world.
I could barely sleep last night. I can barely concentrate right now. Today is the big art discussion. And I’ve been looking at websites of the artists in the collective and they are so talented. I’m so excited and nervous.
And I am nervous and excited because this week I hand the manuscript off to K. for a final quality control check and polish. Not that I’ve been doing this a lot, but I’ve realized that I really need two things that fall under the broad category of “beta reader.” I need folks to read it when I think it’s done (which, for the record, was at the end of December) who can say “Um, no, this doesn’t work. This is wrong. Whoa, I liked this part. etc.” and then I need someone who has never seen it before to both do that and make sure that my grammar and spelling and word choice makes sense when I yet again think that I’m done.
Because I feel like my other beta readers and the project manager now all know what I’m intending. So, I need someone who’s meeting it for the first time to tell me if what I have now makes sense, without the bias of knowing what I’m trying to do.
Ha ha ha. The advice I’m trying to give without actually being in a place to give it is this–deploy your beta readers where and when you need them. If you only need three to triangulate what is wrong with your first final draft, don’t ask the fourth, who will, in all likelihood, just tell you what the other three are saying, but in a slightly different way, because you can use that fourth person when you have your second final draft. Fresh eyes, fresh ideas about what’s not working. (Keeping in mind that I’ve been hashing and rehashing a lot of stuff out with the Project manager at this stage, so it’s like having two in my second set of beta readers.)
Okay, now I have to run around all excited. I’m bringing my camera, because I am determined to be a tourist in my own life. It’s funny. I have heard people say “Don’t be a tourist in your own life,” meaning, don’t just do the things everyone else does, but actually engage and be present in your life. Don’t miss out.
But I kind of want to be a tourist that way. I want to soak this strange place in and see everything there is to see and be open to adventure and not knowing what comes next.
I had a minor freak-out yesterday afternoon, because the Project X project manager and I were meeting, in part, to discuss when we could meet with the person in charge of the art. I should have probably guessed by my post here yesterday that I had a lot of anxiety about this part. But it turns out that not only am I nervous about this part becoming real, but I am really nervous about standing in front of artists and not feeling like a total fraud–like their work is so good and I write weird crap.
But, then, as it happened, I walked into Fat Crow Press, which is this amazing shop full of great art and the woman who runs it writes and prints her own children’s books. And she asked what I was up to and I told her about Project X and how I was starting to get a little anxious because, you know, here come the talented artists.
And she was completely the right person I needed in that moment, because she illustrates books, right? So, she told me that it would be great and fabulous and that I would love working with the artists, because it would mean working with people who were trying to make the end thing wonderful.
And that’s completely right.
But, Monday! Monday we’re going to look at art. I am so excited. I want to take a million pictures. I want to look back over those pictures later and remember how I felt right at the moment when I first took them.
The woman at Fat Crow Press sells extra copies of pages from her books (I told you she hand-makes them all) so you can frame them–the illustrated sides, I guess, though you could do the sides that have words on them–and it made me realize that there will be pages to frame from my book.
Don’t mind me. I’ll just be over here being happy.
–When someone you know has graciously agreed to be your final possible-werewolf, you will wake up in the middle of the night in a cold panic about whether it’s clear that he’s only been the werewolf a short while, if he’s the werewolf at all, and thus is not possibly a serial killer or if you need to add a line explicitly saying that.
–You will add the line explicitly saying that. Believe me.
–Straight men find women framed with red sexier. Hey, there, Little Red Riding Hood, indeed!
–I’m specifically nervous about making sure that Tom’s turn as a suspected werewolf is not embarrassing for him. But I am in general nervous about working with artists. It’s not something that I’ve done before and I am not sure how much I need to be like “Do exactly this” or not. I’m playing it by ear, but my hope is that I can say “Here are the ten things we simply must have, but there’s a lot of other stuff that might catch your imagination or you might have ideas or whatever and I’d love to have that, too.” I was looking through some of the websites of the people I might be working with and their art is just… I can’t even express to you how amazing it is.
I’m trying to be all confident in person, but inside I’m completely intimidated.
–I keep a collection of wolf and werewolf songs–with the exception of “Werewolves of London” which suffers from being too… something… for me to listen to while working. I want to say “evocative” but I find these songs evocative. I think Zevon succeeds in creating a mood that is almost completely opposite of what I want in this particular instance. I mean, he’s a genius, of course. So, yes, he’s not here. Because his magic is too potent. Which sounds corny to say, but there it is. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t, if I were putting together a soundtrack for Project X, stick “Sympathy for the Devil” on it.
–Did I tell you guys Howlin’ Wolf ended up playing a pivotal role in Project X?
–My feeling about this is that either it’s going to be right up your alley and you will love it or it’s going to be too weird and fuck with history in a way that makes you mildly uncomfortable and you won’t like it. There’s no other options, really.
–The other reason the artists make me nervous is that I feel like this is stepping to the edge. Up until now, it’s been fun and wonderful, but if it didn’t work out, well, fine, then I have a weird thing I can stick in a short story collection someday. But once there are artists involved, once you’ve gotten people to commit not to their own vision, but to helping expand mine? There’s no turning back. This has either got to work or hearts will be broken. Mine, especially.
–Yes, thank goodness I had a back-up werewolf. Who is awesome. And who has challenged me to use “anagosity” in his section. “Anagosity” being a word he found in the wild in use in Nashville and Kentucky back at the turn of the last century. In context it seems to mean something like “someone who knows a little bit about a lot” and is a positive trait. But where it came from and where it went? Hard to say.
–Thoughts have turned to artists. I am freaking the fuck out.
–But I am also super excited.
–And overwhelmed.
–But mostly excited.
