Perhaps not the most pleasant intro to a post, but I thought it best to keep the signals as un-mixed as possible, as soon as possible. In brief, I’ve got to put Saint Heretic (and my writing in general) aside indefinitely, though I’m hoping to resume work by the end of this year.
The back story:
I began sparring with this novel as soon as Dermaphoria was a wrap, filling notebooks with more letters from the Invisible Man and surrendering to an untethered narrative which sought to answer the question, “Just who is this alleged nephew, ‘Lyle?’” Sometime during those first two years I spent writing, tending bar, doing volunteer work and meandering the city, a certain belligerent and self-righteous half-angel/half-asshole name Icarus crashed the private party in my right hemisphere and insisted he was part of story. At no point did he offer any suggestions as to what that story was; so after all that time, I had nothing to show but a triptych of longhand narratives that went nowhere and had nothing to do with one another. One evening, sometime around October of 2007, I gathered my work-in-progress and wheeled my roommate’s paper shredder into the living room.
Roommate says, “What’s up?” and I tell him. He says, “Run it by me.”
“I don’t discuss work in progress.”
“If you’re shredding it, then it’s no longer in progress.”
He had me there, so I said, “It’s about…” and gave him a rundown of what I had.
To which he said, “You mean it’s about….” and he virtually repeated my words back to me and smiled, because the story was right in front of my face the whole time.
I turned off the shredder, set aside the two years of rough copy I’d written, and spent the next several months outlining the narrative that was now so painfully obvious to me. It took the latter part of ‘07 and the beginning of ‘08, but by that time I had all of the load-bearing plot points in place, a rough chronology mapped out, and the beginnings of a protean story-mural covering the wall above my desk. Not to mention a fair grip on the three separate voices I wanted to use (though Icarus continues to evolve).
Pat Walsh returned to the Cage and took in a dose of Saint Heretic upon his return. We talked. Could I finish it in time for the Fall 2009 catalogue? We looked at the production timelines, drop dates, the BEA schedule and, considering everything, I said I could do it. I’d been ducking, weaving, blocking and jabbing with this book for some time, and I liked the idea of lighting a fire under my ass. Sure, I could take what I’ve been fighting with for three years and do it in four months, as long as those four months were an uninterrupted streak in the Pit. I mean a full-bore, Federal WitSec Program, NORAD bunker-style lockdown. As long as I had no personal life and four sober months in a retrofitted bathosphere (including an ingot of notepads, reference library, leisure reading, Moleskine, coffee maker and complete seasons of both The Wire and Bullshit on dvd) a mile or two below the surface of the Pacific, I would indeed emerge with a completed manuscript (and perhaps, as my alter ego Will Christopher Baer put it, “a nasty case of the bends”).
Things were glorious for the first two months, but then there was the air leak in my oxygen feed, pens kept rupturing from the pressure, and all manner of euphemisms for personal demands which must be kept personal and which cannot and will not take a back seat to writing. I want to put the brakes on things now, before the Fall/Winter ‘09 catalogue goes into production and word on the novel gets out to sales reps, bookstore chains, Amazon, etc. Pulling the plug on a book that’s been officially announced to the publishing world at large is far more damaging than a book that’s been announced “unofficially” on the Velvet and my own sundry web tentacles. Pat Walsh knows the constraints I’m under and said he would respect my decision, and I’m grateful for that.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I want to get this one right. Sadly, doing as much requires putting a padlock on the Pit for the immediate future. Don’t worry, Icarus won’t stand for this too long. Saint Heretic will emerge in due course.
Semper fi,
-Craig