Bluebird Briefing: April 2015

First, a preface about my second novel, Rainbow, which has been in production for about two years now (concept development started in February 2013, the actual writing that June). The manuscript currently stands at 28,000 words. That's about half the length of a short novel, but I have much more writing ahead of me than behind me, and Rainbow will not be, never could have been, a short novel. Like our protagonist Martin Lane, whom one character emphatically declares cannot be contained, the novel that tells his story seems boundlessly expansive and is not readily delimited.

The writing has been progressing slowly but steadily (isn't that the kind that wins the race?), propelled by a relatively low-key yet sustained stream of inspiration. Unlike the interior cosmic drama that drove me to create Bluebird in a six-week fever (or perhaps something more like a visionary trance), the fire which fuels Rainbow is not usually quite as blindingly bright, but has proven remarkably durable, and the project is still deeply, if a bit more quietly, exciting.

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Meanwhile, developments have been occurring with my first effort in novelistic art, The Bluebird of Happiness. One thing I have realized of late is that, even though the novel was written during that aforementioned six weeks almost three years ago, it is, even today, not really finished, and indeed the production of the novel has been a process far greater than those six glorious weeks. Yes, the novel was essentially written during that time period, but it had a long history prior to that, and, despite having felt that the manuscript was polished and ready for prime time two years ago, I have come to feel that there is more work yet to be done before my debut novel is all that it can be and is, well, ready for its debut.

For background, here is a brief outline of the history of Bluebird:

1999: I first conceive the idea for the novel, at the time titled The Terrible Blue, set in a decadent near-future America and centering on the character of Thomas Fairchild.

2003: I reimagine the story as set in the present day and revolving around the lives of three characters: Thomas, Martin Lane, and Aurora Nightingale. Martin, who was actually first imagined back in 1997, becomes the lead character.

2004: I write several pages of the story, some material from which ends up in the eventual novel.

2007: After setting the project aside for a time, a viewing of the movie Velvet Goldmine provides me with fresh inspiration for the story.

2009: Early in the year, I decide to abandon the novel altogether. By the summer, however, I have taken up the idea once more. I change the title to The Bluebird of Happiness.

2010: I make yet another start on the manuscript, writing the first few pages.

2011: Late in the year, I decide to make Thomas the main character once more.

2012: In early May I receive a powerful new inspiration for the story, which now centers on the seemingly impossible love of Thomas for Alexandra Grey (with Martin and Aurora as important supporting characters). On July 3rd I begin writing; on August 17th I complete the 100,000+ word initial draft of the manuscript.

2013: In May I edit the manuscript, believing it at the time to be ready for submission to agents and publishers.

2014: I decide that I wish to rewrite one section of the novel, consisting of a long letter from Thomas to Alexandra.

This last development was significant for me because it entailed reversing my decision of the preceding year that the novel was in fact finished. It has been a bit difficult to deal with too because it means that the novel is taking much longer to complete than I had previously thought. However, I have also come to realize that this is normal and good; however inspired, however wondrous, however powerful that blaze of literary creation in the summer of 2012 might have been, however important and central a part of the creative process that is producing The Bluebird of Happiness, it is still only a part of that process. The above timeline amply illustrates this fact. The writing of any novel must be a combination of passionate inspiration and arduous toil.

I have also, in recent days, come to a greater acceptance of the need for diligent and careful revision, editing, polishing, and not to be afraid that this will tamper with the purity of the initial inspiration. The two processes are complementary aspects of the same greater process of artistic creation. I know that other authors have put years of effort and work into their novels too, and that this is okay. It is crucially important that I do not release my Bluebird into the world until it is fully ready for flight, until I feel no nagging reservations about any part of the manuscript. Of course it will never be perfect (it is questionable whether any literary work, particularly a novel, can ever truly be "perfect", even more questionable what "perfect" might mean), but part of my hesitation about marketing the manuscript has been due to misgivings about certain parts, especially the letter to Alexandra, which I feel could (should, considering its fictional author and the nature of the novel) be much more poetic. As it stands now, it feels too prosaic and explanatory whereas I feel it could and should be a more mysterious and sublime expression of mysterious and sublime emotions. In short, I didn't write that part quite as well as I could have, and that needs to be fixed, I think, before the novel is everything it was meant to be, before it becomes the one true Bluebird.

Sometimes I feel a bit of trepidation about undertaking such a task of rewriting (which I have yet to begin, though I have been developing ideas for it). The major reason is that the fiery inspiration that produced the initial manuscript was a passing phenomenon. I suppose it is possible that the muse may seize me again as I begin to rewrite Thomas's epistle to the object of his undying love, but no author can completely control things like that. The muse may aid the poet, but the poet serves the muse. However, if the task must be done, then it must, and I can only trust the muse to guide me as she has so faithfully done before. (I realize that for non-writers all this talk of muses may sound a bit mystical, but it must also be understood, as it is by poets, that some things can only be expressed poetically.)

I have also been troubled by the thought that any addition or substantial revision I make now to the Bluebird MS seems, inevitably, like a later interpolation to the "real" text that I produced under such effulgent inspiration three years ago. After all, it was written at a particular moment in my life, and as the philosopher Heraclitus says, one cannot step in the same river twice. But if anything is mystical, it might be the belief that only what I wrote during those six weeks can possibly count as the "real" Bluebird. No matter how romantic I might be in some ways, I am also worldly enough to understand, as I alluded to above, that literary creation is always a cooperative effort between the heart, the head, and the hands.

So, while it is true that I might never be able to recapture the full power of the vision that so ravished me during that summer of suffering and splendor, it is also true that I am still, in a deeper sense, the same person, and it is also true that any literary work is produced over a period of time, whether it be a single day to write a lyric poem or very short story, or many years to write a great novel. As I mentioned at the outset, Rainbow has already been in production for two years, and I am not precisely the same as I was when I began its composition--and I will surely be different still by the time I finish it. And of course Bluebird itself existed as a concept for 13 years prior to its writing, so it is not as though it sprang fully formed from the ether, however much it may have felt that way at the time. (As I mentioned in the timeline, a small part of the text was actually written several years before. So why not some of the text written a few years after the main event?)

On February 5th of this year, I actually did make a small but significant revision to one passage in Bluebird (not the letter), because I wanted to leave certain things about Thomas a bit more mysterious and ambiguous than they otherwise might have been. This was the first time since the edit of the manuscript in May 2013 that I made any changes at all to the text. I am thinking now that I would like to reread and re-edit the entire manuscript, in addition to rewriting the letter. For a novel that I have always intended and hoped to be an enduring work of art, it is well worth the time and the effort to make it as close to perfect, as close to my highest vision, as I can possibly make it.

On a final note, only yesterday I thought up an entirely new scene for Bluebird. This scene, once written, would constitute the first substantial new addition to the story since 2012 (I have hardly entertained the notion of making any actual additions to the text, as opposed to revising or rewriting existing parts of it, until now). Thomas, Martin, and Aurora, as well as a number of other characters from Bluebird, reappear in Rainbow, and some of them may possibly appear further in other shorter works of fiction, but this particular scene that occurred to me yesterday struck me as being especially suitable for Bluebird itself.

It is a scene that I believe would fit the tone and spirit of the first novel perfectly, while also standing out in a rather striking and bold sort of way, and thereby adding a single but important note to the entire symphony. I am quite excited by this, as this development has made me feel more than anything else that my first novel is not yet complete, and that its final completion need not be entirely tedious, but rather may involve fresh inspiration. One of my hesitations about rewriting the letter is that it seemed more an act of obligation, a chore, than the act of passionate eros that the initial writing of the novel was; but that task, too, as time goes on, is being fueled more and more by new ideas, increasingly more by desire than by duty.

The new scene for Bluebird, incidentally, involves a certain piece of music by Purcell which was referenced in my 2013 novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth. That novella is set a hundred years in the future but the three main characters share a passion for the poetry of Thomas Fairchild, making it not so much a sequel to Bluebird as a story set in the same fictional universe. The new scene in Bluebird will provide a further connection between the two tales. It occurs to me that future readers may see the scene in Angels involving the Purcell piece as making reference to the scene in Bluebird, even though in reality the passage in Bluebird was not written (or even thought up) until two years after Angels was written. Thus do I weave a complicated web among the various works of my literary oeuvre.

I read somewhere the other day that poetry is an act of daydreaming. And so it is. The worlds I see in my head, those worlds that seek realization in works of fiction or of poetry (literary fiction being, ultimately, a form of poetry... you might say, poetry by other means), are essentially dream worlds. That does not mean they are not real. They are of course not real in the same sense that the empirical world is, but they are realities of the mind, of my mind, and, through the concrete expression of art, may also become realities of other people's minds as well. And, like all art, these constructions, these made-up things, help us to see reality more deeply and more fully. Art may not be life, but art helps us live.

Angels Are Lonely on the Earth

I have completed my 39,000-word novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth. It was composed in another burst of inspiration from April 8 to May 9. Although certain elements of the story had been in my head for years, it began to emerge in more definite form last September, at which time I thought of it as a radical reimagining of an existing story concept whose title began with V. In hindsight, of course, it was really an entirely new story concept, though I did not separate it out from "V-----" until this year.

 

Inspiration often happens at the oddest moments. What may now be seen as the main idea of the story occurred to me in a flash the morning of November 2 as I was walking from my car to my workplace. And it was on the morning of April 4, while I was still lying in bed, that the title came to me, together with a related question uttered by the protagonist near the end of the story, both of which provided the final spark of inspiration.

The story is set in St. Louis, where I currently live, about a hundred years hence. The reasons for the futuristic setting are not science fictional; i.e., they do not relate to advances in science or technology, or even to changes in society. The reason for the choice of time period has mainly to do with the fact that the protagonist, Andrew Gordon, is a fan of the poetry of Thomas Fairchild, the protagonist of The Bluebird of Happiness. Thomas and his work are referenced throughout the story, and have a significant influence on Andrew's life and thought. In this way, I have written a related story that is not actually a sequel.

Angels also references a short story I completed in 2009 called "The Strange Case of Richard Arthurs", borrowing a mysterious outer space phenomenon from that tale as a plot element. This phenomenon, together with the strange effects it produces in human beings, might lead some readers to regard Angels as a science fiction story; personally, I do not consider this story to be SF. The difference has to do with emphasis, or what the story is mainly about. I would hate for non-SF fans to miss out on the story, which I think is simply a human drama, because of a misconception. (Having been a lifelong science fiction fan, it is certainly not antipathy to the genre that causes me to assert this story's non-SF status. At the very least, I would say that if it is SF, it is not merely SF; and I would also say that if it is SF, it is SF of a more literary type as opposed to standard genre fiction.)

As was the case in Bluebird, there is much reference to philosophy, poetry, and classical music, and there are a number of passages that relate, or show, the protagonist's dreams and visions. I am certain that many readers will think the story, having something of an epic feel to it, easily could have been expanded into a full-blown novel; but I am satisfied with the concise and often poetic nature of my storytelling, and prefer to leave much to the reader's imagination. I consider myself to be primarily a poet who sometimes writes prose fiction, which at its best may be thought of as a form of poetry. I also think of myself as a mythmaker, and a good myth is always suggestive, evocative, and ultimately mysterious. As Andrew Gordon learns, poetry and myths and dreams point us toward the ineffable, rather than attempting to spell out that which may not be uttered.

The story is a tragedy, but I think it is ultimately a hopeful one. That is not as oxymoronic as it might sound, for, as one character suggests, tragedy as an art is actually about hope. It is a celebration, not of death, but of life, and affirms not life's defeat but its victory.

It is said that the pen is mightier than the sword, and just as brave knights battle dragons, so too do writers often battle their own dragons. With this story more than any other, I feel that I have done battle with the dragon of nihilism and despair. I do not mean this in a grandiose sense of battling them for all humanity, but only for myself, and perhaps also for at least some of my readers. The story is more personal for me than I would like people to understand, and it is a story I feel I needed to write in order that I might not be overcome by a particular kind of darkness. It appears at times that those dragons were sent to slay me; but I think that really I have been sent to slay them. In the ongoing war of light against darkness, I like to think that this little tale constitutes a small but significant victory.

Notes From Somewhere Over the Rainbow

First of all, I really need to come up with a real title for "Rainbow". I'm not going to force it though; I have faith that the right title will present itself when it's ready. My ideas about the novel continue to develop rather fruitfully but, despite my excitement, I don't want to say too much about it at this point. It's still in the pre-production phase of development, but is coming together nicely.

One thing I can say about it without giving away too much is that its themes are becoming clearer in my mind. One of the dominant themes, I am coming to realize, has to do with vision, perception, and imagination, particularly with respect to knowing other people and knowing oneself, but also with respect to knowing reality in general.

Martin Lane, like his author, wears glasses and has suffered poor vision since childhood. But this physical defect stands in sharp contrast to the powerful vision of his poetic and artistic imagination (I am speaking of my character, not myself), which enables him to see things that others cannot. In a way, this is a variation of the old motif of Homer, the blind poet.

A big question in the story, as it was in Bluebird, is whether imagination distorts and deforms our vision of reality, or whether it actually enhances and expands that vision. In the former novel, this question was explored mainly in the context of Thomas Fairchild's idealized, unrequited love for Alexandra Grey, a woman he hardly knows, but in "Rainbow", it will be illustrated more broadly, both in terms of Martin's perception of other people, and in terms of others' perceptions of Martin... and even in Martin's perception of himself. As with the first novel, I will again alternate between the protagonist's first-person point of view and the accounts of other characters.

When I first invented Martin, almost by accident, back in 1997 (he was actually, originally, a co-creation with my friend and fellow writer Bill Rogers), he started out as what I now think of as a "mythic persona", based on hearsay about a real person, but more a product of the creative imagination than anything else. So it is very fitting, and perhaps only natural, that the novel centering on Martin should largely deal with the theme of how we know others by way of imagination.

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So what is going on, meanwhile, with the novel referred to as "V"? Well, something interesting (to me, at least). As I described before, the original story concept dated from 2006, and it was originally only supposed to be a short story. When I recently whittled the story down to its essence, what remained was essentially the original short story concept (which could possibly assume the length of a novella). However, since then I have realized that the newer ideas could form a story unto themselves, entirely separate from the original 2006 concept.

I have been quoting passages from the work-in-production on my Facebook page with the tag "V is for V". This was of course not the actual title ("V" itself being an abbreviation of the title), but ever since I came up with that tag, I thought that this phrase "V is for V" had kind of an interesting ring to it, as well as a certain significance--about signification itself. So I am entertaining the notion that the new story concept (the one that occurred to me last September) might actually be titled "V is for V", and that the older story idea will retain the original title.

Although it had evolved into a story of epic proportions, I am thinking now that it will actually be much shorter, either an extended short story or a novella (it seems many of my story concepts fall into that middle ground)--but one that, through conciseness, density, and suggestion (these, of course, being qualities of poetry), will still have something of an epic feel to it. I have long been fascinated by the idea of relatively small-scale art works that contain whole worlds within them, like worlds in miniature.

One reason for the separation is that the two stories are rather different from each other in feel, tone, and theme. I had incorporated the old story as one component of the new story, but it seemed a bit of an odd fit. The old story is more sensual, meditative, and delicately dreamlike, whereas the new story (i.e., "V is for V") is more visionary, tragic, and coldly austere (which makes it similar in tone, I think, to Bluebird... not surprisingly, since it was born on the heels of that novel's completion).

This development is interesting to me too in that it shows me how my general mood has changed since last fall, when what I am now calling "V is for V" essentially replaced the older story. The new idea better fit my mood at the time, but now I have returned to a place where I can also find interest in the old story idea.

For that matter, the tone of "Rainbow" is quite distinct from that of The Bluebird of Happiness. It is not nearly as dark and full of suffering, but it fills me with a different sort of inspiration. It is basically the telling of Martin Lane's life story, though it will not be told in strict chronological order, and will combine his own account with the accounts of other characters. His story will likely not appear as tragic as that of his friend Thomas Fairchild, but I think it will still seem mysterious, strange, and, in its own way, fearful (more wonder than terror).

At least it does to me, Martin's creator (or perhaps, the receiver of the muse's vision of Martin). I can only imagine it would appear that way to those to whom I tell his tale.

A Tale of Two Tales

Okay, I feel like I'm going somewhere again. First of all, "V" is not lost. It was like a star that got too big, too massive, and finally collapsed in upon itself. But the core remains, and it now seems purified. What I realized is that many parts of that grand construction were not essential to that particular story, and began to feel like so much dead weight, making the task of writing it feel unnecessarily burdensome. And that's the opposite of inspiration. I realized that many of those individual parts might work better elsewhere, and some were perhaps not necessary at all, mere filler. I made a list of what I felt to be the essential elements of "V", and after looking at it, I felt much better. It now seems much more clear, a simpler, smaller-scale, but more aesthetically unified idea.

I had always thought of that story as being one of my mid-length fictional works, perhaps a novella or a short novel at most (it was originally, in fact, only a short story), not the overblown epic it was somehow evolving into. I already have two ideas for truly epic novels, stories which can only exist in epic form because of their very nature, and I don't need to give myself more work than is necessary in this short and distracted life. After all, Homer wrote two epics, and that is more than most authors have done. I'll feel incredibly grateful and fulfilled if I am able to complete my two epic novels before I leave this earth.

(I should note that I have described Bluebird as an epic, and I suppose it is in some sense, but it is of fairly standard novel length and would be dwarfed by these other two works.)

Now for the new novel idea... its working title, as I have said, is "Rainbow". This is a reference to The Wizard of Oz. I'm not sure yet if the actual title will contain the word "rainbow" or not; we'll see.

The idea of this novel being a companion piece to Bluebird is becoming stronger. I am thinking that the protagonist may very well be Martin Lane, the best male friend of Thomas Fairchild, Bluebird's main character. I can't help but think of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and how the best friend of the first novel's protagonist became the main character of the latter novel.

It would not be a sequel, nor a prequel. It may overlap in time. But I am actually not overly concerned with continuity. In fact, I'm not particularly concerned to go out of my way to avoid apparent contradictions or irresolvable, differing accounts. I am thinking of these stories as myths, and my characters as mythic figures. As in ancient myths, many varying tales were told about gods and heroes, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to put them all together into a coherent whole. That's okay because myth is poetry, not history. It tells truth in a symbolical way, and by circumventing the literal accounts of science and history, it can access aspects of reality and truth otherwise invisible or incommunicable.

Like Bluebird (indeed, perhaps like every novel I shall write), "Rainbow" is philosophical. If The Bluebird of Happiness was primarily about, as its title would suggest, happiness and the possibility thereof, then "Rainbow" is primarily about beauty, and its significance in human life. If Bluebird was a tragedy, then "Rainbow" is more of a fairy tale. But, as in all fairy tales, there will be much darkness to overcome.

Weather Changes

So here's the deal. The story affectionately known as "V" has reached a standstill, and at this point its future is uncertain. Again, for me and my writing process, this is nothing unusual. In fact, there have been many occasions in the past when I have had to "retire" a particular story idea that I had been working on, in some cases for years. Such a retirement is always provisional, however. After all, I once retired the story concept that eventually became my first novel, The Bluebird of Happiness. It was at a point when the story idea (then known as The Terrible Blue) was already seven years old and didn't seem to be going anywhere... but in another six years it would finally emerge, almost overnight, in a supernova of inspiration. So you never know how these things will evolve. Sometimes things just have to develop in their own good time, and you can't force it if it's not the right time.

My story "retirements" are often conceived not as throwing out the story idea altogether so much as "deconstructing" it. In other words, I wish to preserve the best ideas from it for possible re-use later, either in a revived version of the same story (as happened with Bluebird) or in another story entirely (or perhaps various ideas from the original concept will pop up here and there in a number of different stories).

In any case, there is a more positive side to what is happening right now. It is not merely that "V" has lost some of its inspiration. Rather, a new inspiration has been slowly but surely displacing it. It is as though a nebulous mass of low pressure weather has begun pushing out the bright, high pressure air of "V". I sense some dark fugue arising in my imagination, still in the earliest stages of formation, taking on only dimly perceptible shapes, but with an undeniable mounting energy and the promise of great power, like the low rumbling of distant thunder. Like Bluebird in its final inspiration, it has the feeling of music and of hieratic, dreamlike vision. When I feel the story as music and as visionary image at least as much as narrative, I know it is mine.

One thing I can already say about this new story concept--it does not yet have a title, but I'm temporarily referring to it as "Rainbow"--is that it bears strong resemblances to Bluebird (to the point where I am wondering if it may in fact be a related story involving some of the characters from the earlier novel). At the very least, there are definite similarities in terms of character types, settings, themes, and feelings. This makes me worry, of course, that writing what comes most naturally to me, what most inspires me, will mean writing the same story over and over, albeit in different variations.

However, when you think about it, many great authors have carved out a niche for themselves by writing multiple stories and novels that largely involve the same general type of setting, characters, themes, etc.--one only need think of Jane Austen, for instance, or Henry James, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and any number of other novelists whose works, despite their individual variations and unique qualities, display an overall aesthetic and thematic unity that stamps them with the distinctive mark of their creators.

So perhaps being true to my muse will mean creating a canon of works that bear the strong, distinctive mark of their author and of his peculiar obsessions, tastes, and notions, so that someday people might say, "that's like something out of a Steven Holland story". At least, that is how I like to flatter myself.

Right now, all I know is that I feel like Dorothy, having just left Professor Marvel's house, as the first storm winds begin to blow, with the promise of some wondrous and magical Oz waiting to be discovered on the other side of the cyclone.

The Strange Evolution of Tales

Well, V has been in holding pattern for awhile, but for good reason: the story itself, that is, not in its details but in its very essence, is still evolving. But it is indeed evolving, rapidly and dramatically and in quite unexpected directions.

If there is one thing I have learned as a fiction writer, it is that stories, the truest and best stories I am capable of writing, must write themselves at least as much as I write them. This is definitely what happened with Bluebird, and it is what I am allowing to happen with V. Bluebird sat for two months between my latest and greatest vision for the story and the start of the actual writing. What I have discovered in the last month is that V is not quite at the point of being ready to be written. It is in the process of letting me know what it is.

And I can tell you that this unfolding revelation is nothing if not surprising. The story as I imagine it now bears only a minor resemblance to the story I originally conceived six years ago. That story was born at a much different time in my life and reflected my life at that time. Out of necessity, it is being drastically reshaped to reflect my life at this time, and this process is being guided not so much by my conscious effort as by the powerful gravitational force of the world in which I currently live.

The science fiction element of the story is becoming far less central, although it will undoubtedly remain important, since the whole concept of the tale has to do with eros and cosmos. But the space travel elements are moving more into the background, as a sort of underlying context, giving a greater stage to the earthbound, human aspect of the story.

In fact, one critical item I am still not sure about is the exact relationship between the two parallel narratives: on the one hand, the space exploration program, and on the other hand, the protagonist's life story. As in some postmodern novels, I am starting to feel that perhaps the two narratives will exist in different orders of reality that bear an ambiguous relationship to each other and to objective historical truth. I also am starting to feel that, whatever the relationship between the narratives might be, I don't need to be overly concerned with attempting to explain it, or even fully to understand it myself. After all, it is not history I am writing, but poetry.

To further complicate matters, a third narrative is suggesting itself to me. What makes this one particularly interesting is that it involves Thomas Fairchild, the protagonist of The Bluebird of Happiness, thus creating a link between the two novels without making V an actual sequel. I had already been thinking that Thomas's poetic masterpiece would be referenced in the fictional future of V, but now that element is becoming much more prominent. I am starting to think that part of the story will entail the protagonist conducting research into Thomas's life and work and the relation between the two, in an attempt to understand his own situation.

In any case, what I have realized the most is that I am not so interested in the science fictional elements as I am in the more earthly, realistic, and human elements. This is perhaps because I have discovered in recent times that real life is far stranger and more fascinating than any fantasy we can devise.

It Helps To Know People

The first draft of the beginning of V has found its way to the scrap heap. This is hardly surprising; I half expected it. It's just part of the writing process. I made a new start the other day, just typing up a few opening lines, but it was enough to give the opening of the story a new feel and the novel itself a new start. Of course, it remains to be seen whether and how long this version will last.

This novel has gotten off to a very slow start, despite the sudden new vision I had for it recently. That in itself is nothing unusual either (the speed and ease with which I wrote Bluebird was indeed the unusual, almost freakish, phenomenon). What is more remarkable at present is the specific reason I have discovered that the novel has gotten off to such a slow start.

It is something incredibly basic and simple, something to which in hindsight it seems amazing that I had not given more thought. That element is characterization. One thing that made Bluebird so easy to write was the fact that the characters were so vivid and real to me, as well as so particular and highly individualized, perhaps even to the point of being eccentric. I felt that I was writing about real people that I knew, and was merely reporting what they did and said and thought and felt.

This new story, on the other hand, has never had very highly developed characters. It has always been more abstract in terms of the people populating the story. I probably did not give this more consideration earlier because, unlike Bluebird--which, for all of its experimental flourishes and jumping around in time and different modes of reality, remains essentially a conventional narrative--V has been conceived from the start as more highly experimental in form. Basically, I had never even considered characterization to be as important for this story as it is for more traditional novels. The same has held true in terms of plot--V has not, and is still not, conceived as displaying what most readers would consider a coherent or easily comprehensible plot, although one is present under the surface and will no doubt be gleaned by the perceptive reader, though more intuitively than rationally.

So, going in, the fact that I did not have highly developed characters did not concern me, because, being the type of experimental novel that I intended it to be, the conventional elements of the traditional novel I did not regard as essential as they normally might be. It was to be written from a more purely subjective and psychological point of view, in which the first-person consciousness of the narrator blurs into more objective styles of writing such as news articles and scientific reports. This, in fact, is part of the theme of the story, i.e. the relation between subjective and objective views and descriptions of reality.

However, I came to realize just the other day that the new inspiration I had would work much better, and be more truly inspiring, if I were to have characters who were more real to me, who were more developed as characters. Their characterization in the story would occur in a different manner, perhaps more ambiguously and mysteriously, than it did in Bluebird or in most other novels, but it would still be helpful if I, the author, knew who these characters were. This is similar to the plot, which, though it will be ambiguous and mysterious to the reader, is something that should at least be known to me.

If I know who the characters are and what the plot is, I can choose to reveal them in whatever way I please to my readers, in whatever order and to whatever degree of coherence. The fragmentation of our experience and knowledge in the modern world is something that has been of great interest and concern to me, and this is part of the reason why I am choosing to take this approach to the story. I seek to explore the relationship between our fragmented experience and the possibility of an underlying unity or coherence to things.

In any case, I came to see recently that if the protagonist in particular, the male cosmonaut, was more concrete and defined and partially drawn upon myself, he would be much easier and more intuitive for me to write. This is true of the other characters as well, though not nearly to the same degree, since the story is to be written for the most part from the protagonist's point of view and has much to do with his attempts to know other people, who always remain to some degree mysterious.

And one thing that is quite silly is that the protagonist, as of this writing, does not even have a name. Again, in experimental fiction, this is not always a requirement, but in this story I have no reason to leave him anonymous. In short, I've realized I want to know more about who this guy is. I need to sit down and have a few talks with him, perhaps, so that I can then be better equipped to tell his story, and to make V a far more human and emotional tale, as it was already becoming, than a purely intellectual and conceptual exercise.

The Beginning of "V"

I am obviously being much more open about this novel than I was about Bluebird. Below is the beginning passage (for now at least) of my 2nd novel, code-named "V". I must note that the entire novel will not be written in this style. The style will actually vary quite a bit; as I mentioned in the previous post, some passages will take the form of scientific, academic, or journalistic writing, for instance, and the rest (the majority of the text), while being more personal and poetic, will also exhibit variety in style. The below opening passage is conceived, as is much of my writing, like the quickly changing scenes of a movie. It is like a preview of the entire story.

*** 

  I awake to a world of mist and memory. The sound of water rushing…

  In the end, it was her eyes that mattered most. The sound of soft rain on our umbrellas…

  I pick up a cup of coffee and read the headline:

VENUS SHOT FAILS

11 Cosmonauts Presumed Lost; Declared Heroes

  In the Hall, she lights a candle for the fallen, crosses herself, bows her head, and prays.

  My hand touches her inner thigh, her red lips sigh. The sound of candles flickering in the night…

  The loneliness of the evenings while she is away. The cold blue glow of the television. The sound of empty laughter…

  Their dead faces, devoid of light and love, lost to time and the endless black.

  The harsh light of a strange Antarean star, penetrating my frayed mind… oscillating wavelengths of sanity… exerting its salvific gravitational pull on a damned soul. The sound of agonized and hope-filled screaming…

Another Novel Idea

Well, while I am supposed to be busy editing and marketing The Bluebird of Happiness, it seems I might just launch into writing another feature-length fictional tale, erstwhile known as a novel. This "new" novel idea actually originated from a seed of an idea I first had back in 2006 and which has been gradually developing since then. Since completing Bluebird, I had already decided that this particular concept--I'll call it V for now--was the next major work of fiction that I wished to tackle, perhaps as early as this fall.

Just today, my ideas about it began to reach what you might call a critical mass, the point at which the story starts to seem real and vital enough that the writing of it begins to feel like a compulsion. I doubt that the writing of it will happen in anything like the burst of energy and inspiration that produced Bluebird in about six weeks--in fact, I doubt whether that is a repeatable phenomenon at all--but V has, as of today, arrived at the point where it suddenly feels imbued with inspiration and passion in a way that it never quite had before.

The key factor that has pushed V to this critical mass is a fresh conception of what the story is essentially about, which has given a more definite shape to its inner structure. This is similar to the process that gave shape to Bluebird a few months ago, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the motivating and shaping force is pretty much the same thing that gave impetus to the previous novel. In essence, V became all the more interesting and important and real to me as a story today because I suddenly saw a way to relate it more directly and vitally to my current feelings and concerns.

I don't mind revealing a little about the story at this time. It is set in the future and involves parallel narratives, one the history of a space exploration program, the other the autobiography of a male cosmonaut (that is the term used in the story) and his complex relationships with other people, including family and friends, but focusing particularly on his relationships with three different women over the course of his life. The story will not be told in strict chronological order but in a more subjective and psychological way, combined with some technical, scholarly, and journalistic styles of writing. I think of the basic theme of the story as eros and cosmos; that is, the relationship of human love and longing to the universe itself. It is, like Bluebird, a story of epic and tragic proportions, but then, it wouldn't be a Steven Holland story otherwise, would it?