Dark Seeds, Dead Ends, and The Happy Fisherman

Been working on my short story sequence lately (Moonlight Sketches), and it’s been an exhausting, exhilarating process.

I started out with a few stories that have already been published and a few more that have won literary awards but have not necessarily been published. I definitely don’t send my stories out to publishers enough, which is probably the main reason why those award-winning stories haven’t sold yet. I’d rather just write and write, submit occasionally but if a story gets rejected, I tend, subconsciously at least, to say, “Well, that’s that.”

But that isn’t that. I have to admit the few stories I’ve published were all accepted the first time out. I’m not sure I’ve ever published a story that got rejected once, and that’s just not right. Rejection is such a normal part of the publication process that it’s just understood, when you send something out, chances are it will come back to you with a note—a form letter if they’re too busy and unimpressed to be bothered with you or a handwritten bit of encouragement if they liked your writing style but the story itself wasn’t quite what they usually publish, or it was flawed or whatever. Most of mine have been of the latter variety. Fifteen years ago, an editor at Random House in New York wrote me a note a silly novel I’d written, saying “Please don’t give up. You write very well.” The same year, Redbook rejected a story of mine that in no way, shape or form was right for their magazine (I can see that now): “Very nice. Try us again” the editor said.

Well, I didn’t try either one of them again. Not intentionally. I just went in a different direction. Perhaps even a foolhardy direction, but different nonetheless.

I’m beginning to see a trend.

Anyway, this summer, I’ve been writing my damn head off, trying to stockpile manuscripts so that I can just send them all out at the end of summer and hope for the best. Like scattering seeds to the wind. Maybe some of them will take root.

I received an arts grant to write my short story collection, and so I’ve already written quite a few. It was quite a challenge, and very intense, as I wrote them all in a two-week span. Of course, they’re not perfect, but I have the rest of the summer to fluff them up and make them look nice. I still have two or three stories to write in order to finish the series, but I am very pleased with it. It’s amazing the stuff that comes out of your head when you work intensely like that. I can see now why some of the best Gothic and horror novels get written in a short period of time. You’re just in a different head space, and the intensity of writing, writing, writing produces a sort of vortex in your mind. Imagine Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) in The Shining, sitting at his typewriter in that big hotel, writing page after page of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” I imagine the original novel was written by Stephen King in pretty much the same way—though that scene doesn’t appear in the book. That was all Kubrick.

But, yes, it’s been a spiraling vortex of energy all around me, and what came out was dark. Very dark. I’m exploring the worst side of humanity and, conversely, the best side of humanity, if only for contrast’s sake. I find that I let my mind go where it wants to go. And we live in such dark times. Really. Bodies getting chopped up and left in suitcases for children to find in the back yard. People getting beaten and robbed in broad daylight. A serial rapist who’s never been caught by city police. And then there’s all the stuff happening in the bigger world, with global catastrophes greeting us on the news every day, along with the rising prices of oil, causing an enormous strain on public and private economies, among other things. All of this has a human cost.

Which is where I come in. As a writer, I don’t necessarily feel the need to comment on any of this stuff. After all, tomorrow it might be all different again, and I’m not about to start trying to catch any waves. That’s a dead end.

But what happens is that all of this stuff comes swirling down the pipe and into my brain, coursing through my veins like that dark sludgy stuff that transformed Spider-man last summer and what oozes out is, well, dark sludgy stuff that somehow unintentionally catches the vibe of the twenty-first century. The characters are darker, the places descending into madness, and the plots strive for something hopeful to cling to. But sometimes, I don’t follow the road toward the light; sometimes, it’s the darker road that beckons the loudest.

So that’s where my head is at. So then the phone rings and some telemarketer wants me to answer questions very politely. I don’t even try, to be honest. They’ve got jobs to do, and if I was to call them at their work place and ask them to answer some questions about the state of the world, they’d probably hang up on me. So when I’ve spent three hours in my proverbial basement, mining the dark depths of my mind and dwelling in the land of nightmares, I just don’t feel like being cordial for a while.

The collection is called “Moonlight Sketches,” but I’m leaving it for a little while to simmer on the back burner while I think of a few more stories that need telling.

I’ve turned my attention to a re-write of my novel, Finton Moon, which I’d left off in order to do the short stories. But FM is nearly done now. Another couple of weeks should do it, and then I’ll be finishing that darkest of stories, The Ghost of Emily Dickinson. The title of that one’s going to have to change, of course. But I like it for now. That one’s about two characters, a man and a woman, who find each other and fall in love, but don’t know much about one another. It’s really all about the way in which St. John’s, and Newfoundland, is changing from this ridiculous “happy fishermen” idea to an oil-driven, economic powerhouse that takes a massive toll on those who aren’t slurping from the gravy train. It’s hard, hard times. And the more they change, the more they stay the same.

Now there’s a pleasant thought for the day.

Anyway, I have to get some stories in the mail. Maybe there’ll be a happy ending to that, at least.

It's been more than a week since that amazing Leonard Cohen concert at Holy Heart, and my feeling that it was a spiritual experience is borne out by the fact that I still can't get the show, those songs, or His incredible presence out of my head. I keep playing the CD in the background whenever I'm doing anything--it's the only music I find fit to listen to these days.

BUT, having said that, I was at the annual arts and letters gala Saturday night and saw another wicked show. As usual, the entertainment was fantastic, especially from the younger winners. It wasn't Cohen or Dylan, but I enjoyed every second of it. With all of the writing, music, and visual arts talent we have here, it's just a feast for the sense whenever you get that many artistic souls and their work together in one spot. I did pick up my third consecutive award for fiction, this time for my short story "Hold Out". Earlier in the week, I was lucky enough to receive a much-coveted arts grant for the writing of my short story collection called Moonlight Sketches--the title being a sort of backhanded homage to perhaps the most famous short story collection in Canadian history, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock. So I'm hard at work writing the remaining stories in that collection while I put my novel(s) on hold for a little while. There's a lot to get done over the summer, that's for sure. I wrote a new story today called "The Darkness and Darcy Knight," which is easily one of the darkest stories I've ever written. I think it's a keeper. Once that one was done, I immediately started work on another new story. My goal is to write at least three complete stories by the weekend--for me that's a lot. I've never written more than one in an entire month before, although when they come, they usually only take a day or two to put them together. I like to write fast when I'm channelling a short story. It's just the way my brain works. Poe said that the short story had to be able to be read in one sitting. Well, the best way to accomplish that as a writer is to compose the whole thing in one sitting, more or less.

Anyway, tomorrow's my birthday, about the same time as last year, in fact. I'll be taking some time off, though I'll probably be working a few hours. Not feeling older and not necessarily any wiser. If I was, maybe I wouldn't be working so much on my birthday.

Peace out.