Novel breakthrough

I’ve been stuck, but now found a way through. The novel got to 60,000 words with lots of complications since it’s a thriller, after all. But a few issues were getting in the way.

First of all, it was hard to see why the protagonist was chasing the leads he was chasing. He didn’t seem to care enough.

Second, there was mystification where there could have just been plain lying. It’s nice to give your characters permission to lie.

Third and finally, too many people were randomly connected. They’d just bumped into each other in Paris. Having spent more than a year in Paris, I know that can happen in real life. I enjoyed that random bumping into people a lot. But in a book, you get plot holes when you do that. Especially when you’re trying to tie Paris, New York, Libya, and Rome together. So I simplified. It’s fine if some people went to high school or university together.

All of which is to say that the book was stuck, and now it’s unstuck. I owe it all to Dostoevsky. I’m teaching Crime and Punishment to a class of non-literature majors, and we’re having a lot of fun with it. Characters get emotional. Irrational things happen. My book’s very plot-driven, but now I see ways in which my plot-serving characters need to be people, or at least characters, rather than devices. I didn’t turn my thriller hero into Raskolnikov. But I made him get pissed off and drunk, for very good reasons.

Back to the mother country in a few weeks

I’ve been trying to pivot from family matters to preparation for my upcoming trip to London and France. I’m finally starting to focus a little better on what’s coming up.

First, a few days in Stoke Newington, where I’ll be filming sites that were important in Daniel Defoe’s life for a documentary film I’m working on. I’ll also do some filming at places where he stood in the pillory, and at the Museum of London (where Newgate Prison is somewhat represented).

Back to Austin today

I’ll be back in Austin for a day of housekeeping and packing up before heading back to Jersey. I’ll be packing up my car with things I need for the summer: clothes, books, video camera, guitar, other assorted odds and ends. I’ll be spending the summer in my dad’s house, taking care of him as he goes through hospice care. It’s hard to tell how long it will last. He would prefer shorter rather than longer. He’s not raging against the dying of the light. We talked to doctors and nurses all day yesterday. His main frustration was that no one could give him a timetable. Some of them think they know, but they won’t say.

Dad and I had a good talk last night about his unpublished texts. I asked if he wanted me to publish them on Amazon Kindle and he said “of course.” That will be one of my summer projects. I think that makes me his literary executor. I’m going to make his six published novels available there, along with half a dozen unpublished ones. The former have been out of print for a while, but he got the copyrights back from the publishers.

A recent Amazon review on one of them says:

On the advice of a friend I recently read Don Flynn’s “Ordinary Murder”. Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald is a much put upon “ink stained wretch” who scribbles away for a newspaper that resembles the New York Daily News. He avoids a tedious assignment by his editor, Ironhead Matthews, to investigate the murder of a friend’s son. Fitz loves the friend, the owner of a neighborhood bar, but barely knew or tolerated the son. Throw in a beautiful woman, whose green eyes are like “falling into the Irish Sea”, a charming bookie, Skates Stern, wrongfully accused of the murder, a few yuppies, the usual collection of crooked businessmen and attorneys, and you have an entertaining mystery.

Fitz takes solace in the words of Marcus Aurelius, which puts a bit of a classical spin on the story. He also puffs away on Tiparillo cigars, in the newsroom, which, along with references to the World Trade Center, give the book almost a bittersweet sense of nostalgia.

Perfect for a coast-to-coast plane ride. I started in California and closed the back cover somewhere over America’s heartland.

There’s a dystopian one set in a future where no one can read anymore because of various forms of video making that skill seem old, quaint, and useless. People have been watching what they believe are “true reps” or representations of history to learn about the past. Then someone finds out they’ve actually been watching Hollywood movies like ‘1776’ and taking them as fact.

I haven’t read a few of the newer ones, so I’m looking forward to that. I’ll also be working on my own novel – I like to call it a “bestseller” when people ask about it. That’ll be my summer, along with a brief trip to London and Paris for an academic conference, some filming of places where Daniel Defoe was published, and a few visits to Père Lachaise cemetery, where I’ve planted a fictional murder victim. If I could only remember who was buried next to and behind Marcel Proust I wouldn’t have to go, but alas, memory isn’t speaking.

 

Out of print

I got an email from the house that published my academic book, Americans in British Literature, 1770-1832, telling me it’s out of print and the copyright has reverted to me.

I have mixed feelings about that. It’s been nice to have a book in print. But the things I’m writing now vary so much from that work of criticism that it feels like it belongs to another writer. I was going to say another time, but it was published in 2008, so of course that was another time. Like the late comedian Mitch Hedberg joked about people saying: “This is a picture of me when I was younger.” All pictures of you are from when you were younger. But 2008 really goes back to 2001, when I started the thing. I wasn’t just younger. I was a different person living a different life. A UCLA Ph.D. student writing a dissertation, hoping for an academic career. Now, I’m having an academic career and enjoying it, but looking forward to writing for a much broader audience. Hopefully someone’ll get entertained in the process.

I have to admit my first thought was commercial. Since the rights have reverted to me, I can upload it to amazon and eke out some beer money from it now and then. But sadly, the print rights have reverted. I think the electronic rights of all academic books will always and forever remain un-reverted to me.

So, I’m just going to say it’s out of print, I’m out of print, and it’s time to write and print some more stuff.

I like being in that place. The book I’m writing is going well. It’s threatening to get too long during the first draft, but I like editing. I just read over a 20-page section I was sending out to a critique group I’m joining. I’d anticipated cringing through it, but some of it wasn’t half bad. Some of it was even half good.