Continuing the discussion over here… will respond shortly once I have a think about how to word this.
EDITED to add, I may delay replying until tomorrow due to the heavy trance tonight from the subliminals.
The books I’m working on have Book One in the first person, so there’s a heavy voice-over component. The story begins with the voice-over below which I first wrote way back in 2018 while I was travelling from hostel to hostel, essentially homeless but still working in the public sector. That’s a story for another day. I’ll go into more detail about the visualisation and writing method below, but to start with I felt like I needed to provide a bit of context about what the main character is like:
- Memory
Every time is now when your memory’s like mine.
There are days when the days go by so quickly, that you’d believe time was a river that burst its banks. And then there are days that stand out in your memory above the others, huge in their expanse and dizzying in their contradictions.
But for me, everything has a duration. Every day remains in my memory as clear as any other. You see, I have a problem. I can’t forget anything.
Or at least that’s what I used to believe. The doctors tried to learn a thing or
two about my eidetic memory but I think I just scared them. So I took to self
medication.
You know, most chumps would call me stupid for wanting something as strange as to lose something so precious. But believe me, it’s a mixed blessing at best.
Here in the city of Chicago, you have to get to know the rhythm and the beat
that the city moves to. You have to be able to walk in step with it. Otherwise it eats you and spits you out. And so that’s what I learned to do. Shadowed some of the rich and powerful of the city thanks to the kind and generous donations of their loyal and devoted wives who were interested in what they were up to in their spare time. That kind of thing. But it got boring after a while. Is that pretentious?
It wasn’t a challenge any longer. And so in my quest for self medication and
better hot sauce, I went in search of my friend Seamus. But before we get into him, let’s not get too carried away. We were here in Chicago and I was telling you about my current employment.
You see that poor shit throwing up over there in the parking lot? That’s me.
Pathetic, isn’t it? Looks like I’ve had about two fifths of whisky too many for my evening. But that would be the surface appearance. Mama always told me to steer clear of surface appearances… they’re often a major disappointment.
Some would call that their rugged chin chiseled. As for me, I just call it ugly. I
suppose you could call that a perspective.
But beyond perspectives, there’s something we can know of a man, or perhaps of many things, that cuts to the core of subjectivity and objectivity, bridging the two. I like to think that’s where my detective work happens. In those moments where thoughts are just like vagrants passing through, one drunk thought calls out to the crowd “Geronimo!” and delivers the answer to the last riddle about my current case that had been bothering me for a while.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I guess you’re looking at me kind of strangely thinking, what is this whiskey soaked old sod doing in a parking lot in inner Chicago? Well, I can assure you the answer to that is a lot more interesting than my current appearance looks. Oh, by the way, I’m Damien Greene. That’ll become important later on. So I guess its fitting that this story first began with a leprechaun.
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My method of writing is a little like something Stephen King once described about how characters over time come to life, become real and can even talk to you. I first encountered that in his afterword (I think) to Wizard and Glass, Book Four of the Dark Tower series. He was talking about how the chapters where Roland goes to lay with the prostitute in the Old Town was written back in the 1970s, but it took him many years to be able to write Roland’s story of falling in love with Susan. Despite his experience, this was something foreign to him. Eventually at some stage driving on the highway Roland comes to him in his mind and tells him “I will help you” or “I will show you” and helps him complete the part of the book that had been lingering unfinished for years.
When I first read this I was like “Yes! Someone else gets it! They are real!”
And they can speak to you. So there is a big auditory component. But also a strong visual component, for example I can see the twisted gate of Umaprada with its fun park lettering and the tent in the distance, can visualise the basic appearance of Hoover, the Navy Seal who works for the Pittsburgh Mafia in his spare time for extra cash, and so on. I can see him staring at the fly crawling across the wall of his room at the festival, even feel his emotions at times. The other senses like taste and touch and smell are a little harder to engage though.
Research sometimes provides the window I need into the real city or location to give me a deeper perspective or birds eye view, most of the time though there is a linear building of material in specific chapters, gradually filling in the parts that are needed to write the rest, like a jigsaw puzzle.
Some of his voice-overs are almost like incantations. “Death is not a multi-syllable word. Even anger, or sadness, those were two syllables. Death doesn’t waste time. It cuts right to the bone, bringing its own
monosyllabic cousins with it, pain and loss. They rode in on a pale horse that night, and in fifteen minutes tore me to shreds. After I got off the phone, I canceled or moved all of my appointments for the next week. I knew I was not going to be okay for a very long time.”
Of course with manifestation, it is the emotion behind something that usually manifests it. So I suspect that in writing some of these sections, and dwelling strongly on what he experienced, something similar popped up in my own life. Or maybe the precognition of the event about to happen inspired my writing. Who knows. Causality is not always a one way street.
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As for Minds Eye, I’ve had an extended break from writing the novel since the fire, both due to the trauma of that event and being too busy with a certain woman and my daily grind to return my mind into the story. And its not just that… now that COVID and the events of Trump’s presidency are completely changing the local environment of that city and other cities in the novel, the question arose what are the implications of this for writing a novel about such a complex character as Damien, who will eventually become The Equalizer, a superhero with the power of telepathy and perfect memory who works in secret to level the playing field and hold the mafia to a certain level of moral responsibility to the underdogs and little people, to even the score and make sure the delicate balance of power is kept in the cities. Is the story still relevant? I believe it is, but things have changed none the less.
Now that I’ve been running MET2 and other subs for a while, I’m about ready to get back into writing parts of the story, although I may skip ahead into Book Two to get a head-start on the material in Minneapolis (the second city Damien moves to after Chicago becomes too hot)
I am now going to have two additional hours of time a day not spent commuting to and from work, thanks to working from home starting tomorrow. It came at the right time, as our city’s COVID numbers have been ramping up to scary levels and I was working in what was essentially a hot-spot area, seeing cases pop up at our work, having them send us home early so they could do deep cleans and more. I plan on using the additional hours judiciously and some of it I may be able to use, particularly after work, as story writing time while running MET and BLU.
So I’m going to use this thread to post updates as that progresses and hopefully I’ll see some success in getting back into the world of Greene and his marijuana habit, the Rhino Juice (key plot element), the pretty girls and the web of mafia intrigue that is Umaprada.
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