As I write, Helen Bach is on vacation and Alyson Camus has family visiting and me? I have 7 concerts in three days coming up and so I have been writing even more than my usual six posts a day, more in the nature of 10 a day over three days and I have a pounding headache.
And if I am very seldom sick of music I can tire of writing about it. And that’s exactly where I stand right now. I have a pounding headache and I don’t want to write. Or, to be precise, I don’t want to write about music. I haven’t written a novel since 2007 when I finished “Me In Honey”. I followed that novel with two short stories and began scoping out another full length story about a woman whose murder proves there is, in fact, a God.
Not untypical terrain for me.
This girl is calling to her Mom’s room as she lies in the last moments of a terminal illness, the girl doesn’t know this but just before the mother dies there is three signs heralding the death, a phone rings, the wind blows and she can hear the sound of children playing in the distance.
Whenever death is close by her, these three things happen.
The girl marries, her husband dies 9-11, her son dies, and finally she is raped and murdered at an early age.
I know it sounds like bummer but I wasn’t really interested in happiness or sorry, what interested me was that if these signs occurred every time death was near her, who put the signs there? That was exactly why I was going to write it. In the hopes somebody somewhere would ask the question.
Much of the story wouldn’t have anything to do with death (really only four major death scenes) and I was gonna put a lot of the action in the offices of an alternative LES monthly.
I had actually written a rough draft short story in the early 1990s but I was gonna really enlarge upon it.
Since then I simply don’t have the time for fiction, ideas percolate, maybe three or four a year, but I don’t pursue them. The thing is “Me In Honey” and another is the only two of seven novels I felt I had to write at whatever the cost might be. The other five I wrote because I had to write not because I had to tell a particular story. And if I am writing because I have to write, well, I spend lots of my life writing so I don’t have to write because I have to write any more.
So I can subdue my thoughts.
But not my imagination and I have found especially this year, that my dreams are getting more and more vivid as I fail to organize it!
So today, sick of writing about music, I began thinking of a new story. First I got a name, “Sir Duke”. Why? I happened to be listening to Stevie when I thought of writing it. Next, I thought I’d have a lot of it take place in Beirut in the 70s, just because I know it so well. If I actually came to write it, maybe I’d change my mind. But what I wanted to write about was Immigrants. Leaving your home.
Then, just because I am knee deep in writing about music everyday, I thought I’d have it be somewhat about the music business.
So this is what I came up with:
1. It doesn’t happen “anywhere” real –just some country.
2. The band breaks big in this tiny country.
3. They hit it big and go on a world tour.
4. They return to discover the country and everybody in it have been wiped off the map.
That’s about all I have but since I don’t have the time to write it, who cares?