Guest Author James LePore talks: The Myth of Place

The Myth of Place: Why I Chose Southern Mexico as the Venue for a Large Swath of Blood of My Brother

Mexico, at once magical and diabolical.

—Anonymous

    In 1997, I spent four weeks in southern Mexico, in the city of Oaxaca and on the Pacific Coast between Puerto Escondido and Puerto Angel. I had just read Under The Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, and wanted to see, and photograph, the country where Lowry (in real life) and the American Consul Firm in (in the novel) had tried so hard, but failed, to commit suicide by mezcal.

    The coast road from Puerto Escondido deteriorated with a jolting suddenness as I approached Zippolite. Earlier, I had picked up a hitchhiker, a middle-aged Brit with bad teeth and a scruffy beard, wearing a bandana like a sixties hippie, who told me, as I was dropping him off at a godforsaken roadside cantina, that he had heard that a busload of American tourists had been hijacked earlier in the day north of Puerto Angel and all were killed. I immediately regretted leaving Puerto Escondido so late—night had fallen as suddenly as the road had turned to rutted hard-pan—but I pushed on. There were two or three large bonfires on Zippolite’s beach, their light reflecting wildly off of the huge waves crashing behind them, the waves that had for years, according to my guide book, attracted the world’s most insane surfers.

    Ten minutes later, I was in Puerto Angel and twenty minutes after that ordering dinner on the veranda of a small but clean and not un-charming inn on a hillside overlooking Puerto Angel Bay, lit to perfection by the moon and stars shining down through a clear night sky. The inn’s owner, a graying ex-hippie herself from San Francisco, had heard nothing of any massacre of Americans. Rumors, she said, it’s what the ex-pats and the paranoid surf bums live on along this coast. The time to worry will be when the rumors stop. She had been running her inn for twenty years, so, relieved, I was happy to take her at her word. So happy that after dinner I had three or four shots of the strong—very strong—and smoky local mezcal.

    There was a couple that I took to be American—in their late twenties, both blond, both good looking—at a table not too far away. The place was otherwise empty. I thought to ask them to join me but there was something about the way they were talking, looking at each other and then not looking at each other, that decided me against it.

    I was asleep within seconds of getting into bed.

    At three AM I was wide awake. My room was among a half dozen or so situated along a wide terrace facing the bay. I took my cigarettes out to this terrace, found a comfortable chair next to a thick potted palm tree of some kind, and sat, to smoke and look down at the bay and the dark Pacific beyond until I felt I could fall back to sleep. Before I could light up, I heard the crash of glass on tile floor quite nearby, followed immediately by the voices, at first constrained and then getting louder, of a man and a woman arguing. A moment later, the young blonde woman from the restaurant came out of the room two doors down, stepped quickly to the terrace’s sturdy wooden railing and began vomiting over it. Her husband, or boyfriend, or whatever he was, came out and put his hand on her shoulder, but she shook it off violently. She was wearing a thin cotton robe or wrap, knee length, which she had been holding closed while she retched. It came loose when she shook off the man’s hand, and I could see a breast exposed, and a portion of soft, beautifully rounded abdomen, before she pulled it tight again.

    Leave me alone, she said. I’m leaving tomorrow.

    What about your share? the man asked. He was wearing jeans and no shirt, his hairless, sculpted arms and chest bathed in moonlight.

    The woman did not answer. She pulled her wrap even closer, then she turned and looked my way. I was in deep shadow and had not lit my cigarette, so I was pretty sure she couldn’t see me. I could see her face full on now. She was very beautiful. I stared at her. Your share of what, I said to myself?

    Fuck you, she said, then turned and stepped past the man and into their room. He followed and pulled the door shut behind him.

    I waited a moment or two, then lit up. And listened. But all was quiet. Like the scene I had just witnessed had never happened.

    Mexico, I thought, Mexico.

James LePore is author of ‘A World I Never Made’, ‘Blood of My Brother,’ ‘Sons and Princes,’ ‘Gods and Fathers,’ and ‘The Fifth Man.  He currently lives in Salem, NY and is collaborating with screenwriter Carlos Davis on  his sixth novel. Click here to visit his website.

Creative Death and Taxes, s’il vous plaît.

Exclusive Image: Although Gerard announced to the world and the French politicians that he was renouncing his French Citizenship and moving to Belgium, our crack Paparazzi photog from our vast international staff, snapped GD in Gay Paree on May 11th, Hardly incognito (note emblazoned blazer). Image by Jean Ruisi

Ah France, you gotta love it.  I love Paris; it’s one of the world’s great cities to walk around in. I love and have written about The Côte d’azur and the jazz joints of St Germain. And then there is Normandy and her history, the valor and sacrifice of American boys who fell on the beaches with that day in 1944.

French literature, French cinema and Art nouveau have influenced me, and millions of Americans, from birth. Yet here’s a little sour pickle I picked up from the Associated Press. Dateline Paris: France mulls “culture” tax on smart phones.

Ha! Culture Tax? Okay, so the French gouvernement  (which thought necessary the designation of Bridget Bardot as a national treasure), is very conscious of France’s artistic contributions and identity to the world. So a culture tax turns out to be a 1 percent sales tax on everything Internet from the phones to tablets to possibly Google and YouTube use. Ostensibly this tax will pay to build a healthy and robust resource of French online content, free of franglais. Put another way, to subsidize the online content and web-related industries of France. The French have done similar things, to a degree, with their movie industry. Many feel it hastened the decline of risqué French cinema because part of the creative process was risk itself, and the government tried to minimize risk to the filmmaker. Smarter people with more time on their hands than me will debate the outcome over coffee and cigarettes, but I feel it hurt more than it helped.

However, enter the Pigeons! Yes, pigeon is a rough French translation which actually means “fall guys.”

You see, France is on the verge of 75% income tax on Frenchmen who make more than 1 million euros per year. Well, the Pigeons are revolting. The Pigeons, as they identify themselves online, are a group of entrepreneurs and business leaders who are threatening to leave France because they find it too… taxing! Some have already done so. And, you guessed it: Many of the Pigeons are the ‘early birds’ into the French online industries. Programmers, content providers, artists and in general people who risked their life savings and ate canned soup for years because they had a dream. They succeeded, built companies, hired thousands and are now, somehow, branded as the Diable! So the Culture tax will do what, exactly? Who’s going to be there to take the subsidies? To build this brave new French online world?

It seems to me that the mother lode of everybody on the Internet in France, chipping in 1% of sales, has to be worth more than whatever confiscatory tax the government could wring from the pockets of those rich misérables. But now, those who can build, populate and create content with those taxes, will not be there to be protected by the government.

Even the film industry (already enjoying subsidies) was shocked when their mega-star, Gérard Depardieu, split France (au revoir) as a way of keeping more than 25 cents on every dollar (or Franc or Euro, whatever) he earned.

Of course, no one in France, Europe or most of the PIGS, (not a demeaning term but an acronym actually used in economics and finance which refers to the economies of Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) would ever connect the ‘cradle to grave’ costs associated with many of the government programs that Politicians use to keep the masses voting for them. Spending beyond means is the real reason why governments run out of money… yet the Pigeons are being scapegoated.

The streets of France are filled with French citizens who embrace and even cheer-on the idea of going after the rich to make up the shortfall in the public treasury – as they take their share of benefits that deplete that same treasury. It will be a bittersweet moment when every person en France who has a smartphone tablet, or uses the internet, will be forced to pay, just like the erstwhile roi of cyberspace. 

Trying to create the next generation, online French content culture without the Pigeons would be like… I don’t know… like trying to make a French film without Dépardieu? 

P.S. For more laughable reading, see:
UK’S RICHEST CONCEALING BILLIONS IN OFFSHORE TAX HAVEN

Tom Avitabile
http://tomavitabile.com/
tom@spadvertising.com

A play, right?

Last night I had the most wonderful, wonderful dream, in fact it’s 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning and I jumped out of bed just to write this down.

Last night, I dreamt of Broadway! For the first time in my life.

I was on a subway platform. People were dressed in colors and outfits the likes of which I had never seen underground.  Women wore pastel colors, their skirts and dresses very float-y, moving and swaying as they did. The men were in primary colored suits, sport coats, overalls and jackets.  All the men wore thick rim glasses. I entered down a flight of stairs to the platform. The gleaming silver train was already in the station.

Somebody said, “and a 5, 6, 7, 8.” and suddenly everybody snapped into precision from the shapeless mass of people they were a second earlier. A piano started playing and someone clapped in time to the music. People were moving… no, they were dancing! Choreographed in and out of the car doors onto the platform and back again. They were singing. I was like Dorothy on the first day in Oz, turning every which way trying to see all around me. Every new part of the number brought with it some inventive set piece, or some alignment of dancers that was based on the morning commute I’d seen a million times before, but shaped in a moving pulsing throng of color and body attitude that made them move as one.  Suddenly the men had hats, fedoras, and they became part of the routine as they used them as props and did complicated hat switching routines that actually made me laugh out loud in awe.

Then I saw the lead. She was definitely a Broadway dame! I didn’t know her, but she came right past me as I was taking it all in. I could see she was the star. Her voice was thick and resounded over the entire stage without a mic. She moved like she was on wheels, you could see her as being on the Broadway stage since she was a kid, probably played Annie, and probably just got a Tony for being a witch in that revisionist Oz musical or something like that. Whoever she was, I mean she was impressive.

Then I saw another man enter, he was in a blue suit.  Not your ordinary blue, a shocking blue with wide pinstripes you could see from the back of the theater, different from all the others. It was Tom Hanks! Tom Hanks was in this play! I smiled and giggly laughed as he did his bit again passing right by me.  

At one part in the number the ‘Train” started to move, the whole thing. I remember how silent it moved, with just the slightest rolling noise. Ball bearings, I thought. It moved maybe 20 feet in total, I remember watching the front of the train, it looked as though it was going to hit one of the steel columns of the subway station set, but at the last minute the column pulled away. And the train car moved without incident.  I remember thinking in my dream, “That had to cost a million dollars just for this.”

A few of the performers, gave me odd looks, as I was the only inert object in a sea of swirling chroma and intense motion. Then the door to the train jammed as it was halfway open.  The dancers who were now, I guess, leaving the train, amassed at the half-opened door and suddenly the symphony of movement halted. The intentional choreography disrupted, they became a messy mass of humanity piling up at a narrowly opened door.  The guy clapping stopped and the piano player halted mid-score. Someone yelled from out in the dark seats. “Harry, what the hell is it with this door?”

From somewhere up over my head, at least 30 feet and into the rigging, ropes, sandbags and lights came a voice. “On it, boss.”

A dancer walked by me, and said to a fellow chorus member, “Just like the real thing.” The dance captain heard that, “Hey, did you hear what Frank just said, like the real subway.”

I had only been on Broadway for 4 minutes and felt that I was witnessing something special, a moment when, with all the creativity around me playing out, when choreography and lighting and set pieces were all acting as one organism, in all this well planned, well executed spontaneous art that was unfolding exactly as painstakingly planned, beat by beat by hand clap, came a moment of randomness that would, if they went with it, bring the beauty of real life to their ‘Morning Subway Commute of the Mind’. The Stuck Subway door!  At that moment I saw it as another brilliant element in this brilliant mosaic that would tickle audiences and maybe put another notch in a reviewer’s memory stick. A little dab of New York the way the actors themselves on this stage, who take the subway daily, see it.

 Then somebody from the dark seats in the ‘house’ section of the theater yelled.  “That’s 5 everybody… Harry can we make that do that? Somebody find Jerome. See if he can choreograph the stuck door.”

As the staging around me dissolved into regular traffic and the performers made their way to whatever they do when they weren’t on stage, a man approached mister Hanks with a cell-phone and he took the call and walked off.

The leading lady chatted for a moment with a wardrobe person, and was tugging at her costume, demonstrating something.  I took the opportunity to do what I came here to do. Suddenly, in my dream, there was a reason for me to be there. I picked up a case I didn’t know I came in with and headed up stairs to the offices of the theater. I walked through a room with benches and maybe 20 people, all sitting reading books, newspapers or working their phones, coats and bags at their sides.  Extras, I thought. Or Understudies, more like casting probably.  A big show like this must constantly be replacing cast members, or maybe it was for the touring, bus and truck productions that mirrored every big Broadway play across the rest of America. Then, in a logic that can only make sense in a dream, I looked into a room as I passed it. It looked more like a large classroom. A few music stands and a piano were up front.  For some reason my first thought was some kind of Julliard type classroom where students learned Broadway appreciation 101.  Then I thought, maybe it was a rehearsal room of some kind, but I dropped the whole line of thought.

I found myself approaching a desk, there was a woman going through papers, I waited and introduced myself.

She looked up. “Can I help you.”

“Yeah, I was told to show up here.”

“Who are you here to see?”

I didn’t know, or couldn’t say.

I remember seeing the look on her face. It was like she took pity on me. “Are you here for the casting?”

“Kind of, I guess”

“Do you know what part?”

“Adrian, I blurted out.” Then I remembered, “A Mr. Krantz, asked me to come in.”

Those two names turned her around. She immediately changed her tone and body language. Adrian (?) was the 3rd starring role in this play. And I got the immediate respect and attention, as if I were a big star.

“Oh, I’ve been expecting you. Have you been shown to your room?”

“No, I have kind of been wandering around.” I was now playing it like a big country bumpkin for some reason.

Then suddenly I knew why I was there. I remember saying in my dream, “I guess I am the ‘ingénu’.” And I also remember, as soon as I said it, saying to myself, “a 50 year old ingénu, can you believe it.” (I just looked up in the dictionary what I thought was spelled Angeniux or some French derivation, and found it to mean, and I swear I didn’t know this, “2. naive character in drama”)

She picked up the phone and announced, “He’s here. Yes, I will.” She hung up and said, “Right this way, the director, the producer and the choreographer will meet you in your room.”

I walked up more stairs and had the following thoughts, I am out of shape, I’ll have to get my boss to give me enough of time off from my job so I can do this, but this is big, it’s worth it, I got a lot of catching up to do. I am sure the dance captain will assess my limited abilities and help me not make a fool of myself. In two or three weeks, I’ll bet I’ll be thinner and in good shape. I’ll eat good and stick to it.

Now again, this is the dream I just had, this dialogue actually happened in it. I am not embellishing it. I do find it troubling that in my dream I was so vain.  Anyone who knows me will tell you, I think, I hope, that my appearance, fashion sense and caring about those things is never evident outside of a wedding reception or business presentation.

Around this point in the dream I awoke. I lay there in a state of warmth, in a wonderful peace. The dream actually must have made me smile.  But the narrative kept going. (Now, did I really wake up, or was I still dreaming that I was now dreaming that I was thinking about it after waking up?) Anyway here are the last thoughts, the kind of climax to my dream, the back story if you will: I was chatting with someone in a Sardi’s styled restaurant the night before, we hit it off pretty good and were laughing and topping one another’s jokes. At some point he handed me his card and asked me to come here today.  He was the producer of this play. He wanted me to play a role I was born to play.  You see, the whole idea of this play was that there was a regular guy in it. Someone who spoke to the audience. He was trapped in a Broadway play. He had lines like, and this would be before a big number, “No, no don’t start singing… no, no more singing again.” He was a character, unbeknownst to me, previously played by the likes of Matthew Broderick, who I was replacing.  An everyman who is trapped in a Broadway musical.

In a fit of inspired casting, they decided to try a real person. Someone with absolutely no talent, to play someone with absolutely no talent whose idea of hell is Broadway!

I even had a line in the play that said, “Hey, there’s Tom Hanks!”

Then I really woke up.  I was still in love with my dream. It was a rare dream, in that it had a beginning, middle and end. It was totally wrapped up. Very rare. I immediately tried to remember what I ate last night, and how late I ate it. I never had such a congruent dream. So much in fact, that I wrote this even before eating or the other thing you do as soon as you get up. So much in fact that right now, some 57 minutes after I got out of bed this morning and turned on this computer, I am thinking about synopsizing it and showing it to a friend who is a show runner for one of the big Broadway production companies. It could work? Especially if they don’t cast me and we can talk Tom hanks into playing himself.  (…Why Tom Hanks?)

Tom Avitabile
http://tomavitabile.com/
tom@spadvertising.com

Elements of Literary Style… for Dummies

Somebody once gave me as a gift, a book on the Elements of Style. I assumed it wasn’t as a prescriptive, in that they thought my worked lacked it, but more because it was a simple solution to the problem, “What do we get Tom for his birthday? To which the answer was probably right in front of them in a bookstore, “Oh, here’s something about writing, he does that… and it’s only $14.95!”

I approached the book with appropriate interest and anticipation of what secrets to trade craft lay between its covers.  To my dismay it turned out to be a “slog”.  It read as a lengthy, dry, dissertation that was droll and lacked any dynamism to motivate me to turn to the next page.

It angered me.  After all, isn’t the whole issue of ‘style’ a concept emanating from the good side of the literary arts? Isn’t it a positive entity, one that enhances the reader’s experience? Yet, here the author (lecturer, in the most gruesome sense) felt no compassion, compulsion or responsibility to his reader/student to try to utilize any style in his presentation, no attempt to do the hard work it would entail to romance his presentation, add challenge or wonder to the litany of the very style he was attempting to impart. Not even a jocular quote on style from GBS, if he ever said one. Nothing… flat line.

Readability, if I may forge the term, is an index of many factors, one of them being  ‘style’, that becomes the connective tissue of a story, indeed the sinewy strands of communicating neurons that allow the mind to flow with the story, a current that unconsciously holds the reader magnetized to the track the author wants to lead them down. Not so much for this book.

Indeed this was a book that one had to be assigned to read out of fear of flunking the course.  Then it hit me, Textbook! A book whose sole ingredient, to the exclusion of all else is, text! – Without subtext, context, pretext or super-text. (See my short blog; Writing Tip # 4 Text Appeal)

Yes, I know, many of you would argue, “The one place you don’t want style is in the elaboration and illumination of style as not to obfuscate or diffuse the examples.”  And you would most likely be correct, but it didn’t work for me, I had to put it down, I never read it, couldn’t read it and couldn’t force read it, so I left it on the shelf.

Which by now, as you probably realized, is self-evident by the lack of style (whatever that is?) by which I wrote this blog!

To Err Is Human

“To Err is human, to really screw things up takes a computer.”
–General James Hardtack – USAF

If you don’t recognize the above quote, or can’t Google it, don’t hit your computer on the side of the monitor, it’s from a character in one of my (many) almost-produced screenplays. But once again, the theme of this blog being, It’s Only Fiction ‘Til It Happens, is in full force with this tasty headline from the DenverPost.com, “Supercomputers could generate warnings for stock crashes.”

Feel better now? Now that supercomputers are on the watch? Well, not to pop your thought bubble but in my book, The Eighth Day, the entire Stock Market is locked up and frozen by a piece of freeware, distributed to all the online day traders.

The shareware application was called ‘Pocket Protector’; it protected the money in your pocket, your stocks, actually.  It employed algorithms originally used in terrain avoidance software for supersonic F-22 Raptor fighter jets. It read the market and countered any moves instantly by making minute or major buy or sell decisions faster than a blink of a human eye.

Its purported goal was to avoid having your portfolio crash by maintaining the value. Since everybody downloaded it and put it into play, all those little ‘trade-bots’ would eventually absorb any shock and flatten out any activity until a balance is achieved. At that point, the individual trader has a problem, because the Artificial Intelligence acts like a Rottweiler, whose jaws are locked on their wallet. As soon as they let go or try to trade anything, the investor would lose everything.

So nobody unplugged ‘Pocket Protector’ out of fear of losing all their assets as everybody else’s apps would gobble up their money in a nanosecond.

Now for the part that isn’t a plot in my book, but the Denver Post article: Enter Edison, a supercomputer that can crunch 2 quadrillion operations a second. That’s 2,000,000,000,000,000! The feds, or somebody, are planning to plug this super puppy into the existing stock trading system and it will act as an early warning system that somehow will allow authorities to shut down the system before the various stock trading computer programs, that now rule the roost, do any real damage.  What could possibly go wrong? See CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: “Best Intentions” in The Eighth Day!

Digital Deputies

In 2008, when terrorists attacked the hotels in Mumbai, technology was working for them and against the authorities. Those cretins had accomplices on the outside who used cell phones, video cameras and other tech to tell the bad guys, who were inside the hotel, where the cops were and what they were doing on the outside. This ‘real time intel’ allowed the killers more time to kill innocent people and thwart the efforts of authorities to mount a counter-attack. The terrorists could preemptively strike at places the observers on the outside told them the police were amassing. They could move away from places in the hotel where police were entering. 

Last week in Boston, technology came over to our side. Citizens became the observers; crowd sourcing became the new law enforcement tool.  Smart phones became the anti-terror weapon.  The net effect was the people of Boston became Digital Deputies. 

From a psychological perspective, no act of terror can now be contemplated without this new phalanx of smart eyes and smart ears, in the hands of the digitally deputized public, entering into the terrorist’s calculus.  I hope that’s enough to tell these would-be murderers to go somewhere else, or better yet, forget doing anything at all.

We cherish our freedoms; our nation and the American culture founded around them and we have prospered by holding them above all else as sacrosanct.  Running a marathon, attending a sporting event, or celebrating a holiday by parade or public gathering are basic expressions of those freedoms. Sadly, these events are also a magnet to those who would choose to make a political statement by committing violence.  This time, as President Obama said, “they picked the wrong city.” The resilience and spirit of ‘Boston Strong’ proves that the terrorists not only picked the wrong city but the wrong country as well.   

If you can, you can support the victims of the bombing, I found and donated to, The One Boston Fund, which helps the people most affected by the tragic events that occurred in Boston on April 15, 2013.

Plan B From My Inner Space!

Backstory: In the 60’s, the powerhouse Top 40 music station in New York City, and most of the east coast, was 77 WABC. Although its studios were on 6th avenue in New York City, its transmitter ‘shack’ was knee deep in a swamp in the Jersey Meadowlands. The highest power transmitter allowed by law, 50,000 watts, created an RF electrical field so powerful that “fluorescent lights” in the shack never went off, they were always on, even if unplugged, they just glowed naturally from the intense power in the air. However, the balanced AAA class phone lines that connected the studios to the shack, were the weak link in the chain. So off in the corner, sat a solitary tape machine with two giant 10-inch metal reels loaded and waiting for somebody to push “Play”

On that tape was the incomparable Dan Ingram playing records and talking them up just like always, except from time to time he’d say, “If you are hearing me now it means we were almost off the air.” It was a Standby Tape, ready to fill the airwaves until the problem was fixed.

Here now, for similar reasons, let’s delve into for lack of a better word “authoring.”

I hate writing. I’ve always hated it. Always tried to avoid it. Looked for ways to escape it. A root canal was always a more appealing option than writing. So naturally I became an author.

Here’s the secret: I still hate writing. But I love authoring. Authoring is a multifaceted discipline of which the actual act of writing is a vehicle to achieve the end. To me an author is the strategic planner, the visionary, the god of the universe the he invents. Writing on the other hand is tactical, trapped within the lines the author has proscribed. Writing is the last part of my authoring process. In fact, I talk a story to death, long before I write it. I see the situations long before I type Chapter One. I feel the character’s loves, hates, desires and fears long before I commit them to words. In fact, I once went at a story like a buzz saw. Zipping out page after page, fueled by an incipient scene and a few fragments of dialog. I was going to beat the band.

But then the Author had a problem. I went too fast, went tactical too early. I ran out of motivation. My motivation, once I encapsulated the dynamics of the story that had fueled me, was out and now committed to prose, I stopped.

Couldn’t write. Didn’t want to.
Found every excuse not to. Then it hit me. My writer stopped because my author didn’t fully create the story. Without authoring there could be no writing. So there you have it, the dilithium crystal (Star Trek reference) of my impulse-writing engine revealed. Ultimately my books may be good or they may suck, that is in the opinion of the reader and beyond my control, but my process is always hot, energetic, sexy, breathless and satisfying… as long as that f**king author (or I should say king author…me) does his job first!

AutoSynopsis Deficiency Syndrome

I create, write, pitch, produce and direct ads for a living. It pays for my writing. Everyday, my whole universe is usually 75 words or 30 seconds. Someone spends millions on a company, idea, product or service, and turns to me to sell it in 75 words or less. So when I am asked to do a two page synopsis of my 106,000 word thriller, The God Particle, you would think, “Easy. Do it all day long. A snap!”

Well, three attempts later, and what I have created is a shorter book, 70 pages. Next it was a 10-page rambling, confusing essay on something based on my book and finally…a two-page ‘treatment’ that, unfortunately, reads like it was written on a roller coaster with a fountain pen.

So I got nothing. The ability to encapsulate the work of others is my bread and butter, but the ability to do my own is a crap sandwich.  I do not have the ability to perform autosynopsis. I am too close to the work. I know and birthed every one of the 106 thousand words. I know how interconnected and woven into the fabric of the story they are. As I try to summarize one thread, it leads to another, which, at this point in the garment I have sewn, is equally important. So off I go, pulling on that thread. Do that 10 or 20 times and you get to a short, crisp 70 pages without even approaching the climax.

But wait, a synopsis is not a legal contract, nor is it regulated by any federal law. And really isn’t the job of a short version of your book to sell the mother lode? So why not be more dramatic? Leave out the connectors; hit the big points, the flashy and the showy. Wow, I got it. The Synopsis isn’t the book, it’s a road map of the book. Great, with that kind of thinking…wait, that went nowhere. (50 pages of maps)

Okay, I got it, what does it matter? I mean, lets say I write the following synopsis.

Boy meets girl they have sex, more sex, good sex, then bad sex, somebody gets killed, the other wrongly accused, then the dead one reappears, they have sex again, get married, live happily ever after (or words to that effect).

The agent, publisher or reviewer reads it and the document does its job, and gets them to read the book. Which of course is nothing like the synopsis, except what I just outlined is the plot of a book one of the characters is reading in my book. But they like the whole book.  Who’s going to bitch? Which publishing professional is going to say, “Hey, you know, you turned the tables on us, like we do with practically every cover where we put a sexy girl, a gun or the American flag, to lure the reader, but once they buy the book, we’ve succeeded, nice job doing that to us. “

Eventually I solved the problem of not having been born with the synapses in my brain to perform autosynopsis. I hired a pro to do it.

Tom Avitabile
http://tomavitabile.com/
tom@spadvertising.com

I’ve become that guy!

Last night, at a social function, I turned into that guy. I used to joke about being a “Hyphenate”, that is, a writer-producer-director-a**hole! Last night, I crossed the ‘rude-icon.’

Pontificating is best left to pontiffs, bloviating to the bloviators and pedantics to the, um, well,… the pedanta-philes, I guess. But there is no way in H-E-double hockey sticks, that I should have simultaneously, berated and regaled my dear friends with my extremely tedious treatise on the vicissitudes of the authoring process. Like a bowler leaning his body to karmically get the ball to curve into the 7-10 split, I bent the vernacular, twisted the point and generally put “the spin” on my English.

God! Look at what I just wrote, above!

Who am I? Who is this person I’ve become? I have a case of mothball smelling, patches on the sleeve, utteration-laden, over dramatic profundities capable, boring, old Professor’s Syndrome.

Yuck! Me? I used to be soooo cool. Now, I am a walking, comedic character from a ‘coming of age’ college kid movie spewing dialog lines like; “Er… not really!” an ambushing, “However, in reality…” a ticking, “Well, here’s an interesting fact.”. I hope I get over myself in time for my next blog.

Wait, ‘utteration’ isn’t even a word! See what I mean!

Writing by the numbers

Okay, I know I should know this, I know I know the answer.  Still, I am just trapped.  I am trapped at 65,000 words –and I have opened up every contraction I can find!  But still, I am well under the commonly accepted, off the cuff answer to how long a novel should be – 80,000 words*

The * means this is the most averaged answer I get.   Enter Voltaire, who famously wrote an apology to some king, sometime long ago, when the cutting edge of writing was the feather quill processor, this preamble to his letter has guided me in writing ever since I heard it.  He said, and I am paraphrasing, “Please excuse the length of this letter, I did not have time to write a shorter one.”

The literary lesson I derived from that is the value of the economy of words is hard won, using less words takes longer to write, especially if you hold the standard of not sacrificing the quality.  Now I know that Creative Writing 101 is not about efficient communication, but art. But what if economy is art of a kind. What if seven pages of didactic description, although certainly one way to write, and if done well, holds the reader at the interest point, isn’t the only way to accomplish the same literary effect, what if it can be done in one page? Or one paragraph?  Does the word/page count diminish its value or story value.

Here the movie Mozart enters the discussion. Specifically the scene where the Emperor, having reviewed Mozart’s score for an opera he was looking for royal approval of, indicates his dislike of the work because, “It has too many notes!”

Mozart says in his defense, there are neither too many or too little notes but just the right amount.”

So even a ‘hack’ like Mozart was held to some kind of word/note count scrutiny.  So maybe I’m in good company.  But then sleep beckons, but is never attained as I toss and turn wrestling with the question, is the story perfect, as it is in 65,000 words, or is it not a big enough story to be a book? Maybe a story that can spew 80 – 100 thousand words without thinking, without spending too much time with Voltaire’s quill, is the desirable “throw weight” for a manuscript. Anything less is seen as just  not having gravitas by the Emperors that be.

Believe me, I know writing is hard, and requires a certain kind of courage, faith and discipline.  I have written books that landed at the right word count, some even needed editing down prior to publishing. It is not the work of expanding or adding scenes, characters, narrative or exposition that is the issue here. I spend just as much time writing a short 65,000 as I would a 90,000 piece. I just don’t know if this current work needs the extra ink.

By the way, typing these lines makes this blog exactly 500 words long.