Writing about writing

With the play over, and the next chapter of the life of Tedwords finally under way, one of things I've been determined to do is to focus more on my writing. This week, I made great progress in editing my Late Night manuscript, which my agent had asked me to update back in January. this week, I edited 200 pages, and the good news is, the technology didn't need to be updated half as much as I was fearing.

I have plans on where to go with Late Night, but possibly that's better left unsaid. Let's just say I have a rough outline of what I'd like to do with my life, and leave it at that.

In the meantime, one other writing goal was to spend more time writing letters. Yes, writing. My friend fixnwrtr has been maintaining a steady correspondence with me for over a year now, but during the course of directing the play, that correspondence became entirely one-sided.

In fact, I have to confess, by the time the play was over, I had a small stack of letters from her, unopened. They would stare at me at nights, making me feel guilty.

One of the first things I did after the play ended was to go through them, one after the other. And then, I made it a point to actually write to her in response. In the past month, I've managed to send out three letters. Actual letters, too, with actual pages attached.

I have to admit, when I first started, my letter writing skills were nothing to (pardon the pun) write home about. My handwriting had deteriorated terribly through the years, through disuse. I mean, who actually writes any more? Aside for the first drafts of my manuscripts (and let's face it, there haven't been any of those in a few years) and a few attempts at morning journaling, not this guy.

As a result, my first few letters were cramped, messy. I can only imagine poor J. trying to struggle through them. I have a weird enough handwriting style as it is, a helpless hodgepodge of lower case mixed with upper case. Throw in sloppiness as a result of disuse and it's a wonder poor J. didn't just rip them up and scatter them to the winds.

I've been seeing progress. The letter that I just finished was actually legible, I think. The letters were large, the o's and the g's perfectly formed (for the most part.) I even attempted my favorite signature at the end of my letter, along with a tiny Ted cartoon.

The truth is, letter writing feels good. Like journaling, but in a different way. It's different than electronic journaling (like Live Journal) because it's all by hand, and that feels more personal, for some reason. It's different than personal journals because it's not simply one sided, which has been one of the problems with personal journals I've had over the years. I don't WANT to just write stories to myself. I want other people to read them, comment upon them. I like the two-way discourse (even if I'm not always so great on keeping up my side of the conversation.)

And I like the process of letter writing. The smell of the ink. The feel of the pen in the hand, The struggle to fill the page, the process of addressing a letter. Yes, even the licking of stamp. Definitely the satisfying feeling of placing the letter in the mailbox. It's like sex, only it lingers longer.

What I do find, however, is that life only hands you so much time, and it's hard to keep up with everything. Between editing the book, letter writing, Facebook, Live Journal, Blogspot, not to mention email, there are just too many ways to communicate these days. Forget Twitter. Something has to give, and I find Twitter to be way too limiting. The only time I actually use it is to promote a story, if I feel I have a good one worth telling. That hasn't happened in a month or so, frankly.

Am I the only one who feels that there's too much of a good thing out there? How do other people do it? When I'm at work, I find it practically impossible to keep up with everything.

Maybe my retirement from theater will help things. At least, that's one of the goals. In the meantime, I'm just grateful that this week has given me some ability to feel a bit more organized...at least, on the writing side of things.

Open wide.

So, for some reason, I've been thinking about writing erotic fiction. Just to clear the palette, after the perfectly innocent little play I directed.  
I know, I know, I REALLY need to work on rewriting one of my YA novels, at my agent's request. And I know, too, that one could not possibly write YA if one has published a dirty book or two. At least, under the same name. Even so. The hunger exits, like a demon in my soul.

I once tried to write a sex book, and had a blast doing it. It was called "Ready, Willing, and Horny as Hell." I blew through two chapters before I decided to call it quits. I based the protagonist on my friend Mary-Beth, who at that time was attending a Catholic university. I re-christened her Maria Batista, an innocent freshman schoolgirl attending stately Santa Emmanuel college. In the first chapter, she was an innocent virgin whose sexuality curiosity is awakened by the amorous advances a kindly old football coach.

Keep in mind, this was many years before Jerry Sandusky.

In the second chapter, having discovered her passionate love of the loin, she decides to return the favor by having a foursome with three college boys she encounters in one of the school bathrooms.

That was about as far as I went. I handed the chapters to my friend Mary-Beth, we had some fun reading through it, and then I put it away with all my other writings, where it has never been seen again.

It was fun, but perhaps there's another approach. That book was pure porn, after all. Perhaps I could rework things, and take out some of the porn, to make it somewhat respectable. Something a housewife could be seen reading after the kids go off to school. Perhaps I could model my erotic fiction after the currently popular series "Fifty Shades of Gray."

I'm thinking of calling MY version of Fifty Shades of Gray "The Summer of 69." Get it? It's a double entendre. Snort, guffaw. It's both a Brian Adams song (without the comma) and also, the entire point of the book.

Well! The entire point, with a twist. You see, in my book...the Summer of 69, available soon at a book store near you, my heroine...

(or, hero, I'm not sure which.)

Oh, hell, I'll make it a heroine. There's more money in straight sex. Right?

Anyway, in MY book...The Summer of 69, available soon at a book store near you...well, if book stores still exist in a year or two...my heroine decides not only to embark upon a summer of mutual oral satisfaction...BUT decides she wants to take 69 lovers, too, before the summer is over. Get it? So, the title has THREE meanings...it's kind of like a dirty version of 300. Except 231 less!

I would write 69 short little chapters, too. 69 happy endings. Or maybe not...I'm thinking I might actually give it a little plot, and make my girl race against the end of summer to meet her goal. Maybe she's only at 13 when the end of August arrives, and she has to end the whole thing in an orgy with a football team. Just like Maria Batista.

And if you like that...that is, if my naughty Summer of 69 book gains some word of mouth....well, who knows what would come next?

I could set off a national craze. Whole flocks of people would set upon creating their own summer of 69, inspired by my work. Frauleins, postal clerks, rabbinical students, lobster men. In the gay world, of course, the whole book could be re-enacted in just one afternoon.

Oh!  And that's only the beginning, of course. Then there are the SEQUELS!

That's right, sequels.

Just wait until you read my version of the 700 Club.

On the death of bookstores and the future of things.

There you go. The end of an era: the demise of the super-bookstore.

Sunday afternoon, Ashes and I stopped by our local Borders to see what was there to be had. She snagged a ton of YA, I stuck with feeding my passion for Twain and picked up copies of Life on the Mississippi and Huck Finn. God, I love that man.

In my heart of hearts, I have this strange hope that the demise of the huge bookstores will bring things full circle, and usher in a return to small local bookstores. Certainly, my quasi-city could use one: with Borders closed, I can't think of a bookstore in the vicinity. A small local bookstore would be nice, I think. Maybe keep a little online business going on the side. Hey, maybe it can't make BIG HUGE PROFITS...but guess what? Evidently, neither could Borders.

However, I know, in my mind of minds, that such a thing is not going to happen. As much as I would like the demise of big business to signal the resurgance of small business, I know that what it really signals is the inevitable ascendancy of virtual business. The local bookstore housed within your computer, on your Kindle. No need to go out, interact with people, drive your car. You can take care of everything from your bedroom, with your slippers on (never mind that because everything is virtual, and there's less need for, oh, American employees, those slippers are pretty ratty, because you can't afford to buy new ones).

Such is the way our world is headed. Someday soon, most necessities will be purchased without leaving our home, which is okay, because our job will be in our home, too. Already, I suspect that a good percentage of us who have jobs could possibly conduct most of our work out of our homes, if we needed to. The only real jobs for most of the population outside of the home will be in fast food, medical, warehouse storage, and delivery. To save money, the government will establish virtual classrooms to teach our children. Our entertainment will be fed to us through our large screen televisions. The only reason any of us will need any sort of outside business is to buy fast food and to pump gas to visit non-virtual friends. And, for those who can afford it, expensive vacation resorts, like Disney. Oh, and attorneys will survive, too.

And also, what will happen to all of these empty monster stores? I thought they were stupid and useless when they were first being erected everywhere, but now I wonder, what's going to happen to all of them, eventually?

Maybe they can be torn down, to make way for large family homes or rental units. In a virtual world, jobs will be increasingly hard to find, as only the truly technically savvy will have jobs that pay anything worth a damn. To make due, the size of the nuclear family structure will have to increase, as only two or three will have jobs that pay much, and the community that used to be our work community will revert back to the family structures we used to see hundreds of years ago (only perhaps larger and older, since we are living longer, now). Also, it won't be two parents, ten kids, but a broader, more diverse assemblage--two or three kids, one parent, an aunt or brother, grandparents.

Okay, well that's just plain depressing. Can you see why a return to the small local bookstore is what my heart is hoping for? The other possibility doesn't seem like a very pleasant existance at all. I'll take a return to normalcy, thank you.

True Confessions: My Secret Life as a Rock Star

This Christmas, my mom's receiving a special gift: a blast from her past.

For the past three years, she's been asking me to go through my record collection (yes, I actually still do have a couple of boxes filled with THOSE), in order to return to her a record that I lifted many years ago. Of course, at that time, my parents had tossed their record player and didn't think they'd be able to ever use them. But now, thanks to the wonders of retro-technology, what's old is new again.

What she wanted is a comedy album called "The First Family," which was wildly popular when John F. Kennedy first was elected into office. From what I understand, it sold like crazy during the Camelot years, but then sales understandably plummeted upon JFK's assassination. Vaughn Meader, the man who created the album, suddenly found himself without a career, and spent the rest of his life trying to find a new voice.

Now, I'm a good boy, I am, and I really do want to help mum out. The only problem is, I left all of my record albums at Josie's house, where they've been gathering dust in her basement (well, as much dust as objects sealed up in a plastic container can gather, I guess). One thing I can tell you about separating from someone, even if you still see that person every day...which I pretty much do...it's hard to find time to grab things from their basement, once you're gone. I still have boxes of stuff that haven't been touched in eight years.

Last week-end on Halloween, Josie asked Corb to go downstairs and find a rubber mask for Theo to wear for trick or treating. This was the moment. I followed along, intent on picking up my mum's album, along with maybe a few other choice memories that have been rotting away like fermented grapes in her cellar.

So, the First Family's back in my hands. While I was down in Josie's cellar, I also picked up one of my boxes, too, a small one that had scribbled upon it "IMPORTANT Stuff."

So, I went through that box last night. I have to tell you, I'm not really sure what was so IMPORTANT about it. Mostly, it was some work stuff and an old play that I produced in my twenties. A few letters, one of which was really sad, from a friend who was in pretty dire straights and just wanted to hear from me (note to self: did I ever write back?) An enormous bra, placed in a picture frame, which had been a gift from a friend. Drawings, mostly cartoons, of very busty women. I was a regular Matisse, back then.

Oh, and one other thing. I think this box actually contains further evidence of my own insanity.

Or at least, of a frustrated creative soul.

See, back in my early twenties, after a bad experience in college, I kind of turned my back on writing for a while. It was a foolish decision, and it would have been a better idea to simply suck it up and climb back on to the saddle (and find a better college for grad school), but instead, I sulked, found a day job, and fell in love with Josie. You'd be amazed how working nine-to-five and getting involved with a woman with a small baby can take your mind off of writing.

Even so, I guess there was a part of me that didn't abandon things completely, as what was inside the box demonstrated.

At the time, I was working at this really crummy job in a building that had once been a seventies disco and still had green shag carpeting on its walls. I've mentioned thhis job before: my boss was the guy who broke the first of the Catholic church altar boy sex scandals (I have the People magazine article in the box to prove it). Course, I didn't know that back then. I just knew that it wasn't really a happy place to work, and the office manager liked to make our lives a living hell by placing signs all over the place, things like "Do not leave URINE DROPS on the toilet" in the men's room.

I'd do my job, which basically involved collecting money from insurance companies, and pass the time away by feeding my inner fantasy life. That's what I discovered in my IMPORTANT box.

What I found inside were about fifty little square sheets of paper, all shoved into a folder. These little squares were album covers. Just like the one of The First Family, only, not real.

They told the story of Teddy Two-Tone, my rock star alter ego. Each square was an album that Teddy Two-Tone had either put out or produced, with a drawing of the cover, its highest ranking chart position, the songs on the album, and a few notes about how well it did.

Teddy Two-Tone started his career as part of The Delphonics, a group signed to Grappling Bull Records. He then put out his self-titled debut album, featuring the hit single "Standing on the sidewalk in love with my own reflection" (which I'm absolutely certain would have been a HUGE hit, with that HUGE title). Many, many albums followed, from the trippy "More than Just a White Room" to "Hot-cha," "the most embarrassing Two-Tone album of all time!" Oh, along the way, he recorded a series of duets with Phillie Dixon, a pop singer with a serious drug habit, and produced a disastrous series of albums by an African-American woman named Nana, who broke away from him and released an album proclaiming her newfound independence, called "Free at Last, Free at Last, Lord I'm Free at Last!"



His last album, as an elder rock statesman, was called "The Grey Years," and featured the song "Playful in my Eccentricity."

In addition to creating the album covers, I also found time to make up interviews with various folks who figured prominently in the Teddy Two-Tone universe, such as this excerpt from an interview with Phillie Dixon that allegedly appeared in Rolling Stone:

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember "Breaking Hearts"? (Her last album with Teddie)
PHILLIE: (Wincing) Yes.
INTERVIEWER: What do you remember?
PHILLIE: A hell of a lot of pain. I didn't treat Ted right on that one. He practically handed me my success on a silver platter and I turned around and said 'Fuck you' to him, then 'Fuck you' to my fans, and then 'Fuck you' to myself. And here we are.
INTERVIEWER: You only recorded one track for that album, right?
PHILLIE: Right. "We'll Meet Again."
INTERVIEWER: What happened?
PHILLIE: We were in the middle of our first live tour. Ted started to get angry about my drug habit. I started coming late to performances, then skipping out altogether. He started bitching and I just decided that it was all bullshit, recorded just enough for Breaking Hearts to get the record company off my back, and broke with Ted completely. (Laughs) Not so completely. Thank God he agreed to do "Only You and Me."
INTERVIEWER: Was it hard...to get him to agree?
PHILLIE: What do you think?

Poor, poor Phillie. And poor Teddy Two-Tone. How ungrateful of her.

Phillie did record one song that I actually took the time to create. It still jingles around in my head, some times. It was a song called "It Takes Time," and was kind of a song that Cher would have sung in the eighties, around the time she was producing songs like "Love and Understanding." It went like this: "It takes time/Lots of Time/It Takes Time to See it Through/It Takes Time/So Much Time/So I'll Keep Spending that Time With You."

Good thing I kept my day job, huh?

After I left that job, and moved to a job that challenged me a little more, the album covers abruptly stopped, and Teddy Two-Tone's career in music was over.

I also found my voice, slowly but surely, and found more constructive ways to channel my creativity. I think that helped. Certainly, I haven't created any album covers since that time.

Still, they're kind of fun to look back on, and I can't see myself throwing the covers away any time soon. They may not be as IMPORTANT as they once were (I don't think they ever were, really), but it is nice to look back upon my days as a rock star. Maybe there's a little bit of Teddy Two-Tone inside me, even now. And when you get right down to it, we all need our rock star moments, don't we?

Cold Storage

Last week-end, Corb and I cleared out all the stuff we had in our storage unit and drove everything up to Plymouth for safekeeping at my parent's house. It'll save us about eighty bucks a month.

I'm kind of sad about it. Every time I would go visit our creepy unit, I'd feel a delicious chill down my spine.

These places store secrets, after all.

I mean, you really don't know what's actually in the storage unit next to yours. It could be anything: the bones of Amelia Earhart, Al Capone's lost loot...even Cher's original face. Now, I'm sure that the units get checked periodically, but even so...who really knows what lurks in the heart of a storage unit? It could be an actual heart.

I absolutely refused to go to our unit without Corb there by my side. Even though I knew I was perfectly safe, the place seemed so empty. Large. Metal. Concrete. Cold. It felt whispery.

The people that we'd encounter, loading stuff into their units, always made me feel uncomfortable. Like a goose walking on my grave. Their cars looked strange, the looks they'd give me seemed odd. As if they were thinking sinister thoughts. I'm sure they're perfectly fine folk, the same as we are, but even so, going there alone...well, it would have made me uncomfortable. I could have ended up dismembered, or locked inside my unit with no way out.

And to think, people actually live in these places! That fact freaks me out most of all. From what Corb told me, the manager of our facility lives on site, to make sure nothing happens at night.

I can't imagine having a job like that. Our manager has a unit over the office, says Corb, and her living space is quite nice. Still, can you imagine hearing a sound in the middle of the night? Having to go investigate, all alone?

I tell you, I wouldn't last one night.

So, given all that, why does it make me sad to leave our little storage area from hell?

I don't know. I guess there's something fun about locations that give you the creeps. Haunted houses. Liza Minelli's toilet. The inside of John McCain's mouth.

I'm honestly thinking my next book might take place in a storage facility. I've got a few ideas I've been kicking around. Something involving dark magic.

As prep for the book, I had honestly been toying with facing my fear, too. Driving over to the storage unit one day and removing the lock. Rolling up the metal door and pulling out a plastic lawn chair from the pile. Placing it on the cold concrete floor. Sitting down and asking Corb to shut the door and lock it. Handing him my cell phone. Asking him to come back in an hour, just to see whether I could stand it.

There I'd be, trapped like prime rib in a meat locker. Like a sardine in a tin. Like O.J. in a maximum security facility.

What would it feel like? What sounds would I hear? Could I trust Corb enough to hand over my cell phone? What if he decided to forget about me there? Or, got into an accident before he got around to go getting?

What if I had to figure out a way to escape, on my own? What would I do? How long before hunger set in?

What would an hour feel like in there? What if I had to last the night?

How long before hope would fade?

Now I can't do that, and I guess maybe that's for the best. I've got enough hang-ups as it is. Maybe I don't need to add one more to my laundry list. It's long enough.

So I guess I'll wait, at least until I start working on that next book.

When that day comes, anyone have a storage unit I could borrow for an hour or two? I promise not to scream TOO loudly.