This isn't actually part of the story, it's just a sort of explanation and a very preliminary outline. I have found that it's a bit more difficult to write fiction than it is to write essays. When I do expository writing - like now for instance - the material is generated in real time, as fast as I can get my clumsy, fat fingers to type it. Rarely, if ever, do I do any kind of editing at all.
Now, however, I find that fiction is another story (oops) altogether. I type for four hours solid, and when I stop to read what is done, it takes less than five minutes to do so, and I see that there exists a need for massive rewrites. For now, the material shall go into the manuscript as it comes to me, to be rearranged later. I started writing this story in the first person because I found it much easier to describe actions as though they were happening to me and around me, rather than if I were watching them happen to strangers. The narrator is not this writer (but he is very loosely based on someone I knew as a teenager), and is actually a fairly minor player in the story. Eventually, I'll change the perspective to third person limited.
It's a bit frustrating that so many details need to be explained. For instance, I hadn't planned to discuss weight training at all, but I found it was necessary, in order to give the reader an insight into the narrator's priorities. Incidents I only wanted to mention in passing take more copy to explain than the things that I think are important, and they still need more explanation before the picture clears to the degree I feel necessary.
What else? Lines of asterisks indicate that I plan to come back to that point and write some transition material. So far, the most important character is Marie, and I have written practically nothing about her. Lars is a compound character and will probably be broken up, his antics distributed amongst three or four other characters. The story he tells about astrology is probably not going to survive, and was only put in because I wanted to experiment with nested quotes. I have done some exposition by way of anecdotes related by characters; this will be fixed in later revisions - it is a technique that I detest in other peoples' work and I shall not burden my readers with it . . . but . . . It's possible that my feelings on that subject may change . . .
I anticipate the final work running about sixty thousand words - a short novel, and I think that if I actually work on it, I could have a reasonably complete first draft manuscript done in about a year. I sometimes find myself waking, turning on my machine, adding a phrase or removing a word, then going back to sleep. The conversations seem flat to me, the lack of detail stark and bleak; there's a lot of work ahead, a lot of polishing is still needed. I wrote a couple of thousand words in the present tense, but it proved too difficult for me to keep everything straight, so I went through and changed all the verbs in that section to the simple past. Perhaps as my confidence grows, I will attempt a shorter piece in the present tense; for now, I've come to realize that reading such material for an extended time is wearying to the reader - and can be as unnatural as those very few pieces that are written in the second person (Silverberg's Sundance comes to mind), or the horrible, jarring cinematic technique that has the actors talking to the camera as though the viewer were part of the story - not like Alfie or even Marat Sade where the audience is still just watching. . . the only example I can think of was a low budget view-alike of Deliverance, the name of which I cannot now recall - and that part lasted less than ten minutes.
Oh yeah, what is the story? It is basically a love story slash oddysey about a personality that suffers from multiple-body disorder. A character (or characters) find him(her? them?)self rather loosely connected to the flesh, and relatively unpierced by the arrow of time. Sometimes, he looks in someone else's eyes and sees himself looking back at himself looking . . . and so on into a hall of mirrors. He goes into a restaurant in Vancouver in the autumn of 1992, and after he dines, he comes back outside to find that he is now in Ensenada in the summer of 1967, two inches taller, four years older, and with a different perspective on life. Most of the time he doesn't notice the changes. Only very gradually does he come to realize that his life is not of standard issue. To some degree, we are all the protagonist. The idea also arises that there are those among us who have facilities that allow them to cause others to see, hear, and experience events out of order, and to live through times that never actually took place. This they may do intentionally, or it may simply be a side effect of their proximity.
I haven't gotten to that yet. For now, the narrator toggles back and forth between the late eighties in Redondo Beach and the middle seventies in San Diego. People that he is sure he has seen together never actually meet. In fact, Lars is dead by the time Marie appears, yet they mention each other as though they were acquainted. Doc and Geertje talk about each other, and they are separated by twenty five years and two thousand miles. Characters relate the memories of events that happened to others. There is very little that is sad here. Even though two people die - one of them violently - the mood that comes about is not one of tragedy, rather it is one of bewilderment, with a dollop of frustration (especially on the part of those no longer encumbered by the flesh). No one intentionally - or directly - causes the death of anyone else -at least not permanently; no one is raped or otherwise physically abused in a way that is not completely consensual. There is some of the high-spirited, mindless violence of young men suffering from an excess of testosterone - but not too much. Some of the story might even be funny.
Traces of my inspiration can be found in The Person from Porlock, Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, Tiptree's "Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket," Steinbeck's Cup of Gold, Lafferty's Fourth Mansions, Farmer's Traitor to the Living, practically any work of Philip K. Dick, Silverberg's Up the Line, Heinlein's "All You Zombies," Gerrold's The Man Who Folded Himself, Bester's "5,271,009" (also published as "The Starcomber"), Sturgeon's "Brown Shoes," Haldeman's Mindbridge and "Summer's Lease," Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series among others of which the titles and authors now elude me. . . . .
Is any of this based on real people? Well, I did know a
French Canadian woman with green eyes that had irises that were crowded with streaks of shiny silver, but they had no motion in
them, and she was of an earlier generation than the characters to
be met here. I did find that I was going bald by noticing it in a
weightroom mirror. I did have a tall friend with whom I got into
staged fights, but we only did that three times, the last of which
ended with the locals beating us so badly that - although I was
never unconscious - I have no recollection of that day or the two
that followed it. Doc is almost exactly someone that I spent a lot
of time with a few years ago - his panache awed me, his sudden
death was so convenient for escaping his many problems that I
remain unconvinced that it was not a staged hoax; his is the only
character that I don't find at all believable, yet he's the only
one that is real; he was so amazing that he crashes the very idea
of verisimilitude; I will probably edit him out, otherwise it's
likely that this will become his story. And, I did know a
maneating, polyglot lady poet who would do absolutely anything she
thought necessary to get ahead. But, these are stock enough
characters who practically everyone would know someone who is
similar to one or more of them. Their characteristics are mixed
and matched between them and I think that no one reading the final
work could point to any character and say that this one is based on
them or on someone that they know. I think it is unfair in the
extreme to write fiction about people that you have known, but this
feeling may not obtain forever. I had hoped that the desire to
write fiction had been medicated out of me, oh well.
More as I
think of it.