NaNoWriMo and “The Torments of His Dreams” in reflection

So first I’d like to make this a general catchall point for the entire manuscript — here are the appropriate links to NaNoWriMo, some background posts and all 25 chapters:

NaNoWriMo itself

Decisions, decisions — especially on the NaNoWriMo front
NaNoWriMo prep part 1 — some family history
NaNoWriMo prep part 2 — a little more family history
NaNoWriMo prep part 3 — some more research background…and a title!

The Torments of His Dreams

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25

So having written it all — and like every time I do this, I finish up feeling exhausted and swearing I’ll take a break the following year — some thoughts, though these will feel a bit scattershot:

First, of course, this is a terribly rough draft and even looking back at the first chapters I see ideas and courses that were not fully developed as I’d initially intended, the rapid swerving of tone, small details that now loom larger and need more time to smoothly develop in importance and much more besides. It’s not deathless and was never meant to be — the whole point of NaNoWriMo remains to get something out to work with, not a permanent Great American Novel (or the like). It’ll be there to read as anyone likes for now.

Second, this is only intended to be the core of the first half of the book. I do have a conclusion in mind — a very specific one, as a matter of fact — and a general idea of how to get there. But I’m not going to put that on here as yet…or at all. After all, I would like to eventually develop this into a potentially publishable manuscript, and more so than some of the other things I’ve written I foresee strong possibilities with a lot more time and effort, as well as other factors beyond my control!

This said, my feelings on how this turned out are generally positive. The background and setting, as well as the language and especially the dialogue, are the weakest parts of the story in my eyes — my goal was to advance the plot rather than aim for a specific accuracy in what ‘the City’ (which is of course San Francisco but is intentionally never named) was like at the time, what the English of those who lived in that city at that time was like, and so forth. Doubtless there are a slew of anachronisms. But given the focus on the plot and how it evolved — and how this was intended less to be an exact explanation of ‘what really happened’ than an imaginative retelling of the scenario leading up to it (and next, what happened afterwards) — I think I did reasonably well. It’s the first time I’ve written a story where none of the main characters (in this case specifically the brothers and Thomas McMahon) were meant to be sympathetic, or at least entirely so. McMahon becomes more so a bit by default, but he is a boorish, boastful figure who gets tripped up a bit on his image and has to reconstruct it a bit — the shift is too abrupt for me and needs much more nuance. In the second half of the novel he’ll start meeting female characters outside the one milieu he feels comfortable with them in and that will be of prime importance.

As for the brothers, it was especially nice working with essentially not one but two unreliable narrators, and the admittedly straightforward (perhaps simply hamhanded) approaches to core parts of their characters were interesting to play with. That Richard aka Black Dick is never referred to in ‘his’ chapters by name is incredibly intentional, for instance, as is William’s endlessly convoluted sentences and utter self-regard, where in ‘his’ chapters no character literally gets a word in edgewise. Again, more work needs to be done with them both, much more, but it’s a fine start.

The psychological horror elements are in some sense a recasting of a general approach from my 2003 NaNoWriMo effort, but here given new forms, as well as an intentionally maddening unclarity. That may sound strange but the point is that even to me the exact nature of them should be left open to interpretation. I hate explaining too much and I hate horror stories that explain too much in turn as well. I have ideas and goals with them all that will come to the fore more with time — and there are other intentionally murky parts of the story I’m leaving up for grabs as much as possible. Hopefully, though, they all work at creeping you out just enough for now.

Finally, what then do I think really happened in that room when the brothers were alone? There’s still a half of a story to write, but to review the facts as we know them — after they emerged, William stabbed and Black Dick distraught, the latter first blamed a friend who lived in the building, then said it was all an accident. William persisted in claiming that the stabbing was an accidental circumstance during a quarrel, and initially claimed that he had stabbed himself. The inevitably romanticized portrait I have created about the two brothers probably bears little connection to reality — there’s no evidence that Black Dick was actually a murderer, nor that William was a literature-obsessed type (or an opium addict per se — instead, both brothers appeared to focus on shooting up). If I had to guess what did happen, I suspect it was a case where a fight accidentally turned deadly and both brothers panicked — Black Dick at the prospect of facing the death penalty in response, William at the idea that his brother, who I suspect he had a strong love/hate relationship with, would swing for it. But this still isn’t clear at all, and the guess I type here might change in my mind tomorrow just as quickly.

Either way, what I’ve just said is not, in fact, my goal for the ending of the novel. What that is…you’ll have to wait for. But in the meantime, please enjoy what’s here, all my caveats noted, and all input is welcome.

“BANG! YOUR! HEAD!”

The word’s come out that Quiet Riot’s singer Kevin DuBrow has passed on at the age of 52. I could never claim him to be a particular hero or favorite of mine, but he was one of those guys who wasn’t merely at the right time and right place, but actually able to do something with it with the talent he had.

To explain: back in 1983, metal was this strange beast I knew nothing about, much. I kinda had a vague idea of what was going on, but it was completely sporadic — I remembered the existence of the movie of the same name, for instance, recalled some radio ads for Ozzy Osbourne’s first solo tour in the early eighties, had randomly seen Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast” video once on some non-MTV video show, while back in the late seventies I knew who Kiss and AC/DC were, sort of. (Van Halen I completely missed hearing about until 1984 and, of course, 1984.) But in 1983 two big things happened for my twelve-year-old self to indicate something more was up — the bigger being Def Leppard’s Pyromania, which owned radio, MTV and my brain.

Quiet Riot was the other key factor, though I never got into them as much — I strictly enjoyed them as a radio pleasure, thanks to their two big hits. The first and biggest, of course, was the cover of Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize,” and regardless of whether it was ‘better’ or not than the original (I actually love them both equally), the point of Quiet Riot’s version was that it was in the right place at the right time, loud, brash, well-produced, slammed out of the speakers, rabble-rousing, and with a killer vocal from DuBrow, one that had the same spirit from the original but with its own style. Doubtless the incipient thrash-metal underground didn’t think too much of it at the time, say, while the glam freaks of an earlier generation were thinking, “Yeah, thanks America, took you long enough.” Context is all, though, and when you’re twelve and only just getting to fuller grips with what’s out there, I’d heard almost nothing like it (again, Def Leppard, equal glam freaks and Slade lovers, had warmed me up some already, but “Cum On Feel the Noize” helped show, even when I didn’t have the full sense and vocabulary for it, how there could be differences between two groups that supposedly performed the ‘same’ thing). It wasn’t quite as momentous, say, as “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but the impact might not have been so far off, the breakout hit that fully helped open the floodgates some more (by the end of 1984, both Van Halen and Motley Crue were crawling all over the charts, the radio and MTV — after them, the deluge).

It was the fact that they scored a follow-up hit as well that helped further — an original, “Bang Your Head (Metal Health),” which for me and a lot of other people had to have been the first time we’d ever heard of headbanging in any sort of context. With a doomy intro, slower pace and a less immediate melody — the gang shout of the chorus really was that, it seemed — its cachet is less than “Cum On Feel the Noize”‘s but is no less important, and DuBrow’s performance I think works even better here, whipping up everyone and everything into a frenzy. I still remember being on some roadtrip somewhere — around New England, I think — and that playing on the car radio, with me being utterly delighted, my sister wondering why I was so happily singing along and my parents likely caught between amusement and wishing to heck the song would end.

I never got the actual album Metal Health or anything that followed up from them — a couple of my classmates were excited about the following year’s Condition Critical but that was about it — and like most of the bands I followed at the time, I really didn’t pay attention to individual personalities or even names. The members of Quiet Riot were utterly anonymous to me, and I didn’t learn DuBrow’s name until many years later, when I was a regular reader of the now far-less-essential Metal Sludge site and they published a variety of interviews and stories with him and some bandmates. My impression was that he was a guy who had dealt with his brief spurt of fame reasonably well, and while there had been the usual rotating lineup worries at points in the band’s history things were now settled and they were just doing their thing and having a blast.

So for that reason and for all the other ones, RIP indeed. You made a young kid pretty happy back then, sir, and that’s reason enough to say thanks.

The Australian election — some further thoughts

So as I posted the other day, John Howard’s government has completely collapsed over in Australia, thoroughly swept out in an election that gave Labor and its current leader Kevin Rudd a massive victory. The two-party preference vote breakdown of 53 to 47 percent makes it seem closer than it is; when you look at it in terms of seats won, Labor’s edge is insurmountable and will grow. As has been noted endlessly by Australian commentators but might not be as well known elsewhere, it’s a rejection of the Howard government marked by near unique circumstances — the Liberal Party (which, to clear up this confusion once again, does not mean they are ‘liberals’ in the current sense; they are much closer to the Tories in the UK and the GOP in the US) now holds no higher office in the entire country than Brisbane’s mayor — in American terms, imagine if after the next election somehow the highest GOP official outside Congress was, say, the mayor of Dallas — while Howard himself has been narrowly ousted in his own home seat — a loss suffered by no other standing Australian leader since 1929. From being a 33-year veteran of Australia’s parliament, leader of the country for the past eleven of them and high-profile Bush ally in almost everything, Howard in a day has become nothing more than a private citizen. That’s politics, indeed.

My general impression of Howard, as an American with many Australian friends, nearly all of whom frankly loathe the man, is understandably biased, insofar as I’ve paid what little attention I have to the intricacies of Australian politics over the years (for instance, the WorkChoices legislation often mentioned as a key part in the Liberal collapse was utterly new to me until about a week ago). Still, at the very least he always seemed like little more than the type of irascible crab that irritates me just by existing, keen to gain and keep power by means of multiple forms of denigration of collective ‘others’ while simultaneously appealing to an ill-concealed bigoted streak in Australian society further complicated by a self-righteous religious fundamentalism — something all too easily replicated over here, of course. The various hosannas I’ve read about his abilities with the economy and, notably, almost nothing else that isn’t standard ‘servant of the country/strong leader/etc.’ boilerplate, make it seem like money was the only thing that his supporters actually cared about — forgive me if I find that a bit, shall we say, limiting.

Then there was, indeed, the Bush thing, or rather his enthusiastic support of Bush’s actions after 9/11, most notably participating in Iraq. It’s this type of thing which has led any number of right-wing bloggers (Malkin as ever being a classic example) who had been paying even less attention to Australia than I to post various hail-and-farewell posts, simply because of that alone. It was the kind of stupidly reflexive line of thinking that produced all those ‘Let’s thank the UK!’ posts and graphics and the like back in 2003 because of Tony Blair’s support of the Iraq invasions, knee-jerk reactions that had no sense of depth regarding the UK political scene in the slightest. Similarly here, where the multiple reasons why Howard and company got canned are all reduced down to assuming some sort of displaced BDS was the sole or core factor — and how like many insular American commentators to read everything through this country’s lens alone, and poorly at that. (To my amusement, I just realized that Glenn Greenwald said the same thing at the start of his piece on the matter.) The further sense of self-pity arising from them all is too much to take seriously — one gets a sense that they’re all preparing for next November, when they’ll have to comfort each other, at the rate GOP prospects are looking in general.

Balloon Juice, unsurprisingly, has some tart thoughts on the matter and on those posting all these maudlin and reductionist tributes:

[Are they] that upset about Howard losing simply because of his occasional rhetorical support of Bush? It certainly is not because of Australia’s (and again, not to demean their help) contribution to the force make-up. Is this what the Bush dead-enders are left with- clinging to the rhetoric of a foreign leader? I realize, I think the Republican party and right-wing are such losers and so wrong on many issues I left the party and joined a party I don’t feel wholly comfortable with, but are they really THIS pathetic that all they have left are Bush, Cheney, and Australia’s Howard to worship, and now just Bush and Cheney? Is that really it?

Pretty much.

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