Stranger Will (29 page)

Actually, I hope he cares enough about literature to confront me about the book someday. It would be amazing to be able to talk with my boy about my work.

Writing is exhausting for me. I spend most of my waking time thinking about what I want to write. Only once I have a few sentences in my head do I sit down to write. Those sentences grow to a few paragraphs, sometimes a page or two, and then I am done. Two hours tops, usually. I’ve always done it this way, even sans-child, though I will say that now with a child I find myself hyper-focusing my writing time. I’ll take my 15 minutes of time and cram my two pages into it. My writing hasn’t suffered through the shift in habit, but it has changed.

I have always written with the goal of producing smaller sections. I then weave these sections into each other as I draft out a novel. So, the finished product may not resemble the fragmented beginnings at all, which I suppose is the point of a novel; it should be cohesive, seamless.

I actually really love editing, perhaps even more than the initial writing stage. So, yeah, I definitely revise more than write. For
Stranger Will
specifically, the final version is substantially different than the earliest drafts. Specifically, the entire first draft was written in first-person perspective. There is nothing quite as satisfying, for me, as re-writing an entire novel. The amount of focus I am forced to dedicate to such an undertaking is extremely revealing.

Unfortunately, dedicating as much time as I do to engaging with readers and authors via online networks like Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and all the rest has sucked quite a bit of time from my fiction writing. Though, I got into writing not just to write, but to connect with people; novels just happened to be the best way for me to connect with people at length about a specific topic. Online social networking is the supporting converse to the length and intimacy of a novel. In a way, I have found it to be less a distraction and more of a necessary component to being a well- rounded author.

From a marketing perspective, you are absolutely right. The two aspects—writing (the product) and networking (the sales)— are part of the same piece. A lot of authors, myself included, tend to stay away from terms like “marketing” and “sales”; books are supposed to be better than commerce, right? But the fact is that books only matter when people read them. I think of social networking not as selling but more of helping readers find me.

As for time, I tweet a lot on the crapper.

The novels are similar only in that they both deal with parental abandonment in some way. Some readers have noticed this thematic trend with my work, even back to
Charactered Pieces
. The realization really came to me as more a revelation than a casual observation. I never had a father growing up, so having been forced to see my work as a product of a non-traditional childhood I have to embrace the circumstances. Though, I’m just the kind of anti-establishment hipster that chances are less and less of my work in the future will involve this same theme. In fact, I’ll probably go the polar opposite way and deal with a smothering of parental support as a character ’s main conflict. I’m the kind of guy that stops liking a song the moment he hears it on the radio, as irrational as that sounds.

I’m working on a novelization of The Lost Boys right now.

If Steve, of Gutenberg fame, ever starts a press I think he would be a shoe-in. He’s got name and Police Academy recognition.

The re-embrace of typewriters feels like a natural reaction to the rise in technology. It has happened with other mediums as well: vinyl records and film come to mind, two forms that most people outside musicians and moviemakers respectively don’t see much need for. I think the same about typewriters. Most readers don’t care how a book is composed, they just want the book. The return to a nostalgic medium is generally more a producer ’s response than a consumer ’s response.

This, like the parent thing mentioned earlier, is also a recurring theme that, until readers called attention to it, I hadn’t consciously acknowledged. Though, unlike the parent theme, I think limbs (their removal, their grotesqueness, and their metamorphosis, as in the case with my upcoming novella,
As a Machine and Parts
) are probably less a product of my upbringing and more just morbid fascination. However, if I continue the trend, I hope readers will continue to play the role of my couch- side therapist and clue me in to a Freudian correlation. That being said, the image on the cover of
Charactered Pieces
is a foot…just a foot.

Stranger Will
is composed primary of images pulled from my experience growing up in a small town. The fields, the isolated environment, it felt natural to me. I don’t think
Stranger Will
would have worked if set in a larger town; a small town offers a sense of contention, of not being aware of the larger world, that made Mrs. Rose’s behavior believable. In a big city,
she would have been found out much sooner.

I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin
has some of the same small town imagery, but has too some settings pulled directly from my college days, which is still a small town but much larger than my hometown. The beef packing plant, the Laundromat, and a couple of the bars all come directly from Emporia, KS (IBP, Norges Laundry, and Town Royal, respectively).

I think fiction, more than anything, has allowed me to embrace and really own my small town upbringing. At one time I resented it. But now, it is more a part of me than any forced environment ever could be.

Appendix D

Strippers with My Son

Expanded from “Even Strippers Bleed Red” originally published at Undie Press

I can safely assume that I am the only person to have ever sat alone in a Hooters restaurant reading Lisa Zunshine’s
Why We Read Fiction
, an exploration of, among other things, how the human brain has trouble distinguishing the world of fiction from the world of reality. I am certainly not, however, the first person to have sat alone in a Hooters restaurant suffering the book’s thematic confusion. Despite what my textbook academic luggage may imply, I too play the ‘are they or aren’t they’ game any time I am approached by a set of boobs, especially a set of boobs with tip money on the line.

A good friend of mine was set to be married in less than one week. I arrived at this endowed bachelor party starting-block about half an hour early forcing me to decide, should I be the creepy gentleman sitting alone reading a book at Hooters? Or should I be the creepy gentleman sitting alone eating food at Hooters? I opted for the former, though plenty a kindred loner around me chose the latter, chewing alone, gawking alone, treating the experience as a cheap substitute to the $20-cover strip clubs that pock the Topeka peripheral. One of which, The Outhouse, was scheduled as our stop number two and we were, as one bachelor party member stated (once our group finally coalesced in the Hooters parking lot), “running late.” I respected this man’s desire for punctuality, though was no less confused by it, and helped usher the group to our awaiting van. Leaving Hooters, I turned back to the solo men, wished them well under my breath and almost invited a particularly sad looking gentleman to join us. He licked hotsauce from his fingers, his table plate-less, silverware-less, and mug-less, leaving me to assume his wallet empty and his shame non-existent. But what’s sadder, leaving the relatively sanitary pseudo-peep show that is Hooters or dragging a stranger down with us as we aimed our half-chubs toward a strip club famous for its touch-all-you-want and BYOB business model? I left the man alone and reserved all pity for ourselves.

The veteran of the group, a man named Terry—father to in- tow bachelor ’s friend and cell phone game enthusiast Nathan— warmed our group with a loose joint and equally loose conversation. Terry and I had never met. Nathan and I, however, have been much acquainted over the years. He often made the drive from Wichita to Emporia, Kansas to party with us. Generally, our gatherings consisted of Doug (the bachelor), me, and the handful of bored coeds we could trick into attending. It takes a special type of party-goer to cross the transom from comparatively sterile outdoors Emporia into our all-but-condemned college house, with sticky floors—sticky kitchen, sticky living room, sticky bathroom, and sticky bedroom floors—and perpetually flooded basement, home to crawfish and slugs familiar enough to have nicknames and backstories, being not points of embarrassment, but somehow, points of pride. If you bonded in our house, you bonded for life. Which is why repeat visitors were so welcomed. And Nathan, though he kept his face to the always- current handheld video game system during much of these parties, was repeat enough to practically be a brother. Now, having met his father, and factoring in what I would later learn of him throughout the night, I can assume Nathan’s pilgrimages were more escapist than communal.

Terry passed the joint around asking each of us simple questions, focusing on me, as we were the only two members of the entourage not formerly acquainted. “Doug tells me you have a son. How old?”

“Just a few months,” I answered between coughing fits. I tried to steer the conversation toward less awkward topics. “I hear The Outhouse has a fuck room.”

The father ignored me. “That titty milk tastes like regular milk, just with lots of sugar,” Terry said. He offered the information casually, like one would to a stranger on an elevator. This elevator, apparently en-route a pediatrician’s office or alt food seminar on the benefits of disgusting eating habits. Years later, when TIME Magazine would start a cultural war by showcasing a 4-year-old breastfeeding child on its cover, my first reaction would be, “I’ve heard of older. Much older.” The rest of the boys, perhaps calmed either by the smoke or by their long associations with Terry, reacted apathetically.

I asked, “Why would you know that?”

“I had a baby once. The kid didn’t stop us from having sex. When you got a mom’s titty in your mouth, you end up tasting a bit of it.”

Nathan, displaying what I assume to be a calloused tolerance to household father-on-titty conversation, focused on a late-level game of Angry Birds. I was beginning to understand his infatuation as one that began young as a familial bomb shelter but later expanded to a social one as well. Those images I have of him, ignoring drunk girls at 1309 Merchant Street in Emporia, Kansas in favor of the latest Mario Bros. game, became sad in a completely different way.

After a quick pit-stop for our B-rations in the BYOB equation, filling our cooler with enough beer to kill a stripper, we continued the drive, locking our throats and hotboxing the van until we collectively expressed second thoughts about our ability to maintain composure at the impending promise of lap dances and cold sores. We were little qualified to sit in a chair, let alone actually be a chair for stripper asses. But we persisted, each in our own way. Me, I overcompensated for any perceived uncertainty by offering the doorman $10 to cover both myself and the bachelor, falling way short of the required $20 per boner-toting wiseass. Doug, he compensated by lending me the money without calling attention to the gesture. To this day, borrowing $10 from my friend during his own bachelor party to get inside a strip club ranks high on my list of embarrassing moments.

The Outhouse is unlike any strip club I’ve experienced. Beyond its sketchy location (35 miles east of a dead tree in some forgotten wheat field), The Outhouse is famous for its aforementioned BYOB policy and touch-all-but-the-boobs etiquette (yet the vagina is mysteriously absent from the no-no list). To keep the sadness theme going, the club has opted to go sans-DJ in favor of a sad jukebox attached to a sad rear wall into which the sad strippers put their own sad money for their sad, sad five minutes of stage time.