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In late summer, 2009, Doug Dorst (ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS) and Jennifer Finney Boylan (SHE’S NOT THERE; I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU)  shared this brief exchange about writing, invention, and the nature of zombie mutants:

Jenny Boylan:  Doug, I loved your book.  One of the things I found so engaging about it was the tension between the realism of the police/detective sections, on the one hand, and the more invented and imagined sensibilities of the zombies.  Did you have a hard time balancing the two?

DougDorst:balancing the two storylines (living folks dead folks) was by far the most difficult part of writing the novel. In the first draft (which was about 900 pages), the dead people ran away with the story, largely because I was having such a good time inhabiting their world. I had developed a Root-based economy for them, along with some pruno-bootlegging wars, and… well, it’d take me about 900 pages to describe it. I’ll just say that it was a bit of a mess.

In the second draft, I cut the dead folks back to the point that they were no more than grace notes in the narrative–which pretty much stripped them of any purpose for being in the book at all. My editor helped me find more of a balance in the third draft, but I was still trying to fine-tune it until the last minute.

Jenny Boylan: I wonder, sometimes, if there is less of a difference between the laws of writing “horror” fiction, as a genre, and writing “realism,” than readers–and writers–think.   Did you feel like you were encountering a whole different set of rules, in terms of what your reader might be willing to believe, when you switched from zombies to cops?  Or did you find that your cops and your zombies both were constructed from the same writers’ toolkit? (I’ll note, as an aside, something my friend Richard Russo once said to me;  I’d been working on an allegedly comic scene in which some guy winds up wearing pants made out of ice cream (don’t ask), and he just shook his head and said, “See, the sad thing is,  given the way your mind works, Boylan, you think this is realism.)  Anyway:  cops? zombies? Same approach to both for you as a writer?  Which one was harder to make real?

Doug Dorst: Wait– ice cream pants aren’t real? I begged my parents for them when I was in middle school. I suppose it’s for the best that they said no.

Anyway: Same toolkit, different tools, I think–say, socket wrench vs. crescent wrench. I mean, character is character, regardless of genre, don’t you think? Either that person-on-the-page’s experience feels emotionally true in some way–even if it’s not perfectly grounded in everyday realism–or it doesn’t.

The living characters were more challenging because they had to experience a range of emotions truthfully. The dead were drawn a bit more simply– my intent was for them still to be motivated by the sorts of things that motivate the rest of us, but in an amplified or distorted way. (You’ve got Phineas Gage, for example, with his monomaniacal need to possess this object that he needs in order to feel whole.) If the underlying emotions feel somehow recognizable, then I think you have a lot of latitude to play around with the sort of world the character is operating in. (And “play” is the right word there… one of the reasons I wanted to work in the world of Colma’s dead was that I thought it’d be fun–a big ol’ sandbox where I had thousands of cool toys and got to make all the rules, too.)

As for what readers might be willing to believe: I didn’t overthink it, and it’s probably for the best that I didn’t. I was aware that I was writing a strange little (well, sprawling) book that straddled genres and made use of both the everyday and the fantastic. At some point, after a great deal of worrying, I figured that there was no way for me to predict how readers (who no doubt would have different tastes or sets of expectations) were going to respond and that I should just follow the characters wherever they took me. In retrospect, that was the best decision I could’ve made, although I didn’t fully understand why at the time.

So, yeah: character. I think it’s what makes realist fiction work, and I think it’s what makes the very best genre fiction work–e.g., The Shining (Stephen King’s book, I mean. The film is terrifying, but for different reasons.). I figure it’s what makes all the stuff in between work, too. In short: whether our person-on-the-page’s trousers are made of denim or Rocky Road (ouch), what matters is that we believe in his experience of wearing them.

I would love to see that ice cream pants scene, by the way. Any chance I can convince you to share it?

Jenny Boylan: Doug, as you well know, some drafts are better left unshared.  Although I can tell you that the key line I kept straining to get at in that story was this: One person has forced our hero to wear the pants made out of ice cream–which, if I recall right, were one leg vanilla, one leg chocolate, and the crotch strawberry–making these “Neapolitan” pants– and then says, sadistically, “So!  How do you LIKE wearing these pants made our of ice cream NOW?” And our hero says– and this is the single phrase I was reaching for– and I quote, “They’re cold!”

To change the subject a little, I’m curious about the way you leave some questions unanswered in ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS–and other questions are answered, but only slowly.  Was this part of a conscious  plan, following Dickens’ motto of, “Make’em laugh, make’em cry, make’em wait?”  Or was the difference between your 900 page first draft and your much-shorter final draft the difference between answering all questions, and leaving some open?  Do I smell a sequel?

Doug Dorst: I don’t think that it was a strategic decision to “make ‘em wait”. It was more that I was having a lot of fun working on a large canvas, and I made my peace early on with the fact that the novel was going to be a little shaggy and sprawly. I think one certainly could do a much shorter, tighter, and more action-focused cut of the book — and who knows, maybe that’d be a better book –but it wouldn’t have been the book I wanted to write. Or, more precisely, it wouldn’t have been the one I wanted as much to write at the time I was writing it.

As for the unanswered questions: some were definitely a result of my having to cut the manuscript in half. Some things I chose to scale back, and some things I chose to cut out. (There are also a couple of things that I chose to cut, but I screwed up and didn’t cut them out completely– so, yeah, there are a couple of sore thumbs in there that make me cringe a little. Live and learn.)

Another big struggle for me was the ending. When I finished the third draft, I realized with some horror that the book went on for over a hundred pages after the climax of the action because I had so many ends to tie up. I decided that I couldn’t subject the reader to a hundred pages of denouement and that I’d have to make some sacrifices in order to bring the proceedings to a close more quickly. In retrospect, did I make all of the best choices? Probably not. But again, all you can do is make your peace with the idea that the book is what it is, move on to the next project, and try to turn your regrets into learning experiences.

How about you– any tales of post-publication regret? And if so, how did you deal with it?

Jenny Boylan: I think there are different kinds of post-publication regret.  There’s the little kind, where you find something you missed– a copy-editing mistake, or a vestigial trace of an earlier draft you forgot to sand down;  those make me sad, but not for long.  Then there’s the other kind, where you look at a whole book you’ve published, and say, kind of resentfully, “Oh jeez. What’d you all go and let me do that for?”  There’s at least one book of mine I’m still wondering, What  was I thinking?  Fortunately, nearly fifteen years later, it’s out of print, so the damage at this hour  is somewhat  contained.

On the other hand, as someone who’s been well published over the years, I have to say that post-publication regret is a luxury.  It’s no-publication regret that breaks my heart.  I remember what it was like to keep getting those rejection slips. Anybody who survives long enough to publish a book–even one riddled with mistakes, as mine always are– should still be grateful. Period.

I like your comments about “writing past the ending.”  I have heard both Stephen King and Richard Russo talk about this.  It’s funny, we always think of ourselves as writers struggling to come up with the satisfying ending– but we think less about the not-uncommon affliction of writing right past that ending and coming up with chapters and chapters more stuff.  I think this is why they have closing times in pubs, in Ireland, anyhow.  There are a number of projects I’ve found myself at the 700 page mark where I wish someone would ring the bell and say, “Hurry up please, it’s time.”

I’m actually at about the 650 page mark on my own next project– is this where I get to plug it? This is a young adult series, commencing with volume one, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR, which is a book about monsters.  The quick pitch:  when kids in a certain town reach thirteen, they start turning into monsters: Banshees, vampires, mummies, the works.  So they get sent to a “school” where they’re taught how to disguise themselves, how to pretend to be humans, in order to survive.  So the question becomes:  What’s the right thing:  to pretend to be something you’re not, in order to live? Or to embrace your  “true self”, even if your true self is, say, a zombie.

Which I hope will be a gas for young people to read– I wrote FALCON QUINN with and for my middle-school age boys–but you don’t have to squint real hard to see that these books are sort of about some of the same issues I’ve been writing about for the last seven years, only in a more oblique and playful way.  It’s very freeing, writing about zombies.  I should  have done it years ago.

I guess this is a good place to leave things, unless you want another chance to dodge the question about a sequel to ALIVE.  What next for Doug Dorst, besides faculty meetings and syllabi?   A novel about bugs and spiders, maybe?  Tell you what, next time YOU have the sex change, and I’ll write about SF cops and–as Groucho Marx once noted, “outside of the improvement, you’ll never notice the difference.”

Doug Dorst: Whoops— didn’t mean to dodge the sequel question. I suppose the ending of Necropolis might work well as a bridge to a second book, but that wasn’t my intent, and I don’t currently have plans to write a sequel. Every now and then, though, I do find myself wondering what the next chapter in Mike Mercer’s life might be like. So who knows? If the right “Mercer 2.0” story finds me, I’ll write it. For now, though, there are other projects I’m excited to be working on. One of these is the short-story collection (The Surf Guru) that’s coming out next year, which I’m putting the finishing touches on as we speak.

As for the next novel: will there be dead people in it? There aren’t yet, but, again, who knows? (I’m a big fan of William Kennedy’s work, and dead folks slip into his novels all the time.) I agree that it’s freeing to write dead characters—I wonder if it’s because you somehow have more license to super-size their desires and their quirks. Or maybe it’s just fun to refuse to play by the rules of everyday reality. Whatever the reason, when I was writing Necropolis, it was usually the dead-person storyline that would get me excited about writing again after a dry spell. And believe me, there were some dry spells.

The next novel will definitely have its share of horrible, crawly bugs and spiders and other critters. Some of it takes place in Central America, and if there’s one thing that moving to Texas has taught me, it’s that the farther south you go, the scarier the insects are. I hadn’t planned on any of the characters (or the author) having a sex change, although I now think you’ve just given me a way to liven up the third act.

Falcon Quinn sounds like a blast—and a great way of approaching what I think is the most fundamental question a person can face: how to harmonize who you are with who you present yourself to be. (And middle school is right about the time that it gets excruciatingly difficult.) In a way, that’s the very issue that Mercer and Jude struggle with throughout Necropolis. Anyway: I’ve got a place on my bookshelf reserved for Mr. Falcon Quinn, and I look forward to meeting him on the page.

As a final thought, I just want to echo my agreement with something that you put quite well: post-publishing regrets are a luxury. Writing is a hard gig, especially in this economy, and I know a lot of incredibly talented writers who are having trouble getting their work out. I’ve caught more than my share of breaks, especially lately. Case in point, OneCity One Book—in which I get to have my book widely read in the city I love most, and through which I’m getting the chance to talk to a lot of amazing, talented, and inspiring people about words and stories and writing. Case in point, Jenny Boylan.

Jenny Boylan: Well, case in point, your own damn self.  Thanks for this exchange, Doug, and I do hope I get to see some of your Texas bugs some day. Although, just out of home-state pride, allow me note that  while Maine blackflies might be small, they do get the job done.  Congratulations on a fine book, and good luck with the next one!  J.

Just got this gently revised version of the cover. One of the eyes has been fixed, and the color of the title lettering has been changed.

There’s a really nice review of I’M LOOKING THROUGH YOU in the fine online book review site, A STRIPED ARMCHAIR. Which starts off:

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s I’m Looking Through Youis actually one of those books that straddles the nonfiction and fiction lines-it’s a memoir. There are all kinds of memoirs out there, but my favourites are ones that weave together stories from the author’s childhood with introspective looks at who they are now and have more than a dash of family mythology about them. Ones that are written by literary people, who value style as much as content, and who have had interesting lives. If this is your recipe for the perfect memoir as well, run, don’t walk, to your library or bookstore to get I’m Looking Through You.

I expected the book to be interesting. After all, it’s written by a transgendered woman in who grew up in an old haunted house. And it definitely was! Boylan meanders through time, switching it up to keep things moving, and always choosing fascinating stories. The (literal) ghosts aren’t on every page, but there’s enough of them that I didn’t feel disappointed.

But I ended up being less interested in ghosts than in the people. Boylan’s friends and family were… (click here for the rest of the review).

It’s been almost two years since ILTY hit the stores, but it’s still really nice to get a review like this.   I’m still very proud of this book, and hope that fans of SHE’S NOT THERE who managed to miss the book that succeeded it will take the occasion to check it out.  There’s a whole pulldown menu above featuring lots of information on the book, including the first chapter, which you can read for free right here.

On Friday and Saturday, September 11 and 12, I’ll be performing my one-woman show, THE PORCUPINE WOMAN, at Colby College’s Strider Theatre, on the Mayflower Hill campus in Waterville, Maine.  Showtime is 7:30.  Tickets are free, but you do have to get a ticket from the box office before the show, and these are distributed on a first-come/first served basis.

I’ll also be doing the show at this fall’s SOUTHERN COMFORT Gender Conference, in Atlanta, GA, on Thursday night, September 24. The show is free to convention-goers that evening.  The running time is a little over an hour.

The Porcupine  Woman is a series of interconnected stories and songs, performed and written and sung by me, featuring the electric harp as well as the grand piano.  The show was originally commisioned by the Richard Hugo House in 2008 as part of the “My Avatar” event I performed with performance poet Krista Bell and novelist Vikram Chandra.  The show has been expanded to a full evening, and is being directed and staged by the chair of Colby’s Theatre and Dance department, Lynne Connor.

So if you’re in the central Maine area–or if you’ll be in Atlanta later this month–I hope you’ll check it out.

Found this on Engender. Thanks Helen!

Summer is fleeting in Maine, but gorgeous.  Today’s blog post is just a few snapshots from the last week or two.

This is the blueberry barren atop Vienna mountain (pronounced, VY-enna).  I ride my mountain bike up here, no easy task, at least not for me.  No eatin’ the berries, alas, as the farmer up there has this funny idea about his crop not being for public consumption.   These berries look about ripe to me….

Meanwhile, I got invited to a party at governor Angus Kings house– a shindig for Maine Writers and Publishers.  Angus and his wife Mary Hermon have a lovely place on the coast, and I snuck down to the beach to have a conversation with the cold Maine sea.

Meanwhile, back up at the blueberry barrens, you can see Long Pond in the near distance and Great Pond in the far.  I live on Long Pond in the summer, at the end of a dirt road, just at the right hand side, more or less, of this photo.

And this, you ask? This is a moose print in the mud.  Snapped this on my mountain bike ride.

Lastly, you’ll find Deedie (Grace) and Sean driving the boat, below.  Living on a lake, we spend at least as much of our time on the boat as in the car, especially making the trip across the pond to Day’s Store, where you can get anything from tequila to an ice cream cone.  This was an ice cream run in late July, with Sean in the captain’s chair.

That’s the news from Belgrade Lakes.  Wish these days could last forever.

B

Well, the Colbert Report, in its ongoing “Better Know a District” segment, paid a visit to our own Maine First yesterday, featuring an interview with Rep. Chellie Pingree. Personally, I still miss Congressman Tom Allen, who gave up the seat to run against Sen. Susan Collins last year– but Chellie holds her own– sort of– with Colbert.   The clip:

So here I am, late summer, deep in the heart of the first draft of a new book. I’m in that euphoric, terrifying, mysterious frame of mind that arises when the end of the draft is almost in sight. I try to write about 1000 words a day, which translates to about four pages of double-spaced manuscript. I’m on about page 350 of a book that feels like it will be around 450 pages long. Everything’s set up for the ending, all the characters and clues and tools are in place, and now mostly I have the feeling of standing back, watching the storm I have created roll through the village.

I don’t know if people who are not writers can relate to this at all, but I wanted to linger over this moment with you here. Right now, the world of the book I’m writing is really all I care about. It’s what I can’t wait to do once I get up in the morning, and when I’m doing it, I”m about as happy as I can be, and when I’m finished, I start to think about what I’m going to write tomorrow. Each tiny block of pages brings me closer and closer to the end. I know a lot of what’s going to happen, but not exactly, and there’s still room to be surprised, both for better and for ill. But this particular place– the home stretch–is such a delight.

I have hopes to be done with this first draft by summer’s end, which would truly be impressive (and tidy, since it means I wouldn’t be dragging summer projects into the academic year.) I am such a confused flibbertygibbet of a writer that I really have to go through two drafts, just to have a first draft, because even at my most careful, I am still capable of writing, “A hole fell out of the wall.” (The HarperCollins copyeditor actually caught this one recently; with deep chagrin I had to change it to, OF COURSE, “a stone fell out of the wall, leaving a hole.”) And so on. It is so easy to get blind, in the whirlwind of this part of writing.

Steve King encourages writers to write 2000 words a day, if possible, and to spend no more than 3 months on a first draft. I’m a fast writer, but i’ve never been THAT fast. Still, these fantasy books I’m writing have come faster, and been more fun, than almost anything I’ve ever done. The problem is that, every 200 pages or so, I have to completely stop and go back and fix all the things i’ve screwed up because only writing the story lets me know what the story is. And while this might well be a crazy way of writing (rather than planning it all out in advance), I’ve NEVER been able to do that; for me it’s always writing blindly but with hope, and then going back, and fixing it, and fixing it.

So coming down the home stretch is especially exciting because the options narrow, and I’m less likely to go off down a blind alley. AT this point, I’ve been down so many of them that the number of false moves has been reduced– because I’ve already taken so many of them.

This particular project, by the way, is FALCON QUINN AND THE (SOMETHING SOMETHING) (we’re keeping the something something secret for now). It’s book two of the Falcon Quinn project, and i’ve just learned that book one, FALCON QUINN AND THE BLACK MIRROR (the cover for which is here) is now slated for April publication. I’ve had such a ball with these books, and even now I am still doing what I started doing two years ago with book one– doing a morning’s writing, and then reading the day’s work to my boys at day’s end. Zach and Sean continue to be some of my best critics, especially with this book, which I’ve written for (and in many cases, with) them.

It’s funny, though, I will end book Two before Book One has come out yet, so I wont’ know whether there will be books Three and up (and yeah, I have a pretty specific idea of how many of these there will be) when I have to hand them in. So I have to come up with an ending for Book Two that will end the series if we end at two, but also provides an opening if we go more than that, which I surely hope we do.

At any rate, I am not at all sure that this makes me a very fun or pleasant person to be around right now, because my mind is really drifting away to Shadow Island and the world of the story all the time. Deedie is long suffering and patient about this, having long ago decided that the best way to deal with a writer-spouse is to pretend I’m normal. The boys, meanwhile, want to CONSTANTLY talk about the latest twists and turns in the story. It’s such a fun and fulfilling place to be.

There are times I wish I could stay in this frame of mind forever. But that’d be no fun, because then I’d never find out how the story ends. And I’d be denied the even scarier, even more amazing prospect, of staring something new.

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

My rating: 5 of 5 stars Rick Russo’s new book contains some familiar, beloved elements for Russo-philes– a devoted, exhausted wife; a smart, snarky daughter; an irritating mother who doesn’t stop meddling, even after death–and at the center, a restless, loving soul, this time the professor Griffin, who wrestles with life’s meaning, love, and legacy. But there’s new ground here too, not least in the brevity and economy of the story. Plus, at times CAPE MAGIC is more laugh out loud funny than any Russo book in recent memory. Above all, I found the faint whiff of mortality hovering over these pages, which gave the tale a sense of gravity and sobriety even in the midst of its comic moments. Russo, of course, is my dear friend, and so I’m biased. But I think he’s one of the best American novelists, ever, and CAPE MAGIC is one of his best. Russo departs today on a multi-city book tour, so catch him if you can. View all my reviews >>

My friend Tim Kreider has posted another amazing entry in the New York Times’ “Happy Days” blog:

August 2, 2009, 9:05 PM
Averted Vision
By TIM KREIDER
In 1996 I rode the circus train to Mexico City where I lived for a month, pretending to be someone’s husband. (Don’t even ask.) I remember my time there as we remember most of our travels — vivid and thrilling, everything new and strange. My ex-fake-wife Carolyn and I often reminisce nostalgically about our honeymoon there: ordering un balde hielo from room service to cool our Coronas every afternoon, the black-velvet painting of the devil on the toilet that she made me buy, our shared hilarious terror of kidnapping and murder, the giant pork rind I wrangled through customs. Which is funny, since, if I think back honestly, while I was actually there I did not feel “happy.” In fact, as mi esposa did not hesitate to point out to me at the time, I griped incessantly about the noise and stink of the city — the car horns playing shrill, uptempo versions of the theme from “The Godfather” or “La Cucaracha” every second, the noxious mix of diesel fumes and urine, the air so filthy we’d been there a week before I learned we had a view of the mountains.

The fresh heartbreak was, in a sense, like being in a foreign country; everything seemed alien, brilliant and glinting. It was as if I’d been flayed, so that even the air hurt.
I was similarly miserable throughout the happiest summer I ever spent in New York City. I was recovering from an affair that had ended badly, and during my convalescence I was subletting a cool, airy apartment a block from Tompkins Square Park, with a kitchen window that looked out on a community garden. A theater troupe was rehearsing a production of “The Tempest” out there, and I got used to the warped rattling crash of…

(read the column in its entirety here.)

(photo of Tim Kreider by Jenny Boylan, summer 2007, Greenlawn Cemetery, at the tomb of F.W. Woolworth, in a moment that was surely a mixture of great sorrow and absolute giddiness.)

Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Just finished ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS by Doug Dorst, a wild first novel that is equal measures hard-boiled cop story and zombie invasion. The tale starts out with the near-death of a young man in a cemetery– he’s rescued by our hero, Officer Mercer and his partner, Toronto. As the boy hovers near death in the hospital, the officers try to figure out how the kid got all tied up and left for dead in a mausoleum. While all that’s going on, the officers’ private lives slowly disintegrate, and Mercer starts seeing DEAD PEOPLE.

The tension between the two aspects of the tale remains in a fun, unsettling balance for most of the book, which means that this supernatural detective story is kind of unlike anything i’ve ever read before. Strange, funny, creepy, unsettling– by turns ALIVE IN NECROPOLIS is all of these. Does Dorst answer all the questions he raises? Not by a long shot. But the dark joke, and earnest quest-for-meaning at the heart of the tale still made it a fine book to read.

View all my reviews >>

The reading last night for the LOVE IS A FOUR LETTER WORD anthology was a fine event. Editor Michael Taeckens introduced the host, Russ Marshalek, who in turn introduced each of us with an excerpt from “Love Secrets from Delilah.” Nice.  Then Josh Kilmer-Purcell read from “Twenty-five to One Odds,” I read from “Trans,” and Dan Kennedy finished off with “Excactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older.  And with Hypochondra.”  We signed books and then snuck off into the Upper West Side night to have a pitcher of blue margaritas, and share more stories of breakups, bad relationships, and broken hearts.

Penguin says that hits for the book on their site have gone through the roof.  I’ve been asked to contriubte a blog post about relationships and the book for the site next week, and I’ll post up a link there when the time comes.  In the meantime, you could check out what’s on the site right now; Dan Kennedy had a “soundtrack for heartache” posting sure to bring a tear to the eye.

It was great to see so many readers last night and I appreciate everyone who came out.  I note that we only had two or three people storm up and out of the reading angrily, which is a new low for me,; most of these catapulted themselves after Josh started talkin’ dirty. 

Collection Editor Michael Taeckens, standing, and l to r, Josh Kilmer Purcell, Dan Kennedy, and Jennifer Finney Boylan, Barnes & Noble, 82nd & Broadway, July 30, 2009. (Missing here: host Russell Marshalek).

Finally, I’ll note how this anthology is full of gay relationships, and the fact that this is unexceptional and mundane strikes me as a sign of great progress.  There’s only one trans narrative– but it is a good thing for trans lives to be represented in this mainstream publication–and that’s progress too.