Story on Easter Monday that is about writing. Also about me. Telling it a) in case helpful and b) cos it’s not about pandemics.

So sometime back in Neolithic 2005, I was a bad scriptwriter. That is to say that I wrote decent enough stories in script form but wasn’t good at some of the other stuff in the job, which is arguably as important.

I got work, got paid, got fired and nothing ever went to the screen. And here’s the thing: I cannot write soap. Cannot cannot cannot. I can’t watch it, can’t be in the room with it. It’s my Kryptonite.

So the experience I needed wasn’t gonna be forthcoming.

And I was getting married. To a successful lawyer.

I did not propose to be a stereotype asshole artist husband.

I’d always kinda wanted to write a book and at the same time, well… gosh, that’s an awfully large mountain from where I stand. Like actually writing a piece of long form fiction? I know that can be done. I even know how.

But then walking that road? That is… steep.

One reason to be in film in the first place: direct comparisons with my dad were going to be limited.

But it wasn’t working. I was just another jackass in the waiting room, getting 30 minutes of coffee-stained notes on projects with no legs. So.

I started noodling about, thinking about maybe writing something that might you know MIGHT not really saying it will

turn into a

novel.

And if that did not work: back to school. Law.

I actually started writing two books. I did about twenty pages of each of them. One was a weird, Gormenghast-Dark Materials type deal about an immortal six year old from a family of monsters. I called it The Comet and Alexander. I still have those pages.

The other was this nutso gloves off bullshit fest spinning off from the beginning of The Wages of Fear

I called it The Wages of Gonzo Lubitsch. Two guys rode in a truck through a mutable landscape of corrosive unconscious phantasm, pursued by the shark from Jaws.

I trimmed, expanded, cut, played, scribbled. I wanted a draft by April 2006. The story settled… but in March 2006 I was boned. Could not connect the end to the beginning.

(The shark, by this time, was a distant memory. The corrosive muck had shifted from liquid fiction.)

There was one place I did not want to go: the war. I had no experience of war, and I didn’t want to write a macho war story. Not my jam. I wanted to have memories and pre-sentiments of it, but not fully wrote that period. Let it be a dream.

I was kidding myself. For that story, there was no way to avoid it, but because I had no idea what I was doing, I didn’t know that. I wasted ages, then dived in. Jarhead, Generation Kill, Cross of Iron… what stories did veterans tell about how it felt.

I didn’t care if the detail was off. This was a fictional war. But if people were gonna read this who knew, it had to feel at least respectfully wrong. It couldn’t be risible.

Meanwhile the book was physically enormous. It had monsters, battles, love, loss, dogs, mimes, and had swallowed my limited martial arts experience and occasional Hong Kong movie binges and become… something.

(Could not get the shark in.)

It took much longer, but I finished it.

And people loved that wartime section. It defined the boundaries of the book, or hinged it, centred it. Post-Iraq, post-Cold War, whatever. I haven’t re-read it in years.

Could not. Get. The shark. In.

And so. I ended up as a novelist almost in spite of myself. Loved it. Got married. Wrote and wrote and write and write…

And in 2014 I was writing this book about surveillance and banking and alchemy and reality and murder and there was this little guy scuba diving…

… And there she was. This huge, silent thing in the water with him.

The shark was back.

And she had grown.

She all but owns that book. She roves through the narratives, slips into backstories and images, until she ended up on the front cover. And in the video.

She became so strong that people see her in the real world the way they do in the book. It’s… really disturbing sometimes. https://twitter.com/cFidd/status/1245137449661206532

From there to here. Fifteen years… stories find ways to come out. We never really lose the good ones. We can’t avoid the ones that need to be there.

And if I can get to my desk later, I’ll cross the 90k word barrier and enter the final chapter of the new book.

One foot in front of the other :)

Happy Easter.