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Second "Child"
Anyone who reads my page knows by now that I have one child, a daughter. It’s doubtful that I’ll have more; right now this girl, age 12, is more than enough to keep me busy. I admire people who are able to keep heads above water with more than one child, but I don’t envy them. I also don’t understand them. If you’ve already had one and know what you are asking for – why have two? My maternal grandmother postulated that having kids is like shitting in your own hat. Words of wisdom indeed… so why, pray tell, did SHE, in point of fact, shit in her own hat five times?
Parenting, like war, is hell. If my brief ruminations on the subject don’t convince you of this, take a look at Sugar’s guest articles, or better yet, consult Grace’s School of Parental Bliss. Of course, some people are just naturally adept at parenting large crowds of kids, but it doesn’t appear that you will find many of those people on this site. Why not? Well, the short answer is that we’re writers.
Writers are a different animal. All people are childish and selfish, but writers are childish and selfish and disconnected from reality to boot. No actual, tangible child, with his or her attendant nonstop work and drudgery, can ever completely tear us away from the children that exist only in our minds; children made of metaphors and phrases and plotlines and characters. Why spend time with a real child who cries and craps and needs to be fed and finds you embarrassing when you can endlessly create children who don’t so much as even exist when you don’t feel like dealing with them? Children who can take any form you want them to. Children who can be funny as fuck or terrifying or deeply thoughtful or politically active – IF YOU WANT THEM TO.
As written children go, my novel, which is being published in installments on this distinguished site, would be my Harvard grad. He gave me a little grief when he was in potty training and later as a teenager, but by and large he’s made me pretty proud with how he turned out. If I’m gonna call this novel a “child”, a sentient entity in my life, I call it “he”, because for some reason the end result was oriented towards the masculine, a crime story with four males at its center.
This was the seventh or eighth novel I’ve sat down to write; it was the first I finished. I can’t say what was so special or superior about this one that made it the one to break my cycle of failure to complete anything. I’d like to credit the site with incentive, but I can’t, since I finished the novel several months before coming on board here. I suppose, in the end, it was just fear that if I didn’t complete this one, I’d never complete another. Now, I think about writing other novels and feel confident rather than doomed. And with my mastery of this “child”, I think I gained a measure of confidence and comfort with how I deal with my real life as well.
While I like the novel, I’m not sure that, objectively speaking, it’s any good. I know that a lot worse has been committed to print; I’ve read some of it and, I must admit, have worked with writers who wrote some of it as well. As with a flesh-and-blood child, though, there are aspects of it – small corners – that I quite honestly hate. For instance, in a segment that will to be put up on the site soon, a pivotal Thanksgiving dinner, attended by nearly all of the characters, occurs. Because I had sort of spent myself writing the fun chase sequence right before it, I wound up writing the dinner scene with a diminished capacity because I didn’t want to put off writing it. The result sucks donkey balls, but after several readings and a couple of attempts at re-writing, I ended up leaving it as is since the outcome of the scene determines subsequent plotlines. I got my game back in the next chapter, but I still wish I could have done something different with that dinner scene.
I had some preconceptions about what would happen when I wrote the story, but I ended up abandoning them as my writing progressed. When I am very focused on one piece of writing, that piece will often take on a life of its own and will usually resolve itself better than the resolution I had initially planned. I hit it lucky this time; I finished the bulk of the entire book within ninety days. It seemed to fall into place on its own with more ease than prior projects and its characters overlapped and intertwined very naturally for me; maybe that is why I finished it.
The characters are nearly all characters that I’d used before. Nash, Patty, Vlad Darscun and Alison D’Orsay and the McCoy family were all characters I’d created for a sci-fi story ring in which I participated for a while. The brothers, Michael and James, were also modified versions of my two main male characters from that story ring, although they ended up completely different from their prototypes. (That means I can still use those other characters in future stories, which for a writer is always a bonus.) The characters of Marv and Aggie are even older, snipped from another novel I stopped two chapters shy of finishing in 1989. The only main characters that are new to the story are Big Ben, Lisa and Chloe, and, of course, Father Davieson. The character of the malevolent, child-predator priest was just a random image that I saw in a nightmare, which goes a long way towards explaining why he ended up being so one-dimensional. His pure, freewheeling evil was a little over the top, but I figured it was excusable because he was more of a plot catalyst than an actual character anyway.
I don’t know if it’s really of any interest to you to know the process I went through writing this novel, but I thought it might not hurt to throw it out there. I’ve seen some good writing submitted by a lot of our readers, so I hope that if any of you have a novel in you, this little ramble might give you something useful to help you get it out. Hey, it’s easier than raising a kid. And it won’t stretch your body out of shape, need new clothes every year, wreck your car, eat all your food, or live with you till you’re seventy. And if it turns out to be bad, you won’t have to retain a lawyer - you can just stuff it in a drawer somewhere.
