DIGGING UP NEW BUSINESS:THE SWIFTPAD TAKEOVER
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I finally published my second novel, “Digging Up New Business: The SwiftPad Takeover” (SwiftPad). I am going to try to describe how I came to write it. This will be interesting for me because up until this very moment, I have not really thought about it, because I was so engrossed in the process of writing and publishing it.
I had a brilliant editor in Linda Franklin, whose input turned a blob of a manuscript into something readable. It would take a long time to explain all of the little things she did to polish the manuscript. Sometimes she seemed to understand what I was trying to say better than I did. It was my first experience working with a truly professional editor and it was a master class for me in how to prepare a manuscript.
My characters are a mishmash of the characteristics of real people I have known, but mostly they were invented out of my own musings. One real person from whom I modeled a lead character I will talk about a bit, because he had such a profound impact on me. Kip (Chubby) Rehain is based in part on Ross McConnell.
Ross is celebrated by other people who have known him.
Here
http://www.mjville.com/?cat=7
and here
http://rossmcconnell.blogspot.com/
Neither of the two links above discuss Ross's time in Oregon – he lived in a number of places – I know he flunked out of Harvard at least twice – and was in Eugene Oregon between 1978-1983 or so. That is where I met him. Anyway – I thought of him more than once or twice as I modeled the character Kipling 'Chubby” Rehain. Of course the character Kip is from a different generation than Ross and had a much different experience growing up, but I thought what would Ross do, when I wrote him. The real Ross is one of the great friends I will ever have. He died several years ago in Georgia (the one in the Caucasus, not Confederacy) and some of the circumstances are described above. As you can see he had a powerful influence on more people than just me. Some even seem to see him in a religious context, which if nothing else shows you the power of his personality.
THE PLAN -. My first novel, Farewell the Dragon started out as a memoir, but I quickly saw that I needed to make it fiction for a number of reasons. The most important reason of course was to protect my Chinese friends from identification.
A 1st person novel based on a memoir can pose a number of technical problems, none of which I was aware of when I started, but I learned them as I went. The most obvious is that the reader can only know what the main character knows, so you have to maneuver the character so that the story flows in a way that keeps the plot going and the reader interested. The benefits of 1st person are many – it is more immediate and compelling if done right. But it isn't easy.
So, with SwiftPad, I wanted to write in 3rd person as an exercise in craft if for no other reason. With 3rd person you can tell the story anyway you want, but the problem is to keep the reader interested and not fall off into a blather of narrative that gets too far away of the the character's problems – which is all most reader's really care about. . Different problems – 1st person is more immediate and compelling, but it is harder to sustain in someways. With 3rd person you can tell any kind of story you want if you can keep the reader interested.
My frame of reference as a writer is the big story, epic world shattering story. I know this is sensationalism to a degree – and I think as I mature as a writer – (in 13 days I'll be 64 but I am still very much a kid when it comes to writing) my focus will become narrower. But – maybe not. Anyway – I am at the age where I have stopped buying green bananas so lets not get ahead of ourselves. What I mean by that is that story has to have significance beyond the character's immediate circumstance. Whether it it is Nate in Farewell the Dragon looking for that archaeological artifact that will change the way people think of history, or GG creating a Social Media application that will surpass Facebook and Twitter – the story had to be big, above and beyond the character's themselves.
I wanted the story to be about a place – and since I live near Portland, that seemed like the likely spot. I certainly can't write about Beijing anymore – that city, the city of my memory and imagination is gone forever. The traffic jams are no longer populated by bicycles, but by freeways that turn into automobile parking lots throughout the day. When I was there the tallest building had about 13 stories – and it stood out as a lonely spire, like the WTC used to in NYC. Now many fifty story buildings (and higher) are densely packed in the center of the city. I almost don't want to go back, so the memory of what it was in the mid 80's stays fresh.
I live in a somewhat secluded suburb of Portland now, 'bike friendly' (I don't get in my car unless it is absolutely necessary) and close to Portland. I am not a social person, so I wouldn't hang out in coffee shops or parks, or spend weekend nights at the Roseland watching new bands much anyway. My days of crashing music venues ended in Eugene Oregon in the 80s, which as I said was a pretty good time. So when you see me, I am usually the strange guy over in the corner, you might catch his eye occasionally but mostly has his head down in a book, peeking up to observe occasionally, when others had their attention elsewhere.
I worked in downtown Portland through the late 90s and my wife worked there for the last six years. And I would spend at least one day a month just hanging out in the city, visiting Powell's Books, going to an 'arty' movie, hiking through Forest Park sometimes, or trying out a new restaurant. Mostly I wandered the streets watching, imagining I was Charles Bukowski or Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
After leaving my job in the City, I became an IT consultant, which meant I had to fly to the job. On Friday I would land at PDX returning from where ever I was working and Mary would meet me at the airport, and we would celebrate another beginning of the weekend, (which would end so so soon), eating and drinking in the City, and then we would drive back to our southern most Portland suburb to sleep and get ready for the next week.
So I am an observer of Portland. Not a distant observer of Portland but not a real close one either. I don't really have that feeling of living in town, hearing the traffic, and smelling the food carts, and the river as a background to my life. I think maybe being a frequent visitor rather than a resident helped me see things that normally would be hidden as a part of the subconscious soundtrack of life.
I wanted to write about what I know – and to say goodbye to my career as an IT consultant. Let me tell you a bit about that. Mostly I feel like I faked it for 30 years.
Not at first – when Mary and I returned from China in late 1987, I had to make a living. Zach was about to be born and I was 36 without a clue as to my next step. In my mind our return to the US was just temporary. I intended to get back to China. I had attempted a business there and failed, but I knew if I had another chance, I could make it there.
But I never went back. After two years selling computers in Florida and after encountering Jeb! Bush who I tried and failed to sell a computer to for his 'real estate' business, Mary, Zach and I returned to Oregon, where I continued my 'IT' career.
Ten years later I was a 'Consultant' and It lasted almost twenty years after that.
The hard part of course has been navigating the technical changes that have occurred in the industry, and that is the part I faked. But it didn't matter, because soon I realized it was mostly smoke and mirrors for almost everybody else too. Maybe some other time, I'll tell you what I mean by that. But probably not, because, as I said, Digging Up New Business: The SwiftPad Takeover is my Computer business Swansong, and now I am off again on to whatever is coming next. At least before the sure and certain end of it all.
Anyway, I wanted to write about my IT experience and capture some of the feel for what IT as a job really means. That part is tricky, because technical stuff in a novel poises serious risk of becoming boring.
But Melville did it (Moby Dick is nothing if not a technical manual that could have had an alternate title of 'How to Catch Whales in the mid 19th Century'. And Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' is an Aeronautical Engineer's wet dream.) So it could be done – but by me? Certainly not, at least not yet.
Finally, well – to sell a novel, and to catch the fancy of those readers who are not true bibliophiles, you gotta spice it up. Suspense, psychological abnormality and murder have show up if you want anybody to read it. I actually have no problem with that, either technically or morally. Call me Iago if you want, but for some reason I know the drill. I suspect most people do too, even if they don't admit it.
So to sum it up, I wanted to write a novel in 3rd person, based in Portland, about the IT business with a character who is a serial killer.
But in good fiction, character is the only thing that really matters. I suppose that is not completely true, because there are many novels that are vehicles that carry the stories of societies, both real and imagined, big and small, stories that the setting or ideas overshadow the characters. But the great stories, in my opinion have multiple messages, messages about the implications of the way we live, or of political systems imposed on us, or the changes that nature and history seem to cause with little regard of people. But at the same time those great novels also tell a story about people, and their inner-lives and their relationships with other people.
To me that is the Holy Grail and while it is an act of incredible hubris to think that I can write a novel like that, there is nothing else I can think of that is worth trying. I know I have not yet done it. I am not unhappy with what I have done so far, but I know it does just scratch the surface of what I can do. (There is your hubris!). As long as I stay healthy, (and at my age that becomes a bigger “if” with each passing day) I am going to try.
So what is next? Well – questions of genre seem to be important to some people when they judge literature. In fact some genres are not even referred to as 'literature' by some of the Ombudsmen of the Odes. And the genre I am going for next is going to be the mystery story, where a slightly seedy, no longer young man, who has a known persona, and lives in a known place, is pulled into someone else's life the results of which might be life or death. A mystery story, like John MacDonald writes.
That means that 'Chubby' Rehain is not done. THE SEQUEL – perhaps titled something like 'Digging Up New Business: 'STORY NAME HERE' – is on the way. I'll not detail his circumstances, but Kip Rehain will be be much the same as we find him in 'The SwiftPad Takeover – living in Portland, with a few half-assed project on simmer, looking for a way to stay sane in a world that has given him everything except what he really needs – a reason to be. I hope to have it done by March.
I'll be posting drafts and excerpts. Like before – I not leave them up long – because I know my first efforts will 'need work' to say the least.
I can't think of a better way to spend the winter in Wilsonville, which is near but not in Portland..
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