S.D. Curran's Blog

There was an article today in the Atlantic written by a guy who hopes he passes away at 75. This, he argues, means that he won’t be a burden on his family or society. Underneath this thinly-veiled, supposedly self-sacrificing argument is the socialist thread that seems to be running through everything today. The focus is on long-term costs, long-term this, long-term that. The fact is that older people tend to save their money, have estates, and they also tend to vote conservative, and so all of this is a serious problem, to say nothing of the added health care costs. This belief, that certain elements of society cannot contribute and should therefore be eliminated is nothing more than the latest salvo in an attempt to halve the distance between our current state of affairs and Logan’s Run. Looking at the members of Congress who are now considered senior citizens, one has to seriously wonder if they would really go along with this if it would mean no more thirty-year tenures.

Look, the costs are there. Dying today and getting older is expensive. But to say that a senior citizen contributes less to society than a twenty-something with a hoop hanging out of her nose while working as a barista at Starbucks just seems arrogant to me. Just like how our society has a very narrow view of success – strictly financial – we have a very closed-minded view of what it means to be contributing – again, strictly financial, in the form of taxes. That’s it. We don’t view someone’s art or writing or perspective or smile as a contribution to society.

In Ayn Rand’s Anthem, a copy of an earlier work called We, everyone has their proper place in society, their ‘purpose.’ The state has become the God, and while these people may have purpose they are viewed as easily disposable, just like a worker at a fast-food restaurant. That, it seems to me, is where we are heading. A nation, a culture, a society that views its senior citizens as meaningless, burned-out, used-up individuals who need to pass away and free up room will eventually come to view those who are obese or chronically sick, or in possession of some disability in the same way. The view of people as dollar signs is somewhat of a Republican concept, but it has extended to the Democrats because they know our current system isn’t going to work because we have fewer and fewer younger people willing to find meaningful employment.

I don’t mean jobs – those are out there. I am talking about meaningful employment that brings them joy and happiness.

Now, that term is subjective – some of the happiest days working was when I worked at a gas station in Burlington. In the morning an eighty-something came in to talk with me about the latest book he was reading, and ask me my progress on my own. Another man, a retiree who was on the U.S.S. Arizona, came in and talked with me about life in the navy. Their contribution – a smile, perhaps a cup of coffee or some baked banana bread – was worth more to me than the $8 an hour I was making in 1999-2000.

The real problem isn’t that we view people as useless, unable to contribute, but it is that we have learned to value the wrong things. We no longer value art, and by art I mean literature, images, music. We value commercial crap, rehashed garbage put out without any inspiration. This ties into how we view the older generation. In each senior citizen who smiles is a child, an adult who survived everything this world could throw at him. If they reach the twilight years of their life with a smile on their face, there is literature for you. There’s a story there. We value the wrong things and as a result these stories don’t get told. Our lives are not richer for the loss of these tales, they are poorer.

Growing up I enjoyed the company of older people. I just did. My peers weren’t interesting. But older people could share stories, and the way Aunt Katherine or Uncle Richard or even Uncle Billy’s eyes would light up when they shared some important or unimportant aspect of their lives showed me they still had something to contribute to this world. A story, literature, perhaps a moral allegory, or even a warning to the next generations who think life is all about play and ‘safe zones’ at colleges. These men and women have seen far more than you or I could ever imagine, and they have stories to share. As a writer, I often listen to others share about their lives, and I use that as material for my own works.

A nation that does not value anything other than the financial contribution of its citizens will soon wake up and find it has nothing else.

Metafiction is defined as fiction where the author alludes to the creation of the text, acknowledges the existence of a reader, or defies whatever conventions of novelization he or she would otherwise use in a story.

A Once Distant Memory has shades of this; there is a story within a story where Jack, the main character, begins writing a novel about the events that took place five years ago, when he and his now deceased wife came home Valentine’s Day night to find Meghan, the babysitter, murdered and their eleven-year old daughter in shock. The murderer was never found. Throughout the novel Jack writes, the audience (us) picks up clues about what happened that night and, much like us, the audience, is able to piece together who the murderer was. It’s more complex than it sounds, actually.

Metafiction has been used quite a few times. Having a reader interact with the audience was actually the basis of one of my favorite books as a child: The Monster at the End of this Book where Grover gets more and more frightened about the prospect of meeting the monster at the end, and attempts to stop the reader from turning the pages. I loved the story when I was younger. Other books where this occurs are Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, Dave Eggers’ Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius, The Neverending Story, The Dark Tower, Fight Club, The Crying of Lot 49, and others. It really is interesting how often this comes up, a writer writing about a writer writing. It may have become a cliché, but I have not seen much in terms of indie writers doing this just yet.

Idlewild was released without much fanfare last weekend. I have limited knowledge of book marketing services, and by that I don’t mean purchasing Amazon or Goodreads reviews. I mean getting the word out about this novel. It seems that most writers are not really ‘noticed’ until their sixth or seventh book, so I am holding out hope. For now, am selling about a copy a week of Bad Moon Rising and For None of Woman Born. Idlewild is my favorite because it more accurately reflects my home life growing up, although the majority of it is fiction.

Have started another novel along similar lines as Idlewild; the story started off as a story about how I lost my mind and wound up living in Central Massachusetts just down the street from that degenerate who had three dead babies living in her house in Blackstone. It has turned into something else, a rally cry, perhaps, for the Millennials who are tired of being told that they are good for nothings and have no ambition. I’ve sat in cafes with books before without anyone noticing. The older generation hasn’t paid any attention at all. However, the time I brought in a tablet, I could hear the old people whispering about why I didn’t have a book and how this generation spends all of its time online. I was reading Kerouac or Pynchon, I can’t be sure which, but the older generation looks down upon us because they think somehow our lives are so easy that we take everything for granted. I suppose that is true, to a certain extent. We do take a lot for granted. There are a lot of things we don’t even think about because in a perfect world we shouldn’t have to worry about having to drop out of school to care for a sick parent. We shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not the meal we are about to receive has gone through so many processes to get to its final shape.

I hang around with two groups of people. Much like in Idlewild, I sit with a bunch of old guys on the cusp of the grave in Wakefield, where all they do is complain about this generation. In Wilmington, where my other friends hang out, the focus is on how drunk someone can get before passing out or how many beers a week someone can have before being called an alcoholic. Both groups spend so much time tearing other people down they forget their own hopes and dreams are passing them by.

Saw a documentary on Netflix yesterday called ‘Race to Nowhere.’ It’s about how much pressure we put on children today to succeed and we are robbing them of a childhood. We are literally stealing from the next generation of children, who have no idea how they are going to succeed in life without a college degree. Most of my favorite writers and actors don’t have much in the way of college. Kerouac was at Columbia for a year. Stephen King does have a B.A. from the University of Maine but there is strong evidence that he would have been successful even without that.

Writing today; I’ll update again later in the week.

Earlier this year I completed and had A Kiss After Dying professionally edited. I spent a considerable amount of time working on another story, Idlewild, as well as A Once Distant Memory and Molon Labe.

Idlewild is pretty special to me for a lot of reasons. The first, it takes place in my home town, and second, it was inspired by one of my favorite novels, The Sun Also Rises. Along with that book, The Great Gatsby, and On the Road, I set out to write a story that satire not just the idle rich men or Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but the idle poor, as well. I know a few women who have five or six children from five or six fathers; what amazes me is how they are able to pawn them off to their grandparents to ‘get on with living life.’ One was extremely irate that her parents refused to babysit. The mother had a doctor’s appointment, and her daughter felt she could change it. In actuality, the mother had cancer, and the daughter was a spoiled brat who didn’t care her own mother was dying.

I think the same four guys sit at every coffee shop across the nation. At the Dunkin’s in Wakefield, the majority are wealthy guys who are now retired. Most of the time they complain about the Democrats, who are giving away this country to those who don’t deserve it. In Wilmington, the adults my age complain about the Republicans who are hording all the money. In other words, each one thinks they are right and the other is wrong.

What I wanted to do in Idlewild was create a satire that lampooned both sides. This included making fun of myself as a college professor who doesn’t have to work a forty hour work week. Nothing would be off-limits, except race. I really didn’t want to focus on race, especially in light of the merciless killing of African Americans down south.

The end result was a 67,000 word novel that took me roughly two weeks to write, and another month to edit. I had wanted to release A Kiss After Dying in September, but I have decided against it, since it is still at two publishers for consideration.

So, Idlewild will be published first, and then, perhaps, A Once Distant Memory. Both of these novels focus on the town of Idlewild, but at different times.

This past week I finally grabbed procrastination by the coattails and chucked him out the window. In doing so I finally accomplished something that had been on my to-do list for some time.

A few days ago I took down one of the big three-ring spiral binders and cracked it open. The binder is one of about thirty, which chronicles my writing career from my first short story at about the age of seven, all the way on up to today. Even my dissertation, hardly recreational reading, is there.

The three ring binder in question contained my summer portfolio. The date ‘1999-2000’ stares back at me. I was 20, 21 then. Looking back, I realize that I had accepted a job at a gas station that was practically void of people so I could write in notebooks and not be bothered by anyone. This was in the days before 9/11; before the days when I got married and had responsibilities that came first. And I was attending Bunker Hill Community College, in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

One of the Archives – Final Portfolio for my winter, 1999 class.

Reading the first few short stories, neither of which were published, I find myself flustered. This is what I thought was good writing back then? Back then, the idea was treasured over the delivery method. One of the first short stories was little more than flash fiction: a man suffering from writer’s block is surprised when his typewriter starts churning out his next bestseller. Instead of being happy, however, he starts writing a story about – you got it, a man with writer’s block whose typewriter starts churning out a story. I am not sure where the inspiration comes from – it is possible I read a Harlan Ellison story about a writer suffering from block and waking up to hear gremlins (literally) writing his stories for him. Maybe it was inspired by Stephen King.

Instead of pushing the story aside, I did what I thought was best for the story: I rewrote it.

Back when I was a kid, a first draft was ‘good enough.’ I didn’t have the experience, the ability to edit what I was writing. That wouldn’t come until later, when I started reading about editing rather than writing. What I was doing instead was rewriting, rather than revisioning the story and thinking about ways it could be a tighter narrative.

When I was done, the story remained the same, but the narrative was very different. The 700-word bloated monster was a 400-word story that had all the excess trimmed from it. I waited a day, looked it over again, and submitted it to a magazine.

My desire to write stories stemmed not from my father, who was a newspaper editor, but from a group of several teachers, particularly Tim Teelin, who first introduced me to the world of Ray Bradbury when I was ten. It was as if someone had turned on a faucet. After reading ‘The Jaws Log’ about how the creators of the movie Jaws wanted to train a great white shark, I had an idea about a film director who wanted a T-Rex for his next movie, but winds up becoming dinner. I wrote this story considerably later, and it is in the three-ring-binder I mention here.

There are other stories in this particular compendium. Some of them are just echoes of ideas that I started but ended differently than I would have today. What it reveals is my fascination with clones (which, I might add, might have stemmed from being a possible twin in the womb, but that was never proven). One story was about a girl whose parents were so sick of her temper-tantrums that they had her cloned and programmed to be docile. Another is about a man whose career is in defending clones accused of capital crimes due to their being treated as slaves. Most of these were written between drafts of what eventually became ‘For None of Woman Born.’

The full Archives – over 25,000 pages, including novels, short stories, and published articles. At least twelve novels were lost in a hard disk crash. A friend lost the drive before the stories could be recovered.

In this long and winded entry, what I am trying to say is, don’t dismiss your early drafts of work. Save them. Cherish them. You can be as morbid as I: I have saved all of my rejection letters since I was about eighteen. In doing so you provide yourself with a legacy, and a chance for friends and family, and perhaps historians, to chart your progress. Not to mention yourself.

(July 31st article on Ricochet)

Back in March of this year, my phone service with Sprint was due to expire. The contract had been a nightmare; I had tried to get out of it twice to lower the $200 a month plan my wife and I somehow managed to get ourselves into, but it was no dice. I am not criticizing their service, rather, I am poking at myself. I should have read the fine print, and I didn’t. My fault.

In February, while the snow fell, my wife and I went to the North Shore to Best Buy for a set of headphones. My cat mangled my old ones, and I was fairly certain this pair wouldn’t make it through the weekend.

“I can’t wait for my contract to expire with Sprint.”

“Why? I haven’t had any problems with the service.”

“It’s just too expensive. The service is good, we just can’t afford to be spending two thousand, four hundred dollars a year on cell phones.”

My phone was sitting in the cup holder, while Bethany’s was in her purse. Her purse was open. Since we were talking about phones, she took hers out and began pinning on Pinterest.

The following day I arrived home from teaching my class to find a FedEx package on the table.

“Did you order something from Amazon?” my wife asked.

“Not that I’m aware of,” I replied. It wasn’t the response my wife was looking for. She knows I buy books frequently. Instead of spending the next ten minutes wondering what was in it, I tore it open.

It was a letter. From Sprint.

In much more elaborate terms than I mention here, the letter said that they didn’t want to see me leave, and that they were willing to give me a free upgrade to an iPhone 6 if I stayed.

“That’s a coincidence,” I explained to my wife. Then I looked at the FedEx package. It was overnight delivery.

“You think they were listening in the car yesterday?”

It was certainly possible. While I am not one of those people who thinks the government is always listening to my phone conversations, it is a possibility.

“For years, my Aunt used to say that this was happening,” my wife told me. “I used to think she was crazy. Now I’m not so sure.”

Neither am I.

Once again, I’ve been slacking on updating here. I’ve been busy writing posts for Ricochet, which unfortunately, you need a membership to see my posts, so I may decide, each week, to post at least a couple of the articles I’ve been writing there. I’ve scoured the site for some kind of disclaimer that says that I’m not to post what I’ve written there elsewhere, but it doesn’t really say much in the way of that. I have to err on the side of caution, though; the last thing I need is to be told otherwise.

In other news, classes are winding down and I have been busy grading, grading, and grading. The students over the semester seem a lazy bunch, and some of them are only now emailing me after an essay was assigned two weeks ago claiming they were sick and were unable to do the work. A quick glance at their Facebook reveals images of them at the beach over the past two weeks – together, I might add. Guess who is not going to be getting an extension!

Books currently reading: ‘Go Set a Watchman’ by Harper Lee, ‘Diaries’ by George Orwell. ‘Collected Letters’ by George Orwell ‘V’ by Thomas Pynchon. I will be finished with ‘Go Set a Watchman’ today and will do a review for January Gray Book Reviews later. ‘Watchman’ I tend to read at night before bed. There are a few other books that I have by my nightstand that I am going to be choosing from next. Not quite sure what yet.

Books currently writing: I have taken a break from Molon Labe if only because I found myself skimming yet again. I have reignited work on ‘A Once Distant Memory’ which I wrote last October, and the story has gone from third-person perspective to first, and then to third again. The novel is about 30k in, and I should think it will only be about 70k, perhaps even shorter.

What’s everyone else working on this weekend!

Blog Post!

Book Four of Molon Labe is done, at least on my end. I have been writing more articles and essays for various blogs and sites. One of the biggest mistakes that many writers make is that they stay in their little self-published zone. I think I’ve mentioned that before.

Book Four gave me a colossal headache. For one thing, the dates in the story were wrong; it seemed that three or four days worth or action and conversation took place on one specific day in the novel. I have sorted out the problem, condensed a few things, and instead of the section being about 35k, I shortened it to about 27k. So the novel as it stands right now is 157k, but remember that I am not done with the novel just yet.

I will be starting Book Five today. There are a number of essays and articles I want to be sending out today. Most are political. The easiest way to find out what side you are on in terms of politics is to read something you disagree with. While I am somewhat conservative, reading George Orwell’s account of giving up his well-paying job to understand the plight of the poor is enough to convince me that something has to be done about our homeless population, if not the drug addicts than at least our veterans, who deserve far more than the VA is currently giving them.

I have been reading Bird by Bird by Ann Lamont, which is a writing book that combines some of the advice given by Stephen King with the wit and humor she is known for. One of the biggest problems with writers, she observes, is that they believe that somehow everything they write does not need editing and is the greatest thing since Dickens penned A Christmas Carol. I am on the tenth rewrite of Molon Labe and I can tell you that it is now finally getting organized. Books 1-3 are something I can live with, and while Book 4 could stand more scrutiny, I have decided that my editor should take a look. My editors already wrote me back about Book 1 to say they think it is my best one yet. Maybe it’s because I took my time on it. I see a lot of writers releasing two or three books a year, and they’re usually just okay. I’ve learned the hard way that an extra rewrite can go a long way toward turning a novel into literature.

I’ll be providing links to various articles I have written as they are posted on various websites.

Hello, everybody! I hope everyone had a great fourth! I know it’s been a little while since I updated. I’ve been busy editing and reworking parts of Molon Labe, which will eventually become my fourth published novel (Either ‘A Once Distant Memory’ or ‘A Kiss After Dying’ will become my third. I am not sure which one yet. Kiss is done, but I have submitted it to several places that publish novellas. A Once Distant Memory needs a total rewrite). In addition, I have been writing articles for the Incidental Inkblot, and trying to get some essays published with the big literary publishers.

All too often, we indie authors live in our own little world of self-publishing. While it may do well for some, we do not have the opportunity to reach a wider audience by doing this. When we submit stories to anthologies, submit essays to magazines, conduct book reviews, or even comment on other people’s blogs, we are, in a sense, raising our visibility. While writing fiction is fun, and publishing on Amazon feels great, we cannot neglect that there are other outlets out there where we can submit our work. Neither can we forget the art of the short story. Too many indie authors are pushing short stories aside in favor of longer works because people typically will not pay .99 cents for a short story (they’ll pay three bucks on a coffee, but I digress). It’s time to bring back the short story; I am going to be editing a few more chapters of Molon Labe this week (the novel broke 160k last week) and then editing two of my older stories, That Hideous Strength, and Long as I Can See the Light.

Not much of an update lately; I’ve been working on several non-writing projects, including tearing up my back lawn to create a pea-gravel yard. Molon Labe has reached over 150k, and I have gone back to the beginning to smooth over a few rough spots before sending the first part of the book, almost 25k, to my editors. The bulk of the story is done, but what I need to focus on is shortening the general chapters (commentary). In the first section they aren’t a distraction, but by the sixth book they are big honkers, roughly 5k each. It is one thing to have commentary that reflects not just where we are going but also human nature; it is another entirely to make a science-fiction novel so political as to be unreadable.

The first part of the book may not need much in the way of editing. Since the book is long I may decide to serialize it, but it is more likely that the story will be published some time in 2016. I plan on working on the second ‘book’ in the story tonight, sending that in to my editor, and perhaps starting to edit one of the other stories on the back burner, perhaps Idlewild, which has not seen light of day since last November, when I wrote it.

I remember when I was eighteen and slowly turning more political in my writing. I was deeply inspired by the Michael Douglas movie ‘Falling Down’ and wanted to write about a father who goes psycho on a used car salesman for selling him two cars that broke down after the thirty-day warranty was up. It wasn’t going to work, though; at the age of 18 I knew more about molecular biology than I did about what it took to be a father.

The big problem with being a writer, especially one that desires to have an impact like Orwell or H.G. Wells, is that there is a whole lot of garbage writing out there now. It has, in fact, invaded every aspect of entertainment. Films have little meaning today outside of drug use. Music, especially rap and country, have been so watered down that they do little more than repeat themselves each time. People do not want anything real anymore. They want fluff. They want more and more of the same. It is unfortunate, but writers are going to have to get used to it.