Fifteen years on, I’ve started to rework my first completed novel manuscript.
It’s The Wine Ghost, in which we consider the terrible freedom of Frank Boyles, the last Baby Boomer. Set in Arizona, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, and Thailand, The Wine Ghost was twelve years in the making. I wrote at least 300,000 words on three continents to get the 150,000 words I kept in the 2004 version; ditching a whole novel’s worth of subplots, backstory, and anthropological noodling taught lessons in writing that no classroom can contain.
The Wine Ghost 2K4 was dense and challenging, but writers who read the whole thing (and the handful of agents who read the pitch and substantial excerpts) said it was a remarkable achievement – though not one of them offered to represent it.
I’ve plundered it since; 40,000 words of characters and subplots, including an entire valley and one of the most frightening maniacs I’ve ever written, went into The Devouring God.
It’s a better book for this elision. Even in the slimmed-down 2004 manuscript, the expat milieu was almost Dickensian, filled with stock characters that had little room to breathe on their own, and, in their multiplicity, overshadowed a simple tale of disgrace and redemption.
The 100,000-word manuscript is much easier to work with. I had put off reworking it because I thought to rewrite it in third person (nope, staying in first now). I also thought I might restructure some bits. The pacing is off due to chapters up to 9,500 words in length, but I doubt I’ll break up chapters. I see some major cuts in the future.
I’ll still do lots of line edits on the way because I’m a different writer now, but I’ll leave alone a lot that I probably would not write today. These stylistic indiscretions (i.e., showing off) brand it as an irretrievable semi-autobiographical first novel from a boy who had read too damned much Cormac McCarthy and far too little Hemingway. However, it is what it is.
• reuse, repair, recycle, rewrite
From The Wine Ghost, I’ve harvested short fiction (“Dry Wash” in The Bicycle Review, “Coolie Tales” in not from here, are you?, “The Belly Lesson” and “Tracy-baby Tells a Ghost Story” in Danse Macabre) and poetry (“The Algerian Witch’s Abandoned Brood” in Hauptfriedhoff, for which I also penned the foreword). Versions of all these appear in The Mooncalf and Other Tales, but the originals in context will be different beasts altogether.
• thematic analysis: the rut or the sweet spot?
We make and break patterns in our writing over the years. Sometimes patterns emerge because we’re caught in the loop of trying and failing to get it right, and sometimes such patterns remain because we got it right the first time and it works so damned well. Because we’re swinging for the fences and bursting with things to say, our first novels are perfect for spotting the beginnings of larger thematic patterns in our writing.
The Wine Ghost is no exception. My old friend, developmental editor Zak Johnson, says this: “I think you’ve mined your Wine Ghost for more than you even realize. (the evil uncle from “Dry Wash”) has reappeared as the obscene old man in many of your works … if you do (rewrite The Wine Ghost as a commercially viable novel), keep the original as a relic of the exorcism that brought it out of you.”
Or as a standalone shrine to my daddy issues. Enough said there.
• just one more draft, I promise
After 30 years as a professional writer and editor, I put The Wine Ghost aside and started submitting fiction in 2009. I had a completed and competitive genre novel making the rounds of publishers, and I was halfway done with the sequel. I couldn’t drop that to start draft five of The Wine Ghost, especially knowing that it would take a sixth and seventh draft to meet the goals I had for it then. I had too much going on. I sometimes wanted to just strip off everything I could repurpose from The Wine Ghost and leave it like a car on cinderblocks. I could move on, I told myself.
I didn’t. I’ve planted crossover elements in my paranormal thriller series such that it occupies the same time and space as The Wine Ghost. It’s not just the paranormal thriller series, either. I’m constantly laying Easter eggs and setting breadcrumb trails that lead back to the old friend in the bottom drawer.
I don’t kid myself that The Wine Ghost will ever, ever make more money or even gain more critical acclaim than a genre book. It’s not that I miss the freshness and urgency of the literary expression that led to my writing The Wine Ghost; I’m a better writer now than when I wrapped up the fourth draft.
The dreadful fact is that it’s an important book, the book that called me to write it because it may speak to some teenager as confused and depressed as I was when I first got a little relief by reading Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren or Lord Dunsany’s Pegana tales. It may show some kid a path out of darkness.
And it may sound perverse, but I hope you have an old friend in your office to keep you moving as well.
Visit it sometimes. Thank it for keeping you working. Promise it that you’ll stop by more often and that you’ll eventually bring it to life and set it free on an unsuspecting world.
It doesn’t hurt to make these promises, even if you don’t intend to keep them.
And don’t worry if you forget to go to see your old friend every once in a while.
If yours is anything like mine, it will come to see you.