Endurance Writing 101

I have come to see myself as an endurance writer. At age 40, I don't have the money to be still striving for a breakthrough as a serious author, postponing the other life decisions that should be made when one reaches this defining age. But in the past year-and-a-half some events have occured that broke through the barriers, gave me renewed purpose.

In late 2013 I broke an endurance record in tournament poker and used the winnings to self publish a poetry-art collaboration I had a lot invested in artistically. There followed 3 months of serious manuscript revision of the novel Arisugawa Park, a book partially based on my 5 years teaching English in Japan.This was the mental afterburn of the record-breaking experience: if I can win this crazy tournament, I can certainly finish a novel so outside-the-box it took me 10 years to conceptualize and craft.

This effort paid off, somehow. I received the annual 2014 Book Passage Mystery Writer's Conference scholarship (selected through a 5-page manuscript submission) and met my current agent Kimberley in person - she is always a featured guest.

I'll continue the story in the upcoming weeks..

thanks... congrats are not yet in order.

This story is partly cautionary.

For those curious about my writing, I am putting my latest novel Cowachunga up as a beta work, in real time, at the EnduranceWriter blog.

Full disclosure: I also have a Soylent Log going at endurancewriter. This hopefully gives thread readers a basic background from which to understand my narrative.

Here is a sample, today's post. As you can see, I am often tongue-and-cheek. Never crossing the line into snarky (that is reserved for agents).

SOYLENT LOG 4.1


Here I am at Day 4 and I still have not blown up the Hab with my Soylent and hydrazine experiments. That's the good news. The bad news is that I'm living in my rover, having turned the hab into a hydrogen bomb. I did not realize the rice protein in the all-purpose gruel would have this effect in combination with the oxygen in the iridium chamber. Whoops! Guess I'll never find out whether Cindy was a good replacement for Chrissy on Three's Company.


Actually (apologies to Andy Weir), there is not much to report. I have been dutifully blending my Soylent-fruit smoothie concoction and consuming it. The taste is beginning to not appeal to me. But I think it is worth it in that I have been getting into a good, sustainable diet in a matter of days, not years (the 'always tomorrow' syndrome). When you quit something cold turkey––like eating excessive solid foods––well, that is a chance to create a new paradigm.


Kind of like learning not to whine about the publishing industry. It is what it is. I am what I am. A ****ing good writer who does not really want to get discovered. Meanwhile, A MEGA SCIENTIFIC SOUND percolates in my mind, reinforcing my love of classic dub reggae.


Actually, I did have a peak experience yesterday, three days into the Soylent diet. I was invited to the Imperial Spa* on a free pass by Marie and spent several hours soaking and enjoying an almost meditational ambiance. At the end of this time, I accompanied my traveling friend to an intimate DJ type thing in an outdoors garden setting. Sans flute, unfortunately, but walking there at 11pm in the temperate Vegas night, having taken a packet of natural energy supplement, I felt literally 20 years younger. I felt energized, healthy, balanced, with lots of pep in my step and a realization that life is not so bad. Money or no money, friends and the pursuit of Art will see anyone through. And this Soylent gruel... well it is getting my body in balance somehow.

I was going to do some work, but then I thought no.. I'm just going to light up and listen to the Fleet Foxes' eponymous first album.

And yeah work out a really tricky section of Cowachunga.. this is where two major characters get defined, in the ghost town of Beattie. The question is, how do you say things between the lines that define subtle power relationships between two young men. While describing an eerily deserted one-time mining town on the Cal-Nevada high plateau.

‪#‎endurancewriter‬

I don't know if this is the place to continue writing. I have a lot more parts to the story. Is there an active place to tell a story and get feedback.

Or as Floyd said - hello, is there anybody out there?

There are times when I feel like my writing flows and is flitting, natural. And then there are moments of painstaking craftsmanship... when I go into the paragraph and tear up all the substructure and try and put it together in a drum tight fashion. To express what I am really trying to convey in the most exact, evocative way.

Why this life path, what goal but writing itself?

Fullon_v4.0 said:

I hope your writing endeavors are successful. You're never too young or too old to start!

Click to expand...

Thank you. I just started last year, but I am having a lot of fun!

Thanks for your input Connecticut Yankee. I never really share my manuscript work these days until I publish it. I am currently working on the serial novel Cowachunga, writing as I go.

One per week, delivered every Monday. My conception is solo writing, without a net.

Challenge today:


Delineating more constraints by which I am bound as a writer throughout this novel creation process. I always try and do this to myself when I start a serious work. Figure out which arbitrary constraints I cannot go beyond while writing it--this is the original, spontaneously derived architecture. The beauty is that the reader will never know the reason for hidden symmetries, as characters are filled in chiaroscuro.


It is fiction, therefore untraceable. #endurancewriter

Last month I began the creation of a novel Cowachunga in real time, with sections posted as I wrote them.

The interesting aspect of this project is that it is really making me devote serious time to writing, editing, and plotting. I am taking all those skills gained from Arisugawa Park and plotting a complex novel on the fly. I am not consulting with others about content, although I have been handed plot points from many travelers.

This is the opposite of how serious works are written these days, with books requiring months and years of beneath-the-hood massaging, ghost writing, before they are deemed presentable. I want to bring the fervor back to writing, to make it fresh and new to myself--as a lifelong student of the art of melding my reality to words.

I sincerely hope no one can guess where this novel will end.

#endurancewriter

It's coming, it's coming. Popular demand notwithstanding, Cowachunga 2.6 will be posted tomorrow. One more night to sleep on it and make sure my last edits sit right.

Around 1,000 times editing, rereading, reediting the prose before pressing "publish." Catching myself off guard. Trying to make it seem effortless, natural, in my own voice.

The result: Cowachunga 2.6 - Cohuanga.

Why am I not posting this in the critique subforum?

1. I am not up to 50 posts.
2. I am that confident in my writing. If it is published with my name attached, it is my writing and vision. I welcome words of praise, criticism. But it is done. The words are out there and there is no going back.

Writing without a net. I wonder if James Patterson teaches that in his "master class."

#endurancewriter

STILL CHASING....

This is an interesting moment in time. I have nearly cast off the shackles of writing shit that does not interest me.

I have written thousands of hack articles, posted anonymously online, over the past five years––my peculiar training in endurance. I've learned to embrace writing basic pieces on random shit, on topics from the Mayan calendar to film noir. This has allowed me to stay out of the office rut (albeit at a barely break-even rate of compensation), continue to adhere to a code of creating literary work that reflects my own vision.

A dozen rejections by respected editors for Arisugawa Park are behind me. Time to let go of that baby & all the sweat equity it represents––years trying to capture some essence of life in Japan, which I did not find in many other novels. The novel is admittedly imperfect, sprawling. I fought with the text, carefully preserving spontaneity and personal expression in lieu of plot elements designed to manipulate the reader into a certain emotional response.

Which is not to say that no one is cognizant of what I am up to. While perhaps I do not fit into the traditional authorial mold, I get 500 hits each time I post an installment of my early-stage serial novel Cowachunga - Cohuanga. Without any marketing except random fb posts and tweets, a couple forum threads.

Rather than break up an already written work and call it a serial, I have decided to write as I go. Posts occur directly after the final edit each week. Keeping the quality high is hard, but the elevated motivation and spontaneity more than make up for it.

The pleasure of writing is not derived from money (I have none). It is from the journey, the art of chasing the sun.

Cowachunga is the same as Cohuanga. There are a lot of differences in perceptions between cultures--words get mispronounced, warning signs misapprehended. Somehow we connect, even in conflict.

I got the idea for Cowachunga one desert night at the Hostel Cat, sitting on a bench hearing the whistle of a passing train. I was playing a flute and demon-chaser. Right about that time I had the notion that whatever interesting story I heard next would be the basis of my novel.

Sure enough, two Australian travelers on a road trip across America sat down and proceeded to tell me a tale of driving a rental car through the desert and stopping at an isolated diner. There was a twist that I cannot yet reveal. (The Mustang is not of that night, but of an afternoon in Vegas spent with a Swiss and a Parisian, rumbling down the street in search of topless beach clubs and exceptional pho).

SO that was the basis of Cowachunga, that and the one-day stop in Tonopah that cemented the locale in my mind as one worth meditating on. A town that housed Nevada's tallest building (five stories) at its silver mining peak and subsequently threatened to blow away. A town with a haunted cemetery (1901-1911, life was not easy) next to the circa 1950 Clown Motel. A town built plumb on a silver lode par excellence, with 12 mines spanning 20 miles that all had secret tunnels terminating under the Main Street bank. The car conveyance down to the pits designed by the same gentleman who designed the Cable Car. There is no Tonopah equivalent in the book - this was simply the nascent moment I knew the next novel would be set in Nevada.*

For all its desert ambiance, Cowachunga is to an actual place what the United States was to Kafka's Amerika. A springboard for the imagination to roam, traverse unlikely realities.

I was walking around the streets of old Reno, reading the sections of Cowachunga on my iPhone for the first time in forever. Chapter One is pretty much finished––I really felt like vultures were circling me in the desert at the time I crafted it from June to August. I was definitely in a Jack London/The Martian frame of mind. Drinking Soylent and seeking out shady corners in no-place-to-hide Vegas.

Reading sections 2.1 to 2.6 this afternoon, I realized that my exact meaning was not precisely stated. I needed to revise certain things pronto. And now that has been accomplished.

In the midst of all this reading and editing, I received an email from Kimberley to the effect that, despite not selling Arisugawa Park up to the present, she is keeping a candle lit. Despite everything, she has faith and may indeed be awaiting the next installment of Cowachunga.

I am aiming to have Cowachunga 2.7 up in the wee hours of Monday morning. There are so many complex crosscurrents, plot foreshadowings, to consider.

Another positive - I found an authentic (to my ear) 1968 Jimi Hendrix - B.B. King jam on youtube. The creative way that Jimi Hendrix navigates the thin line B.B. King & the Butterfield Blues Band give him is astounding. Makes me want to chill out to some Charlie Christian live at Minton's 1941. And some Django.

Thanks for reading. I like the fact this thread is on a kind of quiet forum where I can just be myself.

Last summer I posted on a poker forum as part of a kind of gonzo journalist assignment and would start threads that got 10,000 to 45,000 views, hundreds of replies. I was just having fun. But getting that kind of viewership is a heavy burden. No one exactly knows how life goes, but for me it is all about laying low.

I am sure of only one thing. Stories are pouring out of me right now like never before. My agent did not know what she was getting into, when she took me on. But she takes everything on faith. I am one of two authors she just can't seem to place with any publisher (she repped Barbara Boxer for her recently announced memoir).

Sometimes I suspect that because Arisugawa Park is so ambitious (though mechanical, one editor said in an "easy pass") it is creating a legend. What better life than that of a professional writer, whose creative output is valued by cognoscenti?

I already have an idea for the next book, it will be set on a small island I know very well and mimic Cannery Row in ambition.

#endurancewriter

Cowachunga 2.7 - Very Ape is live. Slow driving in the desert, some kind, a big decision. ‪#‎endurancewriter‬

Traveling as usual, playing the flute and experiencing new locales (as documented at the EnduranceWriter site). Currently in Mindoro, gearing up for the Malasimbo Festival. Jamming as usual at unexpected moments, keeping it real.

Having dropped my half-hearted* agent for the nonce, I am now gearing up toward releasing Arisugawa Park as a serial novel, over the course of a year. I guess I need to reach 50 posts to have the opportunity to present it to the AW community within the 'Share Your Work' forum. I am not much of an AW forum user at present (I go in cycles) but I would like to get back into it, particularly as I now have something tangible to share and the agent's reluctant blessing.

As for the shopping process? A number of respected editors at major imprints lauded Ari Park's ambition but found it not geared to their taste, or today's supposedly inattentive market. Bottom line, it was too long for the genre in which my agent was pitching. I consider the work literature, so from now on I do it my own way.

* The decision point for me was that, after all this time, the agent still cannot pronounce the title. When I asked if she had mentioned my work to any editors in person, she said that everything was done by email these days. At which point I asked myself WWFD (What Would Franzen Do)

Ok, I'll stop posting on this thread, for the time being. Thanks for reading, it is now time to move Ari Park to the Share Your Work literary forum, where I will be posting new sections nearly every day.