flowers yesterday, and hid the flowers in water in the garage. Now, as I sit down to tap out this second guest post for The Rap Sheet, I’m thinking about a couple of nights ago, Tuesday.I was invited to a screening of Operation Homecoming. So I get to the theater to hook up with my two friends. Both are writers, and both are gay ... or that is, one is gay and one is a lesbian ... or is it that “gay” as a term covers both? At any rate, we’re in the lobby and they start talking about the pressure to make love on Valentine’s Day. The male says he jolly well might not feel like doing so, but there is that pressure to perform. The woman says do it early in the morning to get it out of the way. Which at my age, hell, I’m just happy to open my eyes. But just thought I’d pass along those Valentine’s Day tips.
Anyway, the cool thing, writing-wise, is that Operation Homecoming is an Oscar-nominated documentary wherein Iraqi vets (and I don’t mean veterinarians in Iraq [which might very well be an interesting subject]) and others tell their own story of a gripping experience over there, or back here in the case of a marine who escorts dead soldiers being shipped home. As the real GI is on camera, starting to tell his or her tale, the film segues to a re-creation--each segment is handled differently, from animation to actuals--and an actor provides a voice-over narration, reading the piece the vet workshopped. This documentary grew out of a series of writing workshops sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Writers such as Vietnam vets Joe Haldeman (The Forever War), Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life) and others, including Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October) and Marilyn Nelson (Carver: A Life in Poems, and daughter of a Tuskegee Airmen), who, according to NEA chairman Dana Gioia, came up with this great idea, conducted these workshops in various places with some 6,000 participants. There’s also a published anthology of these and other non-fiction and fiction-based-on-facts pieces, available from Random House.
Even though writing about war is not directly crime and mystery writing (though there are plenty of characters populating my books who have a military background), as an author, I’m always charged to be in the writing environment and to hear how others are turned on by the craft. Then, too, seeing the doc also helped me get fresh perspective on my recently concluded online mystery novella, The Underbelly. The protagonist is a semi-homeless Vietnam vet named Magrady who stumbles into a mystery involving a disabled friend’s disappearance from Skid Row. I’m now going back through the text of that story, doing some tightening and rewriting in preparation for the hardcopy version of The Underbelly by an indie press I can’t name at this juncture, as George Bush I would say.
One of the obvious things driven home to me by composing a serial was to be careful not to write myself into a corner. Even though I worked from an outline, if there was a character trait or a bit of business about the plot introduced in, say, the second installment, I damn well better make sure it pays off or is at least consistent with the body of the tale by the 10th installment. I’d like to say that I didn’t trip myself up, but that would be a fib. I think I got the big stuff right, but some details escaped me. Lessons learned as I get deeper into Citizen Kang.
OK, I’m running out of steam and gonna jump in the shower. But I leave you with this mini-contest challenge. In The Underbelly, Magrady is only referred to thusly, by his last name. I want to give him a first name for the print version. So if you haven’t read any of the story, and are so inclined, bop over to the site when you have the time and read a few installments, and see what bubbles up for you as a name his mama would have given him. Your No-Prize, True Believer, as Stan Lee would say, is in the mail. Seriously, though, you’ll be acknowledged in the book for coming up with the name, if I decide to go ahead and use it.
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