National Novel Writing Month Winner

I usually do not post personal information, but this one was too juicy not to share.

Back East for the Thanksgiving Holiday, I completed the task of writing a 50,000 word novel in just under thirty days (twenty four to be exact) yesterday on the occasion of my thirty-third birthday. It's an unruly mess of a child, but it's a book all the same. Believe in the Unreal is a big, wet kiss to the South and a love of music that affects everything I do. It's about inspiration, and the forces that control the creative endeavors that we choose to pursue.

"Believe in the Unreal" Excerpt Three -- Jazz

Art was wrapped up in recording his first album, so much that he hardly thought about Deb anymore, his thoughts mainly thinking of the minutae of recording an album, and his thoughts these days drifted towards home, and the once towering figures of Mother and Father.

His upbringing and on a larger scale, his mother and father had been notably absent for years now, ever since he dropped out of college.

The rural Tennesee home came back to him, as he settled into the studio for another evening. He remembered his mothers yellow dress, and thoughts came to him quickly and frantic.

There was, he discovered while tuning his guitar, a certain sadness that crept over him whenever his thoughts drifted back in time long enough to register the time spent apart from looming figures of Mother and Father.

He’d said “Dada” first, before Mama, which was strange now because he barely thought of both of them. They were still in the mountains, stern faces blankly staring into the light of the television, seated on the same couch Art did for years, until he found the secret fantasies that lingered among the fretboard of his first Sears guitar that his father had purchased for him on the occasion of this twelfth birthday.

His father was in the garage prying loose a screw rusted solid to his old bicycle. On a vice the bike frame sat, until a large scream came from the kitchen. The bike slid to the ground, my father jumped to the scene in the kitchen while Art, a million miles away plucked the vinyl strings on his guitar.

A snake had crawled in to the kitchen and had bit Gladys square on the arm. She’d passed out from the fear, and when Art wandered into the room from his bedroom he saw the site of his father cradlind an unconscious mother.

“What the hell were you doing in there?” He demanded, his face a strained expression of rage and desperate recognition.

“Playing guitar. What.” Art stopped dead in his tracks, and let out a yelp, he had seen the two incisions in his mothers arm.

“Don’t be such a sissy, your mother was bitten by a snake.”

Art ran out of the room, tears streaming down his cheeks. He locked his door and cried for an hour before falling asleep. He always slept when he felt this stress. Sleep had a way of comforting him in a way that came on holistically, enveloping the boy right down to his hush puppies.

His father banged on the door, demanding that his son come out. He heard, from a far away dream the insistent demands of his father, but he lay there paralyzed.

When he did wake up the house was empty, and on the floor lay the three drops of blood shed from the snake incident. He sat on the floor, sucked his thumb and cried.

He remembered this moment, sitting on the floor, uncertain of when his parents would return home or if they would. Unsure of when the pain would end, or even the uncertainty of it, for years later. It was a moment that haunted him throughout his life.

At the moment though, the Producer and Drummer stood over Art’s limp reposed torso that squirmed along the edges of the sole loveseat in the green room.

“Time to go boss, we’re done for the night.”

Stumbling to get up, he struggled for comprehension for a location, a reference.

He needed home now, more than when he was desperate. He would make this album, go home to mom and dad (if they would still see him) and fly to Houston to get Deb back. He made up his mind right there, and the producer and drummer stood there speechless, unaware of the vision they had just interrupted.

Meanwhile Deb worked days at the firm, and lunches spent in the record store, browsing through the blues and gospel sections. She would go here, for quite literally inspiration. She would slip on headphones and look past the nine to five existence shed shelled out for herself, beyond the drab hourly desire to hop on a boat across the delta from where she lived and visit the tiny studio.

She wanted to be a DJ. She had begun staying up later and later, to hear the song that reminded her of the man she loved and subsequently left. In the process, she discovered the healing factor of Jazz, how a sly saxophone could cover ones blues like honey, soaking up all that pain and bitterness. In Jazz she found that all of her hollowed-out feelings were really assets from which she could pour the redemption in a litter stouter each time.

Crossing the delta in a large gondola, across the river styx of revelation to the other side, where the transmitter and studio lay.

She would try out for the empty three to six am slot, forgoing her office job, and slipping into something all together more alluring.

In her dreams she would sneak over to the other side of creativity, into the realm of imagination, smoky jazz clubs, guys with all the answers, operating at all angles, stretching out further into the marshes, looking out past the bayou, into the thickets where crocodiles swam wild, freed from the boundaries of civilization.

People spoke differently, from the civil war, hearts bled onto cheap manuscripts, in the back of cars, with candles. She heard country music, the lull of the poplar trees, and gumbo, smoked fishes, meats and craw daddies. She heard Zydeco.

She saw visions of bombed out southern railroads, abandoned images of pretty waifish girls, plum trees sweetly filled with nectar that rolled off of her tongue like the piano works of Mccoy Tyner. She saw all these things that rolled out of Billie Holiday’s voice, silky smooth, hiding the heroin addiction, like we all hid things, like she hid him, and he hid her and there was a larger force responsible for the Jazz but she didn’t know who it was, this grand conductor making things happen pulling strings, making her try out to be a Jazz DJ from three to six when she knew so little of jazz in the first place, learning a little bit more each night, her education in depression, junkie saxophonists, John Coltrane’s mythical withdrawal from drugs and ascension to god. It was all there in her dreams waiting for her to unlock it.

The radio squawked at her in the morning, fresh from three hours of jazz.

It was time to quit her day job.

"Believe in the Unreal" Excerpt pt. 2

This was written before my novel actually found a plot, by means o f trip to New Orleans in 1998, with Whiskeytown's Stranger's Almanac a constant companion.

Its' an attempt at a fictionalized (somtimes extremely) memoir that left room for improvement and progress.

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I’m standing inside my apartment, on the 12^th of May 2003., seeing how this moment led to the next like the decaying footprints from last monsoon season that still hang in the now dried mud of the garden.

My wife has just left, (for the weekend) and I have an inclination to walk down the street to the gym. It’s a nice day, so I waltz down there, in that innocent, doe-eyed way that people do when they’re in love and cant believe that their life is about to become unwound again.

I see her, still in town, in Portland, when she’s supposed to be in Bend visiting relatives. I’m about to say hi until I see him and the way that they kiss, lock lips, and the way their eyes focus in on each others corneas, not afraid to hide anything.

They’ve been sleeping together. She gave me that look when we were first together, in the biblical sense of the word.

Standing there, holding flowers just bought from the florists next door. Standing there feeling like the biggest chump. I duck into the nearby alley. And I feel the whole thing unwinding like it did that day with the Yogi.

And that’s why this is chapter one, because after that moment, it was like I could never believe in anything again. Because if I did believe, something would come along and destroy my image. My paradigm smasher would come the moment I thought I was being too paranoid, discounting any sense of faith.

I started this novel because I had the question: “How can we believe in the unreal?” Must we always start out believing that things will be perfect only to see them drift away the way relationships do?

The way my first period class, at the beginning of the school year behaves perfectly, and I believe in the power of teaching, and pat myself on the back upon returning from school, having warm thoughts about student achievement and the great job I’m doing, only to have it unravel before the next few weeks. Unwinding over the hoops, ladders, slings and arrows of the next sixteen weeks before the trimester ends and a new class emerges; ready to do the whole thing over again.

The way that a new mother in law is perfect, and your image is perfect in their eyes, until they catch you with a cigarette at a long party on a gorgeous summer evening on a beach, after dancing and mojitos.

You’re standing there, feet still in sand, and the whole thing comes apart. Relations won’t quite be the same after that; there isn’t really a way to go back. The impression has been destroyed, like a china plate at a Greek Ouzo Bacchanal.

I’m trying something new here, an attempted belief in the power of fiction. In trying to write a novel about an imaginary character that sees the same thing becoming unwound, but not at such an immediate and intense degree. Will reality itself come apart in my attempt to exorcise myself from the character I’ve created?

Because the character is not me, really it isn’t. It’s someone who falls in love harder than I do. He stumbles and falls at greater frequencies than I do. His mistakes are catastrophic while mine are merely annoying.

My (and I mean the person writing this, for the person is not me and I am not the person) belief in the Unreal is dependent upon my character’s belief in the unreal. Of living life for a whole year, day to day, three hundred and sixty five days of them in an attempt for just one year to belief in the unbelievable potential of man for just one year, keep a straight face for that long. Granted my days and years will alter somewhat, offering an uncomfortable trip through the back pages of the characters mind. It’ll be like yearbook day, only harder and it will last for hundreds of pages.

It won’t be easy, but we’ll get started, right away in the present. We won’t start on January 1^st, but on the fist of November on the day after Halloween.

November 1^st – The day after Halloween

All Hallow’s eve has bestowed upon the soggy crags of the Pacific Northwest a torrent of rainfall. Highway tracks are gutters of bountiful water, and I spray around heading north on highway 205, gunning my white shark (with all appropriate apologies to the late Hunter S. Thompson) all the way into Vancovuer.

With daylight savings time ending, I can believe in that, in the improbable beginning chapter of this my first official novel (second if we include that one about the fish and the microscope and the concurrent invention of the telegraph while Samuel Gompers yelled about getting his wooden teeth back from the grave of George Washington, and how grave robbing isn’t going to sell any books, but wasn’t that kind of half the point?) in the unabashed glories of Daylight Savings Time: An extra hour of sleep, a lighter morning.

There’s something in the sky that reminds my paranoid side that this is morning, and the strange vibes crossing the border gives me is no different this morning. And the radio clucks on about Bush’s new appointee and it all gets lost in the miasma of rain, and journalistic embellishments.

And even though my deadline for believing in the unreal started last night at midnight, I couldn’t help but believe in the power of Halloween as well, even if the premise was weak and ill-observed.

But on the way to work this morning I can believe in Daylight savings time, and in the opposites. Maybe this marathon of faith and radiant positivity is all about spin. It works for politicians after all. I hear them on my radio, making excuses, shifting blames and passing the buck. They make it look so easy, I’m sure I could do it for myself.

The day passes with little flair, witnessing the slow unraveling of that class that used to be so good, believing in the power of my peers while witnessing their simultaneous meltdowns. Ok, I’ve found another belief I can believe in, my own naïve notions. Even though I see these notions destroyed everyday, I can believe in the destruction of these incomplete notions, founded only be text books and novels, not yet practices, tested and approved in the arena of the real world.

And most of all I believe in lunch!! It comes after two classes, two classes that feel like hammers on your brain when you are a little dehydrated.

I flirt with the occasional teacher, extending out my fantasies. Hey, I can believe in that.

But I’m turning this, my debut novel into a sort of reality-based televisual feast, instead of a stern belief that the world is not inherently evil, but good. Not rotten to the core, but golden in its innocence, even if the outer-layer of it is contemptible.

“When we come back from a commercial break.”

Author's Note: I'm in the process of sorting though what may be the biggest written mess of the new century. Below is an excerpt that may or may not be historically accurate.



November 2nd, 1995.


I press the illuminated button called "VTR" that activates the commercial feed tape roll. The lights on the set dim and I am at the control board, making all the things happen.

As is usually the case, I am on way too much caffeine. Crouched in front of the video switcher, I stare into the monitor, waiting for that moment to restart the live feed. I have a sheet to my right that tells me when we come back from break.

The talent is getting warmed up now, adding powder to distinguished noses, rouge to hollowed-out check bones.

When the lights are up and illuminated, they resemble skulls lit up by lightening, ready for the cue from me, and when I'm not on the verge of laughing, I get it right.

I still can't believe I ended up here, immediately after college. I'm the overnight guy here at this little ABC affiliate in Charleston, SC. The sports guy comes in with a wet cigar and berates me for my timing from the last package of the night. He does this after the news cast has ended, and the talent (three of them if you include the weather man, who doubles as sports and current affairs coordinator.)has left for the evening.

The guy who taught me most of what I know is a real TV aficionado. I know this because when I was shadowing him (interesting term used to describe one night shift guy watching another night shift guy) the way he would watch TV showed his undying dedication to it as a medium. His face would relax a little bit, and he would sit back, taking in each frame of video (there are two frames for every one second of video that you see, scary to know that each second is split into polar extremities of good and evil eh?) and savoring each transition and right-on-the-money cut.

He’s always on the verge of saying "I love this stuff.” He's a devout prince fan.

He's not as fun as Jimmy, the morning guy. He performs his act (very few master control operators actually perform their job, they let the job perform a number on them, knocking out posture and accuracy of sight.) like a conjurer. He fondles the switches on the board like Hendrix at Altamont. This guy is always “rocking and rolling”.

He always ate Hardee’s breakfast biscuits, the deluxe ones with the spicy sausage interspersed with American cheese, and he savored it as much as Damon savored each frame of video.

Jimmy worked the Saturday morning shift, watching cartoons and infomercials. He was a family man, and he’d watch the same programming his family did.

He was a magician, sitting at the board like an organist, an organist of bones.

But I digress. After the 10:00 news, the night would settle down, and I’d let the automated show picker reach out its robotic arm and pluck another video cassette out of the slot, like the union stock yards in Chicago, watching video cassettes plucked from their ranks like pigs ready for the slaughter.

If I was on enough caffeine, I wouldn’t let the sports guy get to me, tapping his cigar, talking about games and teams I had little interest in.

But I did not lose faith in Television. There were times, when after working a shift, I would come home (at 6:30) and crack a beer to WKRP in Cincinnati, staring at it in my one bedroom shack. No really, it was a one bedroom shack, a bedroom with four walls and an ineffective space heater.

The TV had wood paneling. I picked it off of the street just a few months earlier, prior to moving in. Staring at it was like calling up memories from childhood, and I reveled in it, despite my flaming hatred for the commercial pabulum of currently I was currently doing or performing, depending on the mood I was in when you asked me.

Periodically I would get called into the General Manager's office, himself a radio DJ of an oldies stati50s He had that 50s radio voice, like the DJ in Grease. DJ’s in his days were beacons of positivity, and he took the same aesthetic into dealing with people.

This was almost always bad. Whenever I’d miss a commercial spot, I’d hear about it. If I missed a commercial, forgot to air it, aired the wrong one, an email would be sent to the traffic coordinator who would use this data to talk to the client, who was steaming mad, because his phone sex ad didn’t air at 4:35AM like it was supposed to.

So in that pleasant radio voice, he’s scold me for missing another ad, locking myself out of the building while out on a smoke break, for locking myself out of the station, wandering outside until the first morning news person arrived at 4am, freezing wondering if that’s what failure felt like, cold and stinging.

”We need to find out why you’re having trouble concentrating.”

Trouble concentrating? Gee, I wonder why, maybe it was the hours, or that sinking feeling I got whenever Roy, the other overnight guy walked in.

To him, television was his lover, a constant companion that he’d highlight with his favorite “rolling tape” saying.

”Looks like I’ll have to roll tape on this”

He’d say that staring at a half-naked buxom woman, selling car insurance. He’d say it when, during “Maximum Exposure” a Bull lanced the torso of an infamous Matador.

He’d say it during “Politically Incorrect”, when Bill Maher would insult Jesse Helms for the twelfth time that season.

I ran into him at a bar years later. He stared at a TV in the bar too, and he looked exactly the same. I was working at a different TV station, public this time, and I saw the whites of his eyes go hollow for a few minutes, seeing how one person moved on while he stayed in the same place, rolling tape on each employee who walked through the doors.

At night on smoke breaks, looking out at the TV towers, I thought of how few people witnessed the work that I did, until I made a mistake. My profession was like so many others in those days, of a subservient role that was barely noticed until all hell broke loose.

There was another guy, Steve, who slept at the station. He wasn’t a workaholic, just lonely I guess.

The first time I saw it, it was a window into a world of loneliness I’d never witnessed before.

I periodically took walks into people’s office, sat back in office chairs, reclined looking at the pictures of unfamiliar family vacations. There’s the fish that Dave’s boy caught last year in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There’s another fishing shot taken at Fawley Beach.



Walking down the hall, my heart dropped dead to the floor when I saw the shadow of a figure walking across the blue shadow made by the TV in the lobby. It was always on, letting the visitors see the result of all the branding and scheduling the corporate office had made.

Looking just past the TV to the couch, I made out the figure of one of the cameramen. Not working, not sleeping, and just staring out at the TV, the same channel he contributed to.

I managed a nervous “Hi” when I walked past. He seemed comfortable with the idea that I was there, and he barely even flinched. I stopped taking walks after that point.

And rolling tape on another promo reel back in the control room, I found a new found respect for my own loneliness. Now sure I was single, twenty two and not much going to write about love wise. But I had friends to spend time with. On nights off Id have friends over to shave the ice off of my not too often defrosted freezer. We’d drink beer and watch TV, listen to music, talk about wave form monitors, cathode rays and dead-end jobs that would castrate men like Roy and leave them without a guide, light or love.

I had a new found respect for the depths of solitude. And I turned the satellite to MTV2, watching the video for Superdrag’s “Destination Ursula Major”.

I needed a job that made more of a difference, that more people bore witness to. I needed to be applauded, lauded and not chastised.

Respect and jobs done with consideration for the rubrics of quality and frequency were a few years off, but I still regarded Television with high esteem.

I quit the job just after two months. The schedule changed me a little bit more each day. I believe in myself more than ever, and I knew there was a better job out there, one that paid more than five dollars per hour.

Still throughout it, I believed in friends. Back when I needed them most. They may not have always led me to the right places in this world, but they did give me everything they had when I felt like I was watching myself watch my life on Television, editing the same roll for the next ten to fifteen years.

It wasn’t going to happen, not with my fundamental beliefs in the Unreal, the possibility that I might one day find my own happiness in places where my work was visible to all just by the cut of my jib or the way that my laconic wit would roll out of my after a few drinks on my evening off.

It was all a matter of degrees.