TALKING DOG FICTION

About eight years ago, I made the first in an unceasing series of disastrous decisions. I had recently come to the end of a ten-year stint as a literary agent in Los Angeles, repping writers in film and television. I was burned out, the industry was rapidly shifting and I didn't pursue a new job with same ambition I might once have. I had been a reader of books all my life and decided that it would be a tremendously good decision to write one.

I started with a new laptop and no actual idea of what to write – this being a sound plan for an out of work literary agent who had spent years advising desperate writers who overspent after scoring their first big deal in a town that feeds on writers who score their first big deal. Electronic books were in their infancy at the time. Imagine if I had possessed a modicum of foresight, I could have crafted a mother-lode of vampire assassin stories and be set for life by now.

Fortunately, the hands of divine intervention appeared, sparing me the necessity of creative thinking. A buddy gave me a book for Christmas – a simple field guide to Birds of North America. I didn't have much interest in the subject but the dryly laid-out text began to interest me with its repetitive minutiae.

It wasn't enough but again, happenstance. I was in the Pasadena Library, standing in front or rows of musty books and closed my eyes, allowing my hands to randomly trail. They stopped on A Unit of Time, A Unit of Water – Joel White's Last Book. It was a beautifully written accounting of the last days of a legendary boat builder, dying of cancer. It was not only about Joel's life and boats, but his relationship with his father – none other than E.B. White, author of marvelous children's literature and my favorite writer growing up.

I needed more though and after a considerable struggle, came up with the idea of writing about a guy who doesn't know what comes next. I had my book! I would chart the life of Harold, a middle-aged advertising executive who sails his boat up along the Atlantic seaboard, following the migratory path of birds. I even came up with a brilliant title – Birds, Boats and Middle Age.

I wrote at a snail’s pace, day in and day out. Slowly amassed details, lots and lots of details. This was important stuff. The Birds of North America Guide was not enough – I purchased the definitive work on the subject – the Sibley Guide to Birds. There would be nothing left out. And books about boats – lots of books about boats. About a year went by. I now had 300 pages with marshes and birds and plant life and sailing and a guy named Harry who's kind of a dick.

The next logical step was to dump the manuscript off on a good friend who was also a very good writer. I needs affirmation of this Pulitzer-worthy creation. My buddy found it to be boring and repetitive with an unlikable main character. He had enjoyed one random section however, in which Harry flies out to Hollywood to meet with studio types about running an ad campaign for the hopelessly snake-bitten sequel to a talking dog movie.

The scrapping of all but 40 pages didn't come easily but it came, along with other characters and story devices and drafts that topped out at 450 pages were again stripped down. And years of stops and starts including a move to Cape Cod and eventually a move to Austin, and different climates and different influences and crashing computers and submissions to New York literary agents who never responded. And lost files and lost interest and eventually a found memory stick with an old draft and more revisions and at the end, an unstable mess as a result of conflicting software systems and who knows what.

Perhaps the best thing about the the process is just that – the process. The story about an ad exec and a dog with diabetes, a trio of entitled white wannabe gangstas and a Hungarian junkie director won't win any awards but it will exist in cyberspace as an exercise that possibly helped me become a better writer. One final circle of hell presented itself – an abomination called e-formatting. One would think that the investment of substantial time in a writing exercise would include an actual editor, professional formatting and a cover that is at least marginally better than a cell pic of a tennis ball on a lawn but that wouldn't have played well in the continuum of disastrous decisions.

What comes next? I released Coma Dog through Amazon and other venues and pimped it out through social media platforms where it has been mostly met by annoyed silence. This may be a sign of impending fame. Currently in the works is a novella about alienated youth and a caterpillar. As always, I'm aiming high.