The Q-View

After mid-October, when I attended a Push to Publish, I put aside writing for a while. It took time to get over the shock of not being immediately offered a six-figure publishing contract, a movie deal, and a Pulitzer Prize. My novel, Internal Lockdown, garnered rave reviews from my wife, my sister, and a friend, so I’m not sure what the problem is here. I guess you have to know somebody.

In the interim, I organized my writings electronically and physically; sent out an occasional query; researched other publishing options; bought and annotated Writers Market 2018; focused on reading, finishing The Bees by Laline Paull, which was a thought-provoking look at life in a hive, through a bee narrator, completing Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher, the controversial YA novel about suicide, and starting Empire Falls by Richard Russo as part of my clear-a-shelf-on-the-bookcase quest; and began researching and annotating middle grade writing.

As part of that exploration, I stopped by Barnes and Nobles and did some perusing and bought two books. I read Because of Mr. Terupt by Bob Buyea, and I am in the process of reading The Misfits by James Howe. Both books feature a philosophy that significantly informed my interactions with high school students: give everyone the benefit of the doubt because you do not know what is going on in the background of their lives.

Last week, the urge to write came flooding back, and I started on TWO new works. I don’t want to call it my revenge novel, but I began a fictionalized version of teaching memoirs. I want it to be in the style of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, satirical and absurd, because that is what the last couple of years of teaching became. My working title is 422, which was my classroom number for sixteen years. The heroes, the teachers–naturally, filter out the BS and stick to what is important, education. I managed 7,000 words last week, which is above average for me. I named my protagonist Gregory Snowden for two reasons. Gregor Samsa is the protagonist of another of my favorite works, Kafka’s Metamorphosis. (Get it: Gregor/Gregory, GS). Snowden is the injured gunner in Catch-22 who spills his secret to Yossarian, the protagonist. I have been consulting Catch-22 frequently for style tips.

It is especially fun to use the Educational Jargon Generator to create dialog for a hapless, ass-kissing, superiority-complex administrator (Nooooo, I NEVER encountered anyone like that, purely fictional). Often, I sat down at the keyboard having only a vague idea of what I wanted to write, but, after a while, my typing was lagging way behind a torrent of thoughts. I am leaving margin notes all over the place to remind myself of the branching ideas that are occurring as I write. And I have three notebooks full of observations kept during my career that I have not even looked at yet.

The other work I started is middle grade oriented. The working premise involves a 12-year-old whose comfortable life is devastated by an overdose death in his family and his subsequent role in helping others his age deal with addiction issues ensnaring family and friends.

Onward!