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 This is a continuation of my blogging here at WdC |
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This will be a blog for my writing, maybe with (too much) personal thrown in. I am hoping it will be a little more interactive, with me answering questions, helping out and whatnot. If it falls this year (2024), then I may stop the whole blogging thing, but that's all a "wait and see" scenario. An index of topics can be found here: "Writing Blog No.2 Index"  Feel free to comment and interact. |
| Novel #7 On the heels of Return came the first long story I actually shopped around ā Our House. Written in a month at the end of 1995, clocking in at 62600 words, I was really proud of it. Looking backā¦ not so much. It garnered a total of 17 rejections, of which 13 were form rejections. One said in rather diplomatic language that it was crap. One said that it was a rip-off of half a dozen other stories, most particularly Amityville Horror. One I canāt remember. And the other was the best, and also the last I received: The editor said he liked the story, ālovedā the writing, but found the middle section meandered, and the constant self-referencing by the narrator, especially with what was yet to come in the story, was off-putting. So he basically told me to rewrite a lot of it, and I decided to do just that, and so stopped sending it out. However, by then, I had written so much other stuff that it fell by the wayside. So Our House was the first novel that got rejected. The story involves an old house that takes over the lives of a group of children, all the way into adulthood. It makes them do things out of character. But is the house haunted, or is it a reflection of themselves? The narrator is watching some protestors trying to save the house, and relates his own history with the place as he sits in his car, trying desperately not to join them. He fights itā¦ and failsā¦ sort ofā¦ Further, the narrator is used rather literally here. The story has no chapters, and is written from the first person perspective as though the narrator is talking into a hand-held tape-recorder. And that is how I wrote the first 25000 words ā me talking into a dictaphone and then transcribing. The house itself existed, an old deserted house on Nelson Rd, long since torn down, which some of us broke into in year 7. The car in the shed was there as well, though not as old as in the story. Oh, and we didnāt kill anyone either. It is written like someone speaking, something Stephen King later did so much better with Dolores Claiborne. This is really based on a sort of reality. In fact, at the time we broke in and saw the damage inside the old house, I wrote a quick story about a murder in the place and my friends - this was primary school, remember, and I was 11 ā passed it around so much it wore out. This happened fourteen years before I wrote Our House, and it was all still as clear as anything. It was also the first long story Iād written that got an emotional response from some friends ā some claimed it gave them nightmares. That would be good if it was true, but I donāt know for sure. Look, the story definitely needs work, it suffers (as you shall see) from a diarrhoea of the ellipsis, and it drags a bitā¦ a lot, but one day when I am suffering from writerās block, I may come back to it and revise the bits that old editor told me to. Not bad, all in all. I mean, not good, but alsoā¦ not bad. Excerpt: Hmmmā¦ Nickyā¦ Okay, letās go. Get this over and done withā¦ It seemed like Nick was a nice enough bloke. I mean, he had some annoying habits, but didnāt we all. Essentially, though, he was pretty cool. āThea turned up with him on the same day that Brian turned up with Yvette and Gina (the latter was who he was trying to set me up with, having heard from Randy that I was a bit depressed after losing āThea). We met in town and went to the pictures. I donāt remember what we saw, but it was an action film. Had Bruce Willis in it, I think. All I remember is that none of us spent a great deal of time actually paying any attention to the screen. Randy and Shelley, āThea and Nicky, Brian and Yvette, me and Gina, four couples spending the whole afternoon kissing like there was no tomorrow. What I do remember ā very clearly, in fact ā was that when Gina kissed me it was like kissing a spittoon; Christ, did that girlās mouth water. She almost dribbled. It was disgusting. I was almost relieved when, after a week or so of constant attention, she decided that I wasnāt right for her. And Brian and Yvette didnāt last a great deal longer, either. I think he found it hard to come to terms with dating quite an intellectual girl, a science student at university. Majored in physics, I think. But āThea and Nicky, that turned out to be quite a couplingā¦ We all liked Nicky, at least a little, though I knew Brian was suspicious of something. I never found out just what, but there was something he didnāt like about the tall, nineteen year old (two years older than me at the time), dark-haired teaching student from Flinders University. Butā¦ hey, you knowā¦ Maybe he just didnāt like an outsider, any outsider, coming into the circleā¦ Especially after we sort of inducted him into the groupā¦ No, he wasnāt inducted, just sort of acceptedā¦ No, thatās still not right. Oh, shit. Well, letās be honest hereā¦ We were looking for a Jamie substitute, some-one to replace the friend weād killed so crudely, and Nickyās affable personality and apparently deep affection for āThea made him a candidateā¦ The perfect candidateā¦ But his first visit to the house seemed to completely contradict this assessmentā¦ It was near the end of September of that year, 1988, when āThea apparently first told him what weād been doing since we were little kids. She said later that she wasnāt sure if he believed her or not at first. She reckoned that he looked at her as though she was having a joke, or setting him up for one. But she persisted gently and he said that he wanted to see for himself. And that was when she asked Brian if it would be all right if he came in with us one night. Brian took two days (during which time he asked Shelley and Randy, but not me; apparently he didnāt think Iād like āTheaās new boyfriend just waltzing inā¦ and he was probably rightā¦ but at least he did tell me after the decision was made) to make up his mind and the next Saturday night there were once more six people seated around that small, dirty, smelly room where āThea and I had first made love, where Jamie had been killed, where five of us had grown upā¦ But things felt different. The atmosphere was really claustrophobic in the room, almost oppressive, and despite the rather cool night outside, the room had a sweltering feel about it as well. We all felt uncomfortable and uneasy and what little conversation there was was very forced. It was almost as though the house didnāt want him here, didnāt want anything to change, no matter what had happened to Jamie. And Nicky apparently felt it worse than any of usā¦ so much so that it almost created a split between he and āTheaā¦ which, I suppose, was probably what the house wanted, anyway. I was so happy with it at the time, and it reads now like it was written by someone trying just too hard. I can see why it was rejected. But the idea is fine and the characters are not too bad. I might revisit it some day. Justā¦ not at the moment. |
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