I probably should have written this some time ago, as I finished the novel probably about three months ago. But for the first month I was deep in revisions, then a month of short stories (hopefully some of them will sell and keep us going,) then straight into another month of revising. Revising sucks. It doesn’t feel creative, it often feels like you're just moving words and sentences around and you're reading the same shit over and over and over again.
I wrote most of the novel at a coffee shop and a couple bars. For me, those two places are a perfect environment for writing. You have a couple of drinks, say hi to some friends and then disappear into your head. I had a lot of support at the bars and for an often overwhelmingly isolating pursuit, that was nice. Many thanks to everyone who would ask how things were going, listened to me ramble about the latest developments and didn’t take it personally when I went to the back of the bar and sat alone.
The novel imagines a man in his mid twenties who grew up in the sticks of the deep South. His mother and stepfather are deeply religious. And I mean that not in the sense of the organized kind of religion. Like many of the South’s religious, their faith takes place mostly in their heads and is highly disorganized. Chaotic even. It is steeped in the events of their own lives and in the meanings that they attribute to them.
In this environment, the boy grows up hearing a voice that he believes is leading him. Eventually that voice leads him to OC and then on to the streets of L.A. In L.A. he finally feels like the religion in his head has become fully realized and he begins to evangelize. Since his faith is largely founded on the darker parts of the Bible, I mean the violence and the more Gothic elements, his preaching is mostly acts of crime and abuse. This works for him until he discovers an old man with a secret sin and a girl that belongs to a downtown cult that practices a mirror image of his religion. Its his belief, only flipped over and spun around.
The book asks the sorts of questions that the Post-Modern world presents to religion as a whole. Where does it come from and what role does it play in the individual’s life. It also tries to examine religion from a number of perspectives: altruism, manipulation, shame, guilt, regret. I think that I also wanted it to ask what role truth plays in the entire message. Does a religion need to have actual facts on its side? Or are the stories themselves, enough?
I printed up a couple of copies for friends to edit for grammar and story elements. We’ll see what they say. In the meantime, if you’d like to weigh in, let me know and I’ll get you a copy. Now, it’s on to a play that I’ve wanted to do for the whole time that I’ve been revising. And that feels good. Back to the real work.
Finally, I’ve always wanted to nail down a good definition of art. One that takes into account, literature, architecture, culinary, fashion, film, the whole thing. And while I've been doing this, I think that I've come up with a working version.
Art is anything that when completed, the creator can only sit back and say, "I have absolutely no idea where that came from." I mean maybe they had an originally vision or a concept but then somewhere along the way, something else took over. And that something, influenced the piece in a way that they could have never dreamed of. I imagine that the something is everyone they’ve ever known, every event they’ve been a part of and everything they’ve done, seen, thought about and dreamed about. And the individual really can’t take credit for any of that stuff. It’s like the quantum world I guess, life is just so much more than cause and effect. Its like, 275 years later, we find out that Newton was only half right.
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