symbolic 53: the five faces of jack maratre
Full disclosure time. I've been having a little trouble with Jack. Not like he's been a rebellious sixteen-year old who's just gotten his learning permit and wants to borrow the car all the time sort of trouble. More of the "who the fuck am I?" sort of trouble. Which isn't the sort of distress I was looking for in a main character. I haven't been making the best sort of progress on paper because I've not be able to get a handle on who Jack is.
I've got a number of folders on my hard drive which contain aborted novels, malformed tales which have been taken off life support and shoved into the back of the metal drawers in the morgue in the hope that no one will ever see the distorted bodies. The commonality in all of them is a sad sack main character -- a fellow who has melancholy and intestinal distress as defining traits -- and, frankly, after writing him for several chapters I'm sick of him.
So, trying to learn from my mistakes here. Too much noir as a child, too much emo-rock / mope-core as a teenager: it doesn't make for a good base from which to draw characters. Christ, it's a good thing I never liked Morrissey's voice otherwise I'd be trapped in a cycle of reoccurring Cthulhu heroes who have an affected fascination towards playing Russian roulette with rusty 19th century six-shooters.
Georges -- who has been reduced to just "G." at this point -- is the fun character. Let's be up-front about that. G. is an aged nonogenarian who survived the Resistance in WWII and came to America knowing something that he shouldn't. Thirty years in an asylum has left him with some answers and an exceptionally heightened sense of paranoia and just how invasive the threads of the Cabinet Noir are in modern society. He's got one mission in life: stick it to the shadow elite before his ticker gives out. Yeah, G. is a fun character. He's also about a hundred and three and, well, I'm just not that keen on a geriatric action hero. It would be like Die Hard XII starring Hume Cronyn or Richard Farnsworth. (Both of whom have already shuffled off to the next iteration and, fortunately, will never have to suffer the iindignityof getting a phone call from their agent concerning such a project. There's still time for Bob Hope, though, he can get himself hooked up to a mobile IV drip and "Yippee Ki-Yeah Mother Fuckers" us from terrorism and high-tech, international thievery.)
I needed a younger protagonist. One who could hold his own against gun-toting grandpa. Someone other than James Van Der Beek perpetually pouting over how the Emmy judges have, once again, overlooked the depth of his soul-searching and tormented angst on Dawson's Creek. Because -- first lesson for the writer -- if you aren't having any fun writing it, you can be sure the audience will hear that same sucking sound when they read it.
For the last eternity, I've been making up homunculi in my lab and turning them loose in slightly uncontrolled environments. For your entertainment, here are my lab notes from these experiments:
1. Jack Maratre, the troubled outsider. First generation Jackie Boy is the one running around the movie trailer posted back in the beginning and who survived the 50,000 word march of last year. He held together fairly well and there are some qualities of him which I will probably recycle and use again. However, his environment was glacial. 50K worth of words and I was barely getting to the fun stuff. I wasn't exactly hooking the readers in and, while a certain amount of that still has some use, it isn't material anyone really needs to see. I needed to truncate the mess and get to the meat of things more quickly. The trouble there was that the back story Jackie Boy was lugging around was too laborious (and ultimately too coincidental) to work. I shaved that hump off him and he collapsed. The body is still good; there just isn't enough soul to keep the spine stiff.
2. Jack Maratre, the action hero. I've got five chapters of this one, including a fairly solid house raid opening. There's even a chapter where Felix has a run in with the border patrol at the Canadian border. This was all written during the opening days of the Iraq conflict and was colored by my reactions to the emergent iimperialist dictatorship of the Shrub and his Inner Circle of Nazi Toadies. I had an idea about a world colored badly by all this and this vision was influencing the direction of the character and draft. In fact, the narrator of Entry 31 is Jack, thirty years after the events of the BOOK OF LIES.
Was it Chekhov who said that if you use a gun in the third act, it had better be on the mantelpiece during the first act? If the BOOK OF LIES works, then there are eight other books to be done before I come back to Jack. And the world may have turned the way he sees it in that discussion by then. Or not, but it can't hurt to lay groundwork just in case I need to come back to it.
But, in the present, Jack as an action hero was the wrong sort of character to be drawn into this book. Too many of the other characters -- G., his incessant desire to get his hands on a gun notwithstanding, and the members of the modern Lunar Society -- were non-combatants in the traditional sense. This turns Jack into muscle. Which makes him secondary.
I liked the house raid opener. I may mark that up and throw out a link to those two chapters. It won't be used, but it might still have some entertainment value.
3. Jack Maratre, the disgraced cop. Pulling the action closer to the front, I've got G. coming out his comatose state and making some noise as he leaves the Belmont Psychiatric Institute. There's information to be had at the Institute (as well as some threads which will lead back to the Cabinet Noir) and, with the fierce blackout of information which happens following the arrival of the Feds, I needed someone who could still have access. A Homicide Detective seemed handy. Until I got to the part where the action moved to another state and I ran into the slight problem of just how a police officer would take himself to another town to pursue a case on which he wasn't currently assigned. A number of other procedural issues raised their heads and it felt like I was trying to jam an entire pig into a three-inch section of sausage casing. No amount of grinder action was going to make all that pork fit.
4. Jack Maratre, cub reporter. More mobility with less responsibility. He could leave town easily, but he won't have any access to the Institute. Too outside with no way in and, with his credentials, he would probably be politely asked to crawl up his own ass and die. No help there.
5. Jack Maratre, listener. Which brings us to Stuttering Jack, Junior Marconi. A number of other aspects of the back story (Jack's family history) suddenly become useful again and I feel like I've found a key to the door which has been previously locked. There are some coincidences to write past, but the climax of Seven is nothing but a tower of coincidences so I figure if it gets flashy enough, no one will care. Or, they'll work themselves out. They usually do.
There you go. I've been looking for a main character who has some meat to him and I think I've finally got him nailed down. Progress.
writing
This is a reasonably comprehensive list of my published work, both virtual and physical.
THE MISFIT LIBRARY
I am Nine of Thirteen, one of the members of the Misfit Library, a writing collective which puts out a quarterly journal of our respective work. We are scattered across the globe and determined to change the face of the planet one story at a time. The link above will take you to Misfit Central where you can acquire copies of the journal as well as read exclusive online material.
SYMBOLIC
I wrote a column for OPi8.com's Transmit blogs: journals of the new dark underground. SYMBOLIC tracked the novel I was working on, referencing the process and the research materials which mad up the backbone of the work. In addition, SYMBOLIC busied itself with ruminations and considerations on the nature of language and communication. And a wee bit of mythology. The first 100 entries of SYMBOLIC can be found here on this site as well as at OPi8.com.
LITERARY REPRESENTATION
I am represented by Scribe Agency as my literary agents. Please contact these gentleman if you have any queries about my work.