Wormholes / series / writing

Fantasy. Paranormal. Suspense. Popular genres today all seem to trend toward series writing. Maybe with changing technologies in publishing and reading, that’s where the market is. I’m not sure because marketing is a mystery to me. As a reader/writer engaged in the world of lit sans marketing, my opinion is that good books might well come in series, but great books are almost always standalones. Now that I have a few books out there (links below), let me ponder how, if at all, this opinion applies to my writing.

I don’t write series. Nor do I stick to one genre. Although I do believe genres can be useful tags – e.g., setting expectations that can help readers predict whether something suits their taste – best to treat genres as cloudy approximations. “Existence precedes essence,” Jean-Paul Sartre famously said. Similarly, the book precedes the genre. Leaving aside for now pulp fiction, which is written specifically to fit a preset genre, works of art, including novels-as-art, develop organically according to their own aesthetic, and once manifested in their own terms, it is the bookseller’s choice to more-or-less randomly determine which genre tags will best guide readers.

So my novels. I undertake each novel as a self-contained work of art, like a standalone sculpture. The concept of series just doesn’t fit my aesthetic register (not that my register is better than anyone else’s). Does this mean no threading between the (currently) five of them? Well, no. Take the latest, Alice. My previous novels blurred the lines of literary fiction, historical fiction, regional, magic realism, with one possibly cross-categorized as young adult as well as adult. Alice, though, is more of a post-apocalyptic adult hippie fairy tale – my first to occur in a fully imaginary setting. This put a new kind of pressure on me as a writer. Because the opening frame is like a weird, hippie fairy tale, one thing I needed was a population of characters who were individualized people and yet archetypal enough to match the fairy tale setting. So Alice’s little hamlet is populated by the rain king, the kleptomaniac, the sweeper, the mapmaker, the white witch, etc.

Besides the characters, though, another thing that holds the magical setting together is two kinds of wormholes. First, there are wormholes in time within Alice, enabling Alice to interact with a series of young women like herself – just coming into early adulthood – from different time periods. Different eras of history are, in effect, stacked up together and connected by wormholes. A lot of the metaphysical or philosophical elements of the novel, and Alice’s epiphanies, if you want to loosely call it a coming-of-age novel, come through these wormholes in time to other characters and settings.

In addition to the wormholes within Alice, wormholes thread into my other novels as well. I didn’t really plan it this way, but just as she interacts with characters across history, she interacts with characters across my writing corpus. Those characters carry their own baggage into Alice, but it’s not like you have to read the other novels to get this one. And it’s certainly not like a series, where you have a fixed setting and plot lines that continue more or less coherently across the books. It’s more like a character from another novel will pop up as Alfred Hitchcock popped up in his movies, but retaining the personality and baggage of the other novel. Again, each novel is a coherent, standalone whole and can be read as such, and yet there are these wormholes, these reverberations. There are touches of this in four of the five novels, sometimes working backwards (as in a character from the first novel, Mr. Robert’s Bones, might pop up in later novel, and the meaning that character acquires in the later novel reverberates back to the first).

The idea of independent novels with a connected underlay might bring up images of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. My wormholes, however, are different. Faulkner and Anderson each use that shared setting as an integrated space for their stories. My novels are not different stories transacted in the same space, but totally different spaces with wormholes randomly connecting them. And my wormholes don’t necessarily follow laws of space and time. Whereas in Faulkner you might get a collective setting that is realistic, integrated, coherent, my wormholes are almost a mockery of realistic coherence from the point of view of imaginative license.

This might sound outlandish, but if you think about it, this is not as unusual as it sounds. The history of literature is essentially a series of hyperlinks or wormholes, where all these novels and ideas and characters are continually building on each other, casting different lights and relevance on other novels. You don’t have to read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to understand Richard Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar or vice versa – I pick those two because they are both quite separate influences on Alice. Indeed, on the surface they are unrelated novels from different countries and eras, and I don’t even know if Brautigan read Woolf. And yet, when you do read both of them, you start to see how each can illuminate something about the other – just like the fool in King Lear can illuminate a character in a Camus novel, or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can illuminate aspects of 21^st-century culture, just like anecdotes by Marx or Freud might cast a new angle of light backwards onto Shakespeare or Jane Austen, just like my Alice might make you want to go back and re-read Lewis Carroll’s Alice. It’s really wormholes everywhere. You can see an example of this in my own wormhole study of works by Umberto Eco and Bob Dylan. The history of literature is the history of all these continually interacting texts reverberating meaning off of each other. If literature has depth as well as surface, these wormholes are an essential part of the underground structure. And the organic development of wormholes across the landscape of literature is a fundamentally different activity than the deliberate production of novels in series.

* * * Click covers below for links * * *

      

Phil’s next surprise

Goodbye, Maggie (160 pages), which was short-listed in the William Faulkner — Wisdom Competition, is scheduled for January 2020 release. If anyone would consider giving an honest advance review, query drggautier@gmail.com and I’ll send typeset pdf (and notify you when a Kindle copy is listed for free after release).

Summary: In a culture of health food stores, gurus, quacks and seekers, a young man’s stagnant life goes topsy-turvy when his charismatic brother shows up with the news that he has murdered someone and asks for sanctuary.

For the opening page, click here.

For an excerpt from late in the novel (“Phil’s next surprise”), see below …

Phil is shaky, fresh from the bed and weak. Gus supports him. The priest walks away, past the cracked headstones toward the moss-laden oaks and cypress trees at the perimeter of the cemetery. Perhaps his concern for all souls has brought him here but his better judgment has him scurrying away before anything pagan breaks out.

The voodoo priestess stands and speaks.

“Close your eyes and feel, feel this city of the dead come to life to help our sister cross over. The city of the dead is come to life and we are but its shadows.”

Gus whispers to Phil: “This is definitely not like my aunt’s funeral in New York. The cities of the dead here feel like they might really come to life.”

A raspy, middle-aged woman’s voice hammers down from behind.

“What you mean, ‘might come to life’? You must be blind as a bat. Look around you and what do you see? Flesh and blood and spirit mixing and churning.”

They turn and see Madame Peychaud.

“Damn fools,” she adds.

“Madame Peychaud?!” Phil exclaims.

“Where the hell did you come from?” asks Gus.

“Got a letter from poor little Maggie. She told me when and where to come. Always directing things, even from the city of the dead. She said y’all had the essential oils business all ready.”

Gus and Phil look at each other confused. The conversation continues as they walk out of the cemetery.

“Yeah,” Phil says. “Yeah, sure, we’re ready. I just, we don’t actually have the, have the oils.”

Phil hears his own voice echo off the cemetery’s iron gate. He is speaking to Madame Peychaud, looking at her. Perhaps he’d never seen her in a dress, never seen her exposed to the shoulder. And the echo – and what he sees – captivates him. For a second, he ponders in sheer curiosity, trying to remember where he had seen it before. He is still speaking to Madame Peychaud but he doesn’t know what he is saying. Where had he seen it before? And suddenly he knows. His mouth dries out. He knows where he saw it. The tiny image against the caramel skin of Madame Peychaud’s shoulder. But he is too frail from his ordeal. He drops.

Someone is being carried. Someone is carrying. A white man being carried. A black man carrying. Other characters populate the scene. They are going down a street. Phil feels that he is somewhere in the scene but he doesn’t know where. Is he the white man being carried? The black man doing the carrying? One or all of the others? Or is he the trees, the sun, the stucco facades, the atmosphere itself. He floats into the atmosphere. Up, up he floats, surveying the scene below – a black man carrying a white man with a huddle of people moving along with them down the street. He is on top of a cathedral. The mime is there, on top of the cathedral. The bells ring.

“Wake up, baby.” The voice is Madame Peychaud’s.

Phil is back in the fairy queen’s bedroom.

“Where are we?” Phil ventures. “Why are we …”

“Hush, baby. We don’t have to be out of this room just yet.”

Phil is still groggy. Everything seems symbolic.

We don’t have to be out of this room just yet.

He starts to dream again. He is back in the hollow, at the pond with Maggie. She is young and beautiful.

“Do you know about my parents?” she is saying.

Phil doesn’t answer. He is lying in the grass, feeling the sun, watching the leaves waver overhead, hearing the occasional “plip … plip” of a fish jumping in the pond.

“Once upon a time, I thought that he too betrayed a loved one.”

Strange, Phil thinks. This conversation. Viewing our lives with such calm. Feeling the truth of things, but from a distance. Detachment. Compassion. They only work together. That’s where he got it wrong. That’s where people get it wrong. They think detachment and compassion are opposites. No, they are brothers, sisters, twins, always together. They only work together. Unconditional love means never missing anyone. If you miss them, your love is tainted by attachment, interest, possessiveness. As long as you’re capable of missing someone your love is conditional. It’s like a veil was lifted for Phil. He is getting excited. And his excitement breaks the spell. He looks at Maggie but the scene is fading, dissolving. Someone is standing across the room. Someone with her back to Phil. She is rinsing out a small towel in the sink. He hears Madame Peychaud’s voice.

“This wild goose chase you been on the last few weeks, hunting around like that. It isn’t really about Hermia, is it?”

“No ma’am. It’s about Magnus.”

Did he really say that? No ma’am? Is he a child again? No, he is just disoriented. He gathers his thoughts.

* * *

(Click image for links)