The initial inspiration for the novel occurred on a
walk after work. At the time, I was working in Brooklyn about a mile from the Brooklyn bridge. The inspiration
arrived when I was close to the end of the bridge. I looked to my right at the NYPD police headquarters and
that's when the thought arrived from somewhere deep within memories I thought I had purged from my memory bank:
If I could go back in time and have a second chance to deal with my personal obsession, would I do a better job
the second time around. My personnel obsession involved a young woman I had met in the mid-seventies. She
was the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my life. I never saw myself as a future love interest in her
life because my confidence level couldn't handle doing the usual things that men do when they are interested in
a woman. Yet I wanted to know her more than I did. Worse, I never told her where I wanted to fit into her
life, I was clueless on that point. I was conflicted and handled things badly and in the end she saw me as
someone she didn't want to know. The worst part was her life would remain on the Jersey Shore while mine stayed
in New York City. We never had that exit conversation that would resolve my feelings for her. When I last saw
her, she was young and beautiful and that is how I would always have to remember her. Fortunately for me the
act of writing, revising and trying to sell my novel has transferred my little obsession with her to my new
obsession: trying to find a place for my novel.
I'm sure as you are reading my back story,
you can see I'm a flawed person and may guess that my relationships with woman have been mostly failures. That
is why my main character is a deeply flawed person. Whatever you may think of me. He is in worse shape.
He has giving up on life, while I in retirement have been given a chance to make of life whatever I want. In my
own low level way of looking at things this novel has become a metaphor for the alien in the novel. In
the novel, the main character has to be manipulated into wanting that second chance to make things right.
That's is one area where I differ from the main character, just ask me once, and I am gone. They say write
about what you know. I know what it is like to be a flawed person. As a complement to the sick society that we
live in, I am branding myself as a flawed person with lots of ideas. If the people who inhabit so-called
reality shows shows like the 'Jersey Shore' can make money showing off bad or stupid behavior, why can't
someone make money from essentially being pathetic?
Once I started thinking about the inspiration I
started thinking about the people I met and the things that happened during that period when I would spend my
summer weekends and vacations at that little town on the Jersey Shore. Pretty, much everything, I could
remember became part of the plot. A different writer would have taken this idea and wove it into a simple but
nice love story. I tried to make the novel into a simple love and revenge story. But somewhere in the novel I
realized that I had created a whole mess of difficult to understand relationships. These relationships were
driving the novel. So, all the things I could remember and the things I created all became woven into a
complex plot about how relationships, all which involve people with good and bad goals, became a story about
obsession, greed and murder.
I didn't realize until I had written several
chapters that I was not only going to finish the novel but give it the best I could do as a writer. By a
strange twist of fate, I had to listen to someone who exploded in a full and ugly rant. Because of how this
person had presented himself before the rant, he showed that beneath his pleasant personality, he had a darker
side. Thus, he became the model for my sick villain: Allan. And because of the subject matter of his
rant, I realized who had to be the real mother of Jan, my main female character. And because I'm a person that
likes to complicate things I also figured out who had to be Jan's real father. My novel became a lot more
complicated after two of my minor characters became the real parents. Now I had Allan and a separate group of
villains, both working together, but with two different motives.
Once I established the main character, I knew that
with my limited skills as a writer, my novel was going to be long and more than a detective novel where the
main character only operates within the confine world of whatever the mystery involves. In my novel, you can
see three distinct ways in which the main character looks at the world and at himself. As the world around
him shifts so does the main character. Thus, the novel would have a journey element to it as the main
character struggles to interpret the many things that happen around him while still sticking to his overall
goal. Find out who murdered Jan and who and why that same person would do it again.
There are many themes on looking at life in the
novel but the first theme that shaped the direction of the novel was the idea that most of the people you
meet will either get you killed or help you to grow as a person or try to move you in either direction. The
challenge for Jan, the main female character was to find out who was going to get her killed, before it was
too late. The second theme was the idea that at some point in your life, usually much later. You had to take
a long look at what you had done with your life. And if you had not found meaning or purpose in your life,
what were you going to do about it?
I throw everything but the kitchen's sink into my writing and try my
best to tie everything together. Some of the people in my novel are pretty nasty and talk even nastier. At the
end don’t expect a civilized scene where the master detective unveils who put the poison in Colonel Mustard’s
sherry glass. A lot of the novel has that pulp fiction style of the detective novels in the thirties
where lurking beneath picket fences and two-bedroom homes things were pretty ugly and of course, there
were always a couple of corrupt coppers. Perhaps I am delusional, but my dream is to have my novel end up as a
big-budget film Noir Noir and yes a voice over is mandatory.
Some of the scenes in the
novel were created just because they would photograph well and add to the symbolism and mood of a movie. When I
started the novel, I hadn't read a novel in 30 years, I took my idea of pacing and plot from the small
screen(TV). At the end of the first chapter I leave my main character clinging to life with impending doom. I
was taking my inspiration from TV shows like 24. Always leave the viewer hanging, so they have to come back
next week or after a commercial. And yes, I wrote most of my scenes to be visual: man against or influenced by
the environment - will he/she/they make it - stay tuned folks.
I wrote my novel from the male point of view, yet
most of the people who buy novels are females. Could a female understand the part in the first chapter where
the main character describes his first impression of Jan in terms of various body parts? Would a woman
understand why in chapter 12 after having the best sex in his life the character has to moralize over what
he did? Most of the women in my novel are attractive and interesting. All of them are at least
partially based on women I have previously met. If you are a female who has read my novel I
would like to hear from you. I might not like what you have to say, but I will give careful reflection on
all viewpoints.Email
address:
I knew the chance of finding a literary agent who
understood what I was trying to do and who could see the commercial value of the novel ranged between slim
to none. And that was the first step, getting someone to publish the novel and finding a group of people who
would buy the novel all seemed like insurmountable goals. So I knew from the beginning, I wasn't going to
write the sequel or any other novel unless the first novel had some commercial success. So I wrote a
novel, where 'I let it all hang out'. I took a look at the world around me and it all became a part of
the novel.
If you have a web site please list your site's url. It is a good way to improve your
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your site's content. If you are a author, maybe they might even buy a copy of your
novel.
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