I Like Big Books, I cannot lie

When I wrote “It’s Always 9/11, I didn’t think of it as a particularly long book. None of my readers mentioned its length. It’s a thriller after all, and it reads fast. So I was surprised to discover, once it was laid out for print, that it was 616 pages strong, (counting title pages, acknowledgements, copyrights, a reading guide, etc).

Big books are not fashionable these days—the average novel seems to run around 200 pages—but I love them. For the writer a big book gives you time to create complex, believable characters and settings and for the narrative arc to evolve organically. For the reader it’s an opportunity to immerse oneself in a fully realized fictional world. What could be better than a chilly rainy afternoon lost in a great book? (unless it’s lying on a hot sunny beach immersed in a great book).

And while I’m at it…I like real books, in all their paper glory. I like their feel in my hand. I like their smell. My cover designer Anne Weinstock and layout editor Kristen Weber did great work that enhances both It’s Always 9/11 and Wrong Highway. Their craft would be totally lost in an electronic book —it’s like a MP3 compared to a vinyl album. The same goes for audio books and more so. Not that there’s anything wrong with listening to a story—but it’s passive entertainment. When you read, yes, the author’s done a lot of work but so do you, the reader, translating those words on the page into that fully realized fictional world. That magic is why the written word was invented, why its thrived, why little kids learn to read.

If I get huge requests for an electronic version of It’s Always 9/11, I’ll publish one. But for right now, I’m really happy with my big thick book and its enticing cover.

Here we go again

The rains are back and I am back to revising “Liability Insurance”, a screenplay I originally wrote in 1999.

Like “It’s Always 9/11” , “Liability Insurance'“ deals with technocratic intrusion. And like “It’s Always 9/11”. way too much has eerily become true. Since I wrote the draft I’m working from 22 years ago, much of the speculative fiction of the screenplay has become basic underpinnings of our society. Other aspects could readily become a potential reality, if, as the ghost of Christmas past says in Dicken’s A Christmas Carol ,“if these shadows remain unaltered by the future”. So it’s going to be a careful dance to incorporate the themes of technological intrusion, technological alienation and environmental disaster—more valid and powerful than ever— without losing their speculative edge.

One theme of Liability Insurance resonates especially in this present moment. That’s the tug of war between safety—or perceived safety—and freedom. I’ve dealt with this in both Wrong Highway (on a personal, one might say selfish level) and It’s Always 9/11. (on both a personal and societal level) How powerful is that craving for freedom? What are my protagonists willing to risk for it? But its even more central in Liability Insurance, where safety is the organizing principle of existence.

Why am I so obsessed with this? Why, whatever I write, the theme ultimately comes down to freedom versus the illusion of safety, in varied manifestations? I guess its because it goes so much to the heart of who I am , and what I’m compelled to explore. And personal freedom is so at risk in our current moment, under attack by the left as much as the right. Freedom is a facet of character more than ideology. Freedom cannot thrive where opinions come as package deals and any deviation from the orthodoxy is a violation of the culture wars, rendering the person who expresses these views, as not only “wrong” intellectually, but a bad person. In other words, guilty of thought crimes. Freedom is an open mind. Freedom is a willingness to think critically, to voice your opinions even if they are unpopular, and to act when necessary. Freedom can be dangerous.

So it’s back to the blank page with another alienated woman and mom. I’ll keep you posted.

Kaspar Oppresses Everyone Equally

One of the aspects of writing a novel set in the near future is that the fictional world is seriously tested by real life. I started writing my upcoming novel, “It’s Always 9/11”, in 2017, finishing my final manuscript in the spring of 2020. Needless to say, that span of time wrought a lot of crises and changes. Since the book’s completion, while I’ve been preoccupied with the publishing process, the crises and changes have only accelerated.

In many ways—the stress of mysterious illness; the vulnerability of a fearful public to authoritarian creep; the emergence of Portland as a protest center—”It’s Always 9/11” is eerily prescient. In other ways, events have unfolded and consciousness altered in ways not addressed by the book: the Black Lives Matter movement; the identity-based consciousness that has infused our culture.

“It’s Always 9/11” may have predicted some headlines, but it is not ripped from the headlines.

When you write a book—at least when I write a book— it’s not unlike developing a sophisticated video game. I define a group of variables—characters, situations, settings. As they come to life the story develops, consequential to those variables. Our real ex-President, Donald Trump, was a racist and authoritarian wannabe. My fictional President, Rupert Kaspar, provides universal health care and outlaws fracking. He is not a racist. To the contrary, he sprinkles his speeches with all kinds of inclusive cliches. As my character Teddy notes, “he oppresses everyone equally”.

But he is no authoritarian wannabe. Kaspar’s lack of racism, his technocratic slickness, make him a very effective authoritarian. There’s no overt vulgarities to attack. There’s no simplistic way to define or denigrate “the other”. Resistance becomes an act of character rather than identity. The question becomes not whether the good guys beat the bad guys but what price a disparate group of people are willing to pay for freedom.