Monday, June 16, 2014

THE GRAPEVINE

One of my favorite scenes in the book is the "Grapevine," which props up  the schizophrenic narrative and connects to it's destination. I made sure I avoided the word phantasmagoria in the book because it's trite, but it's a good blog word and I'll use it now.  Only a reader can judge.  Leo steals Barlow's Green Subaru and flies down Interstate 5 to Los Angeles, weaving up and over  the gapevine on his way. Crucial detais omitted here, but if you read the book you'd know what I mean.

I imagined that dark passage  listening to one of my favorite Pat Metheny tunes.  Are You Going With Me?  Over and over again. The images in the video below don't match the landscape in the book but they do justice to the tune. You have to listen to the end to truly scale the Grapevine. I think you'll understand when you get there.



You can read the Grapevine section of book at the RAW FICTION website. It's an AUDIO EXCERPT, meaning you're supposed to listen to this very same tune as you read, like a sound track.  It's a different version, featuriing the haunting voice of Anna Marie Jopek, a Polish singer.

Monday, June 9, 2014

WHAT YOU SEE IS WWHAT IT IS


It wasn't easy but the RAW FICTION website v. 1.1 is more or less up and running. I'm seriously disappointed in the shortcomings of the WordPress website builder platform we used.  It's user-friendly but also user-stupid. It won't allow me to change the size of the text nor choose a font, which is ridiculous. Even compared to the humble Blog-Spot the formatting is primitive. That's ironic because WordPress started out in life as a kind of Super Blog and enhaned its reputation  as it moved up into website building. Something seems to have gone wrong along the way. But I'll have to do with what we got, which could be worse.

I really like the grainy textured design at the top of the page that my web-designer guy put together. I think it capures the essence of what I mean by raw fiction, Rough and unfished. That's me. Those who have read it know my writing is hardly polished. Let's not talk about typos again. The term of art is "dirty prose."  Dirty fiction has another connotation altogether. I'm sticking to raw.

I envisioned the website as a place to germinate fiction.  But now I'm told  my idea of airing  short-story drafts can  be construed as publishing them -- and thereby jeopardizing their chance of being picked up by real publishers. My scheme is in ruins. The platform must be "repurposed." I speak a little tech.  

In the worst case scenario it's still a place to help promate My Life as a Cadaver and redirect the novel on its path to obscurity.  The idea of rekindling interest in my human rights book Levi's Children is pure fantasy. 
Linking the site to a moribund gallery of long-expired news articles in the Morgue secton is a vestage of my old website. Irrelevent nostalgia.

I'm ready to start counting "hits."