When I get around to writing a novel loosely based on this period of my life (but not legally actionable), I may want to call it South Lake. I like the name for some reason. I try to name all my novels, even the ones that are still just a glimmer in my eye. Having a name puts them on my short list of what to work on when I’m stuck on whatever I’m supposed to be working on. Currently, by the way, that’s Johnny Come Lately (a working title), my memoir of growing up in New York centered roughly on 1974 – 1976.
I’m at the point where I should put the working titles in chronological order based on the period inspired or portrayed in them. I’ve got nothing for high school or college ’cause those still feel like really hackneyed times to me. More fun to end JCL with me preadolescent with the Studio 54-era coming on. I remember people in 5th grade repeating lines from the first season of SNL: “Ouch, my penis sure hurts when I urinate!” and stuff like that. Fairly radical for 10- and 11-year olds.
For the period of the late ’80s – early ’90s in San Francisco (all pre-dotcom), I’ve got History of Utah (a novel in the form of a bunch of Camper Van Beethoven bootlegs, some mixed tapes, and commentaries), and For You, the Stars a set of short stories, at least one per girl.
Only Way Free stalled out with about 100 pages happens in the mid-90s, eventually including email. It deals with hack writing and fidelity and is stuck on a context-shift metanovel thing that’s kind of embarassing.
Wellspring is my dotcom novel, mostly a sketch, pretty theoretical, and possibly not worth doing but when I took the stock options, I promised myself I’d take notes and capture some of the best scenes, and it does have three natural acts. It’s just a story that we all know too well right now. And how boring on the Internet, especially if you were here before, during, and after the bubblee. Still, again, witnessing is worth doing and maybe it will mutate to another context. Maybe I’ll set it in Texas in the ’80s.
A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I’ll Never Read is a hyperlinked writing sandbox with pretensions of someday spilling out at least one good story, possibly the one about Rafe.
Not set in period / hard to classify: Blurt is a hypertext that currently exists only on my Palm and which consists or many very short interlinked blurbs written for specific words.
I’d also like to take the a text like the neverending sentence a make every word a link. Maybe like a wiki so that some of the links went to form pages where anyone could define the word or write about it or reweave the slub back into the woof, or maybe more authorial, more auctorial than that. Still, the Mola Project has always made me want to write (or contribute to) a densely linked and nonetheless coherent hypertext story, one where literally every word (or almost every word?) links somewhere, but that’s another story.
I also wrote about two paragraphs of something called Wodeneye that might be about my dad. I’m not sure.
There, I’ve named them. Now I just have to finish, write, or start them and we’ll be all set.
