I have been to Vancouver, BC only twice. I was there in November of 1999, and that visit was only twenty-four hours. Admittedly, I did so much during that visit that it seemed like a much longer time. And, as the case was, I was alone during the road trip to and from, so I had ample time to think. Also, I faithfully wrote everything down upon my return to Portland.
The second time I went to Vancouver was a year later in November of 2000. That trip I was with my girlfriend at the time, and one of my best friends and the three of us visited another friend once we got there. The second trip to Vancouver, needless to say, was vastly different than the first. I found myself taking everyone around to various sites of my first visit, but I did not tell any of them why.
The real advantage to waiting as long as I did to rewrite this manuscript is that I was able to make a nightly visit to Vancouver from my desk in Longmont, CO via the internet. I looked at maps, and I looked at Google Street view. As ersatz as it is, it was a remarkable thing for me to see.
I found myself getting very nostalgic for a place that I really never spent much physical time in. The amount of mental space Vancouver has taken up over the last two and a half decades is sizable, it really is. The city and my place within it never really left me, it's weird. And the people I met there, Kelly namely, have also been with me for all these years.
What's different now?
After I left Goddard in January of 2009, all I knew was that I wanted to write. In January of 2009, I only really had my graduate school thesis, From Ansbach to Color as a completed manuscript. Sure, I had a few older pieces, and at the time I really held them as valuable assets. I had The Exile which I wrote in 1993. I had Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver which I wrote in November of 1999. And then the other two: Mascaras y Munecas and The Cataract which I wrote in 2000 and 2001 respectively. These are very old manuscripts, and even if I had once thought of them as novels, they never were. They were just stories that I wrote, or pieces of stories that I hoped to make (remake) into novels some day. Some day came this year.
The order in which I have done these has been appropriate, I think. I rewrote The Cataract in April after immediately leaving Astoria, Oregon the month before. And Exile I rewrote in July, which means I gave it a full thirty years between drafts. And as I have said earlier, I knew as Exile was winding down how I needed to rework Twenty-four Hours as a story for Sam Foley.
I think it's worth noting that when I wrote Undertakers of Rain in 2009, I did so because I was feeling nostalgic for my friend Chris, and for our time in Portland, Oregon. When I began to write the novel, I decided to write two characters, Sam and John. I wanted to take all the worse qualities of Chris and my personalities and put them into one character and take all the good and put them into the other character. Although I had wanted the novel to be about both characters, it was ultimately John's story. So, I was glad for the opportunity to write in Sam for this one.
Incidentally, John and Sam have been in every novel I've written that has been set in Portland.
No comments:
Post a Comment