Seems appropriate to talk about the history of The Saltness of Time, the novella I want
to turn into a print book using a letterpress and funded through Kickstarter.
That campaign ends Dec. 3 and I'm nowhere near my goal. Very much appreciate
those who have donated. If the goal isn't reached, Kickstarter will refund your
donation. I even received $100 donation from this person: Алексей Ухловский.
Anyone translate that for me?
But if you're interested in reading this work, even without donating,
no problem. The Saltness of Time, is available
as an ebook and it is also included in the paperback collection of stories, One More Victim. I consider them literary works and worry: does that label turn off many readers? Does it you?
Here's the back story on Saltnesss.
In my 20s (in Lawrence, KS, and in Florence, Italy, and in Oiso, Japan) I was
writing. Trying to write. Probably the Hemingway Nick stories influenced me.
But I had a vision of creating a series of linked stories featuring myself in
high school and my best friend I called Fred. Some Fred stories worked out
(those are in the One More Victim
collection, too). Some stories you learn to give up on; some you go back to. The Saltness of Time was one that kept
pulling me back. But it wasn't until my 40s that I reentered it in a serious
and productive way.
***
An aside here: young writers, be patient; let things fester
inside you. Don't think you've failed before you have. Don't think you've
succeeded before you have. Many stories are like wine: they need time in the
cask. Don't get drunk too soon on them; don't give up on them either. Or, don't
listen to me at all. Seems plenty of young writers are doing much better than
am I in this epublishing business. Maybe the best route is to ignore geezers
like me.
***
Writing the novel Crazy About You, I discovered a technique that seemed to work for me. It was in
first person, but allowed a kind of leaping forward for the character so he
could look back upon himself. Just because you are in first person doesn't mean
you have to stay in the present.
An example from Crazy:
At the drive-in, Gwendolyn and I both had
chocolate malts with our cheeseburgers. Was beef better then? Was milk sweeter?
Why is it that a chocolate malt and a cheeseburger is never as good as it was
in high school? As we get older do our tastes become jaded, too, the way our
ideals do?
The main character in The
Saltness of Time is relating his story to a captive group of listeners in
the present. But he's talking about the past.
That made Saltness
complicated to write. The reader learns the story through the narrator who is
one of the listeners, but 90 percent of the story is listening to what the main
character says. And then the story teller tells a story that was told to him,
so there is a story within a story. This technique created interesting tensions.
It also provided the listening narrator in the present with opportunities to
comment on the speaker of the tale.
Maybe this taste will clarify the above mush:
He was a little spooky. But I figured he was
harmless. And there were myself and Ted to protect the girls, snuggling against
us as we sat on the divan. We both had our arms around our respective women,
sharing the commingled warmth of our young bodies in front of the fire, the
only source of heat in the hotel. Sleeping arrangements had yet to be worked
out. We had taken two rooms and, by looking at Ted, I could tell he was sharing
the same hope I had: that we would take our girlfriends to our own beds, as we
each certainly had done in the past, but neither of us knowing if the sisters
would acknowledge that fact to each other through the act of allowing it to
occur again in the presence of the other. The alternative was unappealing:
sharing the narrow, double bed with Ted.
The stranger sat in an overstuffed chair
near the fire, getting up as needed to feed it new logs.
"I haven't told many people this story.
Perhaps you'd rather not hear it. I know how hard it is for young people to
listen about what rocked the hearts and flamed the passions of old people when
they were young. It seems so long ago it's hard to believe lives back then were
blood and bone real. And what happened to me that night reached back into the
last century. I mean, Gabrielle was born in the 1880s. No, wait, might as well
get it right. She was eighty-nine when we ran across her and that was in 1963,
so she would have been born in..." He stopped briefly to calculate in his
head and Stephie, the little math whiz, spoke up with the answer,
"1874."
This approach, too, gifted to me the best ending sentence
I've written for any of my works. (Shame on any of you who get The Saltness of Time and
skip to the ending!)
The phrase "saltness of time" comes from
Shakespeare ("Some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of
time," Henry IV, part II). I was thinking more of the salt beds of the
dried-up, inland sea below the rich soil of the Kansas prairie. And, of course,
the salt beds, too, within each of us that we develop with time.
But back to the whole Kickstarter business. Don't you think
this would be a wonderful read in a print book from a letterpress book,
hardbound by an old fashioned bindery? Hope you do. $100 donation would get you
that book.
