INSIDE TWICE - The Journey so far: Part 1

SUBSCRIBER NOTES FOR EPISODE FIFTY SIX:

Hi! And welcome—at last—to the first real edition of INSIDE TWICE, my weekly chat with YOU and the whole community of TWICE subscribers.

Before anything else, I’d like to say—again—THANK YOU for subscribing to INSIDE TWICE! Lots of people read TWICE on line without subscribing, just by going to the TWICE site’s ‘Archive Page’ to clicking on the latest episode link button—which is GREAT! This serial is a personal creative project, which I’ve been working on privately for many years, and now, it’s satisfying—and weirdly adventurous—just to seal each new episode into a bottle every week and toss it out into the sea, without any idea where each of those bottles may go, or who might read what I’ve put in them. But it’s an even greater pleasure to share this evolving story with some more tangible community of readers with whom I can enjoy some ‘back and forth.’

Through this weekly blog, I hope to offer you a more personal window into all the creative thought, activity, challenges and rewards that lie behind this endeavor each week for me—and I encourage you to send me your thoughts and questions about the serial as well. Every bit of feedback I have ever received about this project has helped me improve its shape and course, and been creatively energizing for me too. But I’d enjoy and benefit from some even more direct and fluid communication with subscribers—which is why I’ve been thinking about inviting you and other TWICE subscribers to a monthly Zoom chat about the series and whatever other topics may be of interest to you. I’d be very curious to hear what YOU think of that idea. Do you think you’d be interested—or does this just sound like a well-intended waste of time? If there is interest, I’d like to set the first of these chats up next month! So I hope you’ll let me know. :]

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So, with this week’s practical business out of the way, let’s get to the personal stuff! This week, I’d like to share some thoughts about my experience of the TWICE journey so far. Where did TWICE come from? Where’s it been? And where might it be going? As I started working on this post earlier this week, it quickly became clear that answering all three of those questions in a single post—as I’d originally imagined doing—was…a bit more ambitious than I’d thought—and a bit more material than you would likely want to wade through at a single sitting. So, this week, I’m just going to cover the first of those three questions, and save the rest for my next two posts here. So…

WHERE DID ‘TWICE’ COME FROM?

I actually started writing TWICE in 2004, during my brief residence in Omaha, NE. Back then, I just meant it to be a lighthearted romp about a guy who gets to live a life just the way he’d always dreamed a life should be. I’d just finished writing The Book of Joby—pretty much the opposite kind of story, about a guy who lived a life where NOTHING went the way it should have—and man-oh-man did I feel ready for a change of pace! …Unfortunately, it turns out that I don’t really do ‘lite.’

The guy in that original manuscript got the ‘awesome do-over’ he’d always dreamed of…and then a funny thing happened. You see, for me at least, when a story’s actually got legs, it isn’t long before the characters and the internal logic of that story not only develop lives of their own, but become stronger than the author is. Pretty soon, such characters are telling YOU what they’ll do, and what they won’t, and what ‘your’ story is actually about, ‘you authorial moron.’ TWICE turned out to be a story with really STURDY legs, and no sooner had my protagonist gotten everything he wished for, than the whole deal turned out to be ‘bait and switch.’ NOTHING went the way he had imagined it would. This, my guys explained to me, was a ‘be careful what you wish for’ story. For the kind of author I am, anyway, there is never any real choice but to listen to your characters, do what they tell you to, and follow them to the real tale.

What a long and winding path that has turned out to be, full of passionate personal investment, creative ecstasy, and crushing defeat (in my actual life, I mean—not just in the story). I wrote some of it living in an actual slumlord’s tenement in Seattle, with an actual ‘excrement artist’ living in the basement and putting up large ‘installation pieces’ in the shared bathrooms—rats the size of house cats, fairy rings of vomit around the big plastic trashcans in the building’s shared kitchen, seven inches of standing water on the laundry room floor, traversed by tiptoeing across waterlogged 2” X 8” planks to the machines—that simply drained onto the floor—for lack of necessary plumbing to drain elsewhere perhaps? I made friends there with a host of pretty friendly alcoholics and drug addicts who lived inside, and finally left to escape a large tribe of not very nice frat boys next door. My one-time editor told me he wanted to publish this book THREE TIMES over six years—before he died tragically under a set of barrister’s bookshelves on his basement stairs, and I finally acknowledged the fact that he was never likely to publish it now.

And as addresses changed, and changed again, and day jobs came, and day jobs went, along with a few managers and agents, TWICE kept evolving—and evolving—into a MUCH larger tale than I had first imagined—about much more interesting themes than I’d expected. I began to realize that both my protagonist and virtually all of the characters around him were actually struggling with the same problem: being stuck in the wrong story! No, not MY story; their stories! In fact almost none of them were remotely aware of what a powerful force ‘story’ actually was in their lives, much less of what to do about getting themselves unstuck, and into ‘the right stories.’ By 2010, it had become not one story, but three interrelated stories braided together. So, ‘TRILOGY,’ right? But…sadly, that wasn’t going to work. You see, all three of these stories climax at the same moment, in the same event. Can’t really tell any of them ‘workably’ without including that event. But none of them have much punch or purpose once that event is exposed—and the three tales together are WAY too large to fit all together in a single book (if you don’t figure War and Peace or anything by George R. R. Martin into the equation). So, I spent three years, literally, trying to find some workable way to cram this story into a standard three-book format—doing real violence to the story itself in the process—until my editor suddenly died. Then, I gave up and started taking work as a ‘ghost writer.’

…Do you feel like maybe there are some ‘gaps’ in that story somewhere? Well, you’d be right. But let’s save filling those in for some other time, and move on for now.

The thing is, the more I understood this story, the more I LOVED it—and NEEDED to finish it—whether anybody ever published it, or saw it, or heard about it ever again. So, somewhere around 2015, I realized that a few hundred short little chapters—most ending with a cliffhanger of some kind—sounded a lot more like a cable TV series than a ‘novel’ or a ‘trilogy,’ and I thought…what if I published this as a serial somewhere? Dickens did it. Gaiman did it. Lots of people have done that, very successfully, and this way I wouldn’t have to massacre the ‘natural structure’ of this story to fit it into three sequential books, each with its own ‘big climax and resolution’ somehow. The question was just where and how, exactly, to put the story up.

But I’d just recently gotten married, and moved to another state, and a house that needed all kinds of major work--like rebuilding dangerously rotten decks, and putting in gardens, and installing outbuildings and repairing basements—and everything else that COULD POSSIBLY break, and…well, some of you have been married—and home owners—and know what I’m talking about. And members of both my family and my wife’s kept dying, and dying…and I kept getting huge freelance jobs of the sort that require 200-plus hours of work a month for a year at a time to complete, and then a set of circumstances I will NOT go into here made it necessary to sell that house, and move again—to a new house that made the old one look like a maintenance breeze—as more members of my wife’s family fell ill and died unexpectedly—as more infinitely expanding freelance jobs arrived. And let’s not go into the rest of that either just now. But...do you see a pattern here? …Could it be that my characters and I had…something uncomfortably in common? Might we all be working through…similar problems—about how to get out of the wrong stories into the right one?

All of which is to say that as the whole New York genre fiction publishing industry continued collapsing into greater and greater disarray around our many friends still entangled in it, I decided that the best thing to do was just put this serial up online myself—as soon as we got more than two minutes of breathing room in a month. Which finally, sort of happened, at around this time last year. Just before one more completely unexpected family death—and the pandemic—surprised us again. …What a good thing we live on a relatively peaceful island, eh? :] But…once again, I digress—as people—and lives—do. So often.

Lest I scare you here, allow me to assure you that I DO know—very clearly—how all three of these stories will end. I know how ALL of these characters are going to move from the wrong stories they’re stuck in now to the ‘right’ stories they’re groping toward. I calculate that getting them there—one episode at a time—will likely take at least another year or two. I suppose one interesting question is, by the time they’ve all got their stories sorted out…will I have figured out my own any better?

I guess we’ll see—eventually. :] Stay tuned!

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In the meantime, I have managed to update content on the TWICE site’s homepage, and am still working on the ‘story-to-date’ summary—which turned out to be a bigger job than I imagined as soon as I realized that a unique version would be needed for EVERY episode—since the summary stops at a different place depending on which episode you’re reading when you need it. This feature was suggested to me by a subscriber—and I sure wish I’d thought of it much, MUCH earlier, when it would have been easier to implement. :] So let that be a lesson to us all. Don’t hold back on sending me those suggestions! :D

Next week, I’ll be writing about what I imagined TWICE would be and how it would work when I first put it up here, and how it’s actually gone since then. :]

Have a great week! Stay safe and healthy. And thanks again for being part of my subscriber community!