Friday, August 23, 2013

My Books In Sexy Brief, Part Two, "Music Made By Bears"


Music Made By Bears
My old friend Jack once called them “the bastard children of [his] imagination.” I’m sure all writers have them: pieces of writing that are begun but never finished. My senior year in college, after I quit my column due to its receiving a wretched combination of indifference and loathing, I started writing the second novel, and I was invited to write jokes for a student-run local-access TV show. At the time, the first draft of what was then called “Remembering the Dead” became yet another bastard child of my imagination. I abandoned it shortly after Dalton arrived in town—so, barely into it. I started writing jokes because jokes were actually more difficult for me to write than the Jibba novella had been. But my jokes, and the show itself, were awful. Profoundly bad, unfunny, and not even so unfunny it’s funny—that perfectly embarrassing presentation of utter comedic incompetence by writers, producers, and hosts alike.
But one of my jokes got a big laugh from the crowd (the punch-line was a new reality TV show called Blind People, Alcohol & Swords), and after graduating from college I moved to Los Angeles, where, surely, after sending the people at South Park the music video I made, I would be hired to write jokes for a living.
Overwhelming.
Indifference.
Fortunately my intelligence blasts its glory in billions of directions, so I was able to take on work doing multimedia quality assurance (a 21st Century Proofreader) while trying to teach myself to write better jokes, novels, teleplays, and screenplays. 
It was almost like being struck by lightning: One day I was was walking across my bedroom in the “Harbor View” apartment complex in a part of Los Angeles my roommate and I called “The Void,” and an image filled my mind so completely, and hit me so emotionally, that I literally had to sit down. Immediately I saw that my mind had gloriously birthed another bastard child, but this time it had given me the end of a story I had begun to write my senior year in college. 
Now I had A and B, and all I had to do was write the simple story that sewed them together.
I needed to build a bridge.
Fortunately I’m a fairly bright guy, and in the copious amounts of downtime I afforded myself because I was extremely good and efficient at my job, I was able to once again write a novel while working under other pretenses.
And then I finished it. I sewed the two sides together, unabashedly cried about the sad tale I’d written and equally unabashedly allowed myself to fill with sparkling adrenaline: I had written a longer, fuller, better book; I had reached another distant shore.
In that time, I had also written two comedic spec-scripts: one for The Office called “The Audit,” and one for Arrested Development called “Boyz ‘N the Wood.”
I showed the book and scripts to some close friends, and they liked them just fine—but nobody was backflipping over them like I was.
So I put “Remembering The Dead,” “The Audit,” and “Boyz ‘N the Wood” docs in my folder full of other writings, and I started the next book, based on a conversation I had with my friend Mike while we were in Las Vegas: “Danny, why don’t you write a book like the way you think?”
I started writing a new book at my proofreading job, but instead of writing the way I think, I decided to write the way that I think, but amplified.
And then I abandoned that project, because I forced myself to face a cold reality: I was about to turn 28, and I was fucking nowhere as a writer.
I decided to take on a writing project of staggering proportions.

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