I’m at the point in my writing cycle where I’m overanalyzing how writing works. I often need to break apart stories and books and try to find what makes them readable, desirable, and functional. Although I feel that Rumored to Exist is a good book in many places, I don’t know how it will stand as a complete book, and I don’t know how I will come up with the ideas to finish it. Because it is so loose and free-form, there’s no cohesive story to follow, which puts me in the danger of never finishing. I’ve been hacking at Rumored for a little over two years, and I’m barely halfway done. Another round of edits could put me well below the halfway bar, if I start chopping the pieces I absolutely hate.

This means I start thinking about the theory of plot and structure of story. It also means I think about my interests and try to find new topics to research, combine, and twist into new ideas. It’s a nervous prospect, since I have absolutely no attention span right now, and I can never apply myself to projects like this. It’s the reason I could never learn a foreign language, or pull a decent GPA in largely scantron courses like psychology or sociology. So I might be off this kick before too long.

The perfect starting point and example is, of course, William S. Burroughs. He lived a life of ecclectic and bizarre connections: heroin, South America, homosexuality, classical literature, psychology, technology, and travel. He worked jobs just to find out what it was like, as a private detetective or exterminator, and took a strange path, studying at Harvard, going to Vienna for medical school, living in the middle of nowhere in Texas, and then going across the globe: Mexico, South America, Tangiers, Paris, Austria, New York, Kansas. His life provided the raw material to produce his books. He often went on about different topics, such as the Mayans, time travel, scientology, the corruption of a Christian society, drug dealers, and more. But he didn’t write straightforward narratives about his experiences, like Charles Bukowski or Henry Miller or something. It was more veiled in complicated structures; cutups, fragments, dreams and chaos used to frame the pieces of his stories.

If I wanted to rip off Burroughs entirely, the two basic pieces to investigate could then be defined as the content and the method. This sounds pretty arbitrary, but it’s an important distinction, because I think in most of your writing 101 classes, the division of story would be something like plot and character. I don’t think plot is required, because it’s really a part of method. The method of a story, especially something nonlinear, doesn’t have to include plot. It could use any mechanism that would pull the reader through the story. A book like Naked Lunch is not plot-driven. (The well-versed Burroughs scholar could argue that it is, but the first-time reader would disagree, so let’s stick with that.) And character is somewhat of a division of content. Although characters are important in WSB’s work, he doesn’t rely on a top-down cast like a Hollywood movie. And it isn’t a typical first-person narrative like so many literary works.

I don’t know where to start, and I don’t think I can investigate both of these today, but the easiest way for me to begin would be with content. I always try to find new, cool things to discuss in Rumored, be it designer drugs, high-tech weaponry, pop-culture icons, or obscure history references. I’m not always 100% happy with some of these things, and many have been cut or toned down as the editing of Rumored continues. I need to think of new topics, but I need to think about how they are discussed or applied, and that’s where it gets even more complicated.

Back to Burroughs - a lot of his work has a mystical, investigative approach. He talks about the Mayans and Ah Pook the Destroyer and all of that, with a spiritual approach. I don’t mean that he is a religious writer; it’s that the characters and reference - the content - relies on a religious framework to interact through his books. When he talks about heroin, it isn’t a Trainspotting sort of Calvin Klein ad for junk; he talks about it in a spiritual sense. He has created a culture which has its own minor morality plays based on the unique aspects of drug use and addiction. It’s not like a Hollywood movie where the use of drugs pushes one of the characters in the stereotypical inventory of characters through the stock five plot movements, i.e. I’m a high school cheerleader and I have a football player boyfriend; Someone offers me drugs and I try them so I can be pretty/popular/better; antics ensue; I weigh 500 pounds and smoke a pound of hash a day; I learn to love god. moral: don’t do drugs, kids! Burroughs seems to walk far outside of this, because he isn’t pushing a plot like they are. He might have some plot elements to keep the pages turning, but it’s not all designed to be a 2 hour movie of the week.

Although I haven’t read his stuff in years, I was thinking of Asimov as another example. He wrote all of these books about robots, but the books aren’t really about big aluminum men running around killing people or whatever. He took the angle of social commentary and engineered it around the limitations and issues of robotics. Asimov wasn’t a religious guy (If I remember correctly, he’s a Humanist, which is probably my closest fit, religion-wise) and his books aren’t knit together with a spiritual overtone. He takes his unique topics and works together the content with the political or sociological consequenses. Other writers would have a plot-driven theme about robots, but he uses a light plot to drive home the unique circumstanses of man creating artificial “life.”

So my homework for tonight is to come up with a laundry list of topics I could further explore and research for the universe created within Rumored to Exist. There are tons of things there, but many of them are free-floating. Someone might be injecting some cloning serum in his arm, but the purpose and placement of clones in the book is somewhat secondary. I think if I picked apart some of the topics I’ve discussed and brainstormed further mutations of them, there would be more coross-pollination of weird stuff and more ideas for new pieces.

And maybe tomorrow I can talk about method. Or maybe I’ll still be babbling about this.

It was a dark and cloudy afternoon. Foggy, really - it looks like the mist at the outer boundaries of a Nintendo-64 screen has enveloped all of Seattle. I knew the few days of sunshine were too good to be true - now we go back to six months of shittiness.

I watched too much TV last night, and didn’t get any work done. There was a show on about the Air Force One, another one of those Discovery Channel “Inside Story” things. I actually went on the first jet-powered Air Force One, a Boeing 707, tail number 26000. It’s at the Boeing museum in Seattle - you can walk through it and see various replica seats and desks and fake radio gear behind plexiglass. Actually, I don’t remember if the museum had plane 26000 or 27000, or if it was all fake. But one one of the two was where they swore in LBJ while JFK’s corpse was stowed away in the passenger compartment. Another weird thing on that show - Air Force One is the FAA callsign for the plane only when the president was on board. When Nixon resigned, he was president when he left DC on his way home, but Ford was signed in at noon, when he was midway to California. So the plane had to change callsigns to 27000 while in midair.

The Museum of Flight has so many cool planes there, each with a weird story. Their B-17 was in the film Memphis Belle; their FG-1D Corsair spent 33 years at the bottom of Lake Washington before being restored; they have an A-4F that used to be a Blue Angels plane. I already mentioned Air Force One; their SR-71 Blackbird and D-21 drone is also a one-of-a-kind. Their F-4 Phantom really scored 3 MiG kills in 1967; their P-12 biplane once flew from LA to San Diego, inverted. One of their biggest planes is the prototype 747; one of the smallest is the Aerocar III, a fiat-sized car that can bolt on a pair of wings and a prop for air travel. The Aerocar is pretty kick-ass; you can convert it in only ten minutes. Although it can go about 100 miles an hour in the air, it can only drive at about 65.

I’m bored, and I have a meeting in a bit, so I better cut this short.

I’ve been obsessively eating those little, red, cinnamon candies, and watching a special about nuclear submarines that sank. So it’s been a productive evening. I also got a bunch of CDs in the mail, but I fell asleep after Marie called, and I didn’t get a chance to listen to anything. Now, in a fit of “it happened ten years ago” nostalgia, I’m listening to a Lizzy Borden album. It’s Master of Disguise, probably the best one. It’s somewhat of a concept album, and really reminds me of my first semester in college. I recently found another copy, and it’s one of those albums that can really transport me back to a very specific time and era. I love music like that, even if it is somewhat dated.

I should get back to writing. Rumored to Exist is going slow, but I have a pile of edited stuff to reconcile that I’ve been putting off. And Letterman is on.

01/05/99 15

The government is burning tons of napalm that has been sitting around since the end of the Vietnam war. Why can’t they have some kind of lottery for it? Or sell it by the barrel at the army-navy store? I don’t know about you, but I could really use a 55 gallon drum of napalm.

It’s a slow day - I want to write more, but I can’t. Maybe later.

01/05/99 15

I need to do some research and find all of the nuclear subs that are still on the ocean floor. I think there are at least 4 or 5 of them. After I make my first billion dollars, I’m going to rent that Hughes explorer ship and try to find one of those subs. That Hughes boat has this gigantic hole in the middle of it, where they can lift an entire submarine with a giant claw-like thing, close the doors behind it, and dismantle it with Navy frogmen in nuclear protection gear. I guess when they salvaged that Soviet sub in ‘74, it was completely hot from the nuclear missiles. They also found 9 bodies, and gave them a traditional Russian burial at sea, while they rolled a few movie cameras. They showed part of the burial on the Discorvery channel special last night - it was very bizarre, James Bond sort of stuff.

I still hear what sounds like sea otters across the street. I’ve been listening to White Zombie all morning. I’ve started cleaning my office in anticipation of my move to the other building. I only have one or two boxes of stuff - some of the people I work with have a dozen boxes of stuff. I wish I had a camera I could mount anywhere and transmit the video signal several miles away. I’d use it for lots of things, like proving that my fucking landlord is only in his office an hour a day.

I actually brought my lunch today. I’ve been going to the deli downstairs every day, but that costs money and I’m gaining weight because of it. Plus, I’m moving offices at the end of the week, and the new place doesn’t have a deli downstairs. So, I need to get used to lunchmeat and snak-paks again.

I’ve been having a minor freakout about the year. It isn’t because Prince sang about it in that stupid song, but because 1989 was ten years ago. So many key things happened in that year, from college to women to psychiatry to everything else. It was when I left for school, learned to play piano, bought my first bass, got my first real credit card, and started taking Prozac. And the fact that I can now say “Ten years ago, I…” is making my usual nostalgia trips even more chaotic.

On a similar topic, I was flipping through channels last night, and saw a “Hey, remember the 90’s?” CD for sale. I almost called the 800 number to yell “Hey, IT IS THE FUCKING NINETIES!!!!” at somebody. Remember you read it here first - this is going to collapse on itself so much, that by 2015, you will see ads for “Hey, remember 2

this afternoon?” CDs.

I have a lunch to finish. Catch you later.

The midwest is buried under 16 feet of snow, and the sun was out here today. Vindication.

I got a new driver’s license today. I tried to look as scary as possible for the photo, but it’s not great. I didn’t shave for a week, and wore a Cianide shirt. Unlike Indiana, they let me keep the old license (after they punched a hole in it.)

My friend Suzanne was here today. She’s been in Olympia since xmas, but her and her guy-friend Matt came up here tonight. We went to Denny’s, did a bunch of driving around, and stopped by my work for the tour. I’ve known Suzanne since 1994. She’s a manager at the Borders in Bloomington and I usually see her when I’m in town, and hassle her about stuff in the store or whatever. The first time I visited Bton after my departure, she went with me to White Castle. I went to the counter and told the girl “I came all the way from Seattle to eat here.” She said “I’m sorry.”

I wanted to write more, but I’m so tired. I read through all of Rumored to Exist tonight, and made some comments. I also read through all of my notes, and got all ready to start writing new stuff. But I’m not awake enough to do any work. (I am listening to the Dream Theater album entitled Awake, though.) My mom called me at 9

this morning, and I was dumb enough to pick up. And no naps, either. Maybe I will write more tomorrow.