I’ve been busy working on something. Check this out, here are some facts and other worthless trivia about my first book, Summer Rain:

• The book was started on April 1, 1995

• The final draft was sent to the publisher on July 3, 2000

• The last third of the book was completely rewritten in the second-to-last draft.

• About 20,000 words were cut from the book’s length during the final draft.

• Final wordcount: 220,866

• First draft wordcount: 82,142

• Original target wordcount: 40,000

• A first draft was completed on 9/15/95, but contained just a fraction of the final product.

• Based on a short story by the same name written in late 1994 for a writing class. Part of the story is in chapter 38. A slightly cleaned-up version of the standalone story is here

• The interview with Type O Negative contained in Chapter 35 really did happen when Jon Konrath was a DJ at WQAX in 1992. Later, when their landmark album Bloody Kisses was released, they thanked John Conner from WQAX. This is where the name for the main character came from.

• Early drafts contained lyrics from many Death Metal bands, but they were removed in the final draft to avoid permissions problems.

• The band Nuclear Winter was a basement/joke band containing Jon Konrath, Larry Falli, Ray Miller, Derik Rinehart, and others. The song lyrics quoted are real.

• The story’s timeline is carefully scripted to match Indiana University’s actual 1992 academic calendar.

• Jon Konrath went back to the IU Bursar’s office and purchased a complete recapitulation of his Bursar’s account to reverse-engineer some of the dates and dollar amounts in the book.

• The report cards and letters from the college with regard to grades were real.

• In chapter 32, a letter from the Dean of Students is signed by Juan Schwartz. This is the pseudonym Trey Parker used in his film Cannibal: The Musical

• In chapter 21, John falsely predicts that the World Wide Web will never catch on.

• Almost all of the mails sent from John Conner were actual emails sent by Jon Konrath in 1992.

• Several scenes and characters were cut completely from the book:

  • A job interview for a computer support position at Bryan Hall.
  • Going on a horrible blind double date to see Cool World with a female friend and her best friend.
  • An interview with Death Metal band Unleashed
  • Several sequences involving me tutoring a friend in computer science
  • Another female interest late in the book that acted as a foil against Amy.

• The original draft had an ending that took place years after the original summer. It told what happened to John Conner, and some of the other characters in the book. It ended with a paragraph that’s partially stolen from Charles Bukowski’s Post Office:

           Then I started reading, reading guys like Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.  I saw their lives through their prose, and it started me scribbling in spiral notebooks, hoping to free myself by journaling.  The scribbling helped mold me, and as I felt better about my own little world, the pile of filled spiral notebooks began to grow.  Then, I decided I should just write a novel about all of it.  And I did.

• In early drafts, Amy leaves John for another man at the end of the book.

• In real life, WQAX closed its doors forever at the end of 1992.

• Nick’s original name was Marco.

• The first trip to Elkhart was much longer. It was cut in half during edits. One scene removed contained John’s father.

• The entire book was written using emacs. It was stored in text files, a file per chapter.

• A printout of a draft from 6/18/99 is in the Library of Congress. This was the second-to-last draft.

• Amy’s apartment in chapter 37 (Colonial Crest, #144) was Jon Konrath’s actual apartment in the 1993-1994 school year.

• The cover photo is Showalter Fountain. The photo was taken by Dave Gulbransen, but the publisher messed it up during design, so it looks horrible.

• Amy’s personal name in her email says “The more things change, the more they stay the same” in French.

I should mention that I finished a draft of Summer Rain today. Now it’s time to shake out all of the bugs, and get this piece of shit to the printer.

I’m sick - probably shouldn’t be awake but my sleep schedule’s off due to a day of heavy cold medicine and too many naps. I ate dinner at like 5

and now I’m starving, so I woke up in the middle of the night to eat pizza. Make sense? Probably not.

Ten seconds after I convinced Michael that CVS was the greatest thing in the world, it stopped letting me check in files. This is a metaphor for my life.

04/28/00 13

I fucking hate being sick. Even though I got a good night’s sleep last night, I absolutely couldn’t get out of bed thismorning. So I called in, hacked (lungs, not code) for 45 minutes, and got back to bed. Had a weird dream that I was at the weird Maryland top-secret camp where they’re holding Elian and his dad. I was hanging out with my old friend Chris Hagen, who was desperately trying to convince me that I should have children as soon as possible. Chris has always been a strange guy, so this wasn’t entirely out of character.

I just got lunch from the Mini Star, a diner a few blocks away. Very cheap, pretty good, and extremely fast. And they let me order anything, no matter how small, with no minimum order. I think I could call and ask for a napkin, and a guy would be here three minutes later. It’s like having a Denny’s on call. Today’s a soup day - hot chicken noodle, perfect for this cold. I also got a $3 cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice that could regenerate the dead, it has so much vitamin C in it.

Otherwise, it’s very much a non-day. I kept drifting back to sleep, half wanting to stay unconscious for three days until this was over, half wanting to get up, take a shower, and get on the computer or clean or go to the corner store or something. I feel so guilty for sitting around all day, but… I’m sick.

It still hasn’t registered that I finished a draft of Summer Rain. It probably won’t; this is common for me. When I think about it, there are probably so many problems - continuity, gaps, grammar, and it’s going to be a huge task to fix all of them. I wish I could print the whole thing, mistakes and all. But it’s somewhat rewarding to find a major fuckup and thing “I’m glad that didn’t make it to print…”

Back to my soup…

Things are, at best, a blur. I think I’m getting a cold, which is a pisser because I’m in the final mile of editing Summer Rain, and I really want to blow through the last of the writing and get it over with. I’m down to five chapters with sizable holes that need to be plugged, and then it gets down to the monotony of spell-checks and passes through printouts with the red pen. I’m almost certain that two weeks into the month I’ve scheduled, I will say ‘fuck it’ and send the thing off to the printers.

I can’t think well at the start of a cold. It seems to cut into my creativity first. I think if I could sleep more, I would get past this. I got about 6 hours last night, which helped. Tonight, I will try for 8. I also want to think about what books to read next. I haven’t been able to read while I edit Summer Rain, and I want to get into stuff that will make me want to work on Rumored to Exist. Maybe some Raymond Federman. Or I could re-read Leyner.

I have an overwhelming urge to get a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I’ve decided to wait until the book is done and money settles down, and then I will waste my evenings on learning to fly a Cessna. And waste my paychecks on control yokes, pedals, and more memory.

Okay, back to the book.

I am the walking dead today. I slept about 2 hours right after work, and I slept almost 10 last night. It was pouring rain outside, which meant I was hypnotized into a deep sleep, and I had abnormal dreams all night long. Anyway, I rolled into work today and could barely open my eyes. I’m still trying to get the caffeine going so I’ll be able to function a bit more.

I’m still writing, working on Summer Rain, but it’s getting tougher. I didn’t realize I left significant blank spots in the manuscript that were to be filled in later. I thought I’d just be doing some light editing, but now I’ll have to write complete chapters to insert into this thing. I guess it will be nice to do some writing from scratch, but I need to get the whole story in my head before I start messing with it more.

I do like digging through old writing and finding things that I think are ingenious, things I didn’t realize I wrote. I was digging through my hard drive the other night, trying to get things into some kind of order, and I found this long monologue I wrote about this woman who sold me a microwave at Target. I’d forgotten the piece and forgotten the women, and laughed my ass off when I read the story. I always love finding stuff like that. I think I’m a boring and redundant writer, then I find a story I scribbled on the back of some physics homework in 1992.

It’s just another day. I spent the weekend staying up all night and sleeping all day. Now I just about totalled myself getting in here, and my eyes are welded shut with sleep. My stomach is churning from no food and too much caffeine. I could use a nap. I could use ten naps.

I shouldn’t bitch - I got a lot of writing done. I cracked open the Summer Rain text, and started at page one. I hope to read through it, making revisions and getting up to speed with the text again. I used to be able to think of a paragraph or conversation and just turn right to that page without thinking. Now I forget how the fucking story goes in some places.

Last summer, I cut the book into three pieces - three books, to make it more logical, to fit together better. It’s sort of three phases of the character’s summer, and follows his thinking about what he should do with his life. It also makes the text easier to work with - the chapters are shorter, and I can just work with each third of the book, and not worry about this giant volume of writing all at once.

My plan this time is to read through the whole thing, correct the choppiness, and fix any holes. I do have a larger idea to break the story apart by alternating the chapters of reality with some other chapters - maybe flashbacks, email messages, or something. That’s a bit ambitious right now, though. I just want to focus on making the main body of text readable. I know nobody will want to buy this book, or even read it. But I want to make it readable to me, and I want to finish it. I’d feel better with a fully-functional book sitting under my bed and collecting dust than a bunch of disjointed text that makes up 90% of a book.

Also, I think my drive to finish this book is different than before. When I wrote the first draft, I wanted to publish this book and make money and do interviews and be on Charlie Rose and become famous. I realize now that the book market in this country is fucked, and the only way you can get a book deal is to be a murderer or one of the lawyers at their trial. Americans don’t buy books anymore unless they’ve got the endorsement by some pop-rock idiot, or they were ghost written for a rock star or something. I can’t sell this book. I can’t give it away. And I don’t think anybody would read it, because it really drags, and tells a story that has a lot of vague hidden meaning that isn’t there for most people. It’s boring to most people. But it means a lot to me. And also, I have been afraid about talking about me. I didn’t want to discuss everything that happened with people because I was afraid they’d sue me. There was a lot of self-censorship involved, and I’ve decided to just cut the shit, hit the throttles, and write this fucking book. Nobody’s going to see it except me. So it’s time to belt this thing out.

I cut through two chapters last night, and made some minor changes. I am not happy with my writing style in the manuscript, and my first big changes will be cleaning this up. The beginning of the book’s been edited about 38 times, and past the first few chapters hasn’t really been touched from the original manuscript I started back at IU. So the first third of the book is really lofty, with me adding adjectives and adverbs all over the place to make it more descriptive. It reads like a dumb-ass trying to be smart. And then later in the book, I was typing faster than fuck while on a caffeine buzz, and some parts of the book just skip all over the place. There are whole sentences without verbs, lots of edit marks, stuff unfinished. So it all needs to be brought to the same level, the same style.

I’ve thought about what style to mimic for this book. Obviously, I want my own style and I need to find it. But I need to find it by writing SOMETHING and then slowly finding myself and changing. I guess what I want is a combination of Bukowski and Rupert Thomson. I want to be easy to read, easy to tackle, something that flows well, but has a depth behind it. I don’t want to spend half a page describing an environment - I’d rather briefly set it up, have the character and their actions describe it, and then continue. I guess Kerouac was into that, especially in On The Road. Anyway, the stuff is hard to read in places, and it needs to be simplified, but it still needs to capture the feeling.

Window washers are outside my office right now, dangling from ropes with buckets of soap and squeegees. It was pretty weird - I heard a knocking around, then saw these ropes drop and guys in harnesses fling down like SWAT team guys rapelling down to get the terrorists or something.

My stomach is feeling a little better, but I still need a nap…