So, in case you think I’m a complete sloth, one reason I haven’t been posting much is that I’ve been busy the past few years working on a new novel, called Radioland. The reason I can write about it now is that I’m convinced it doesn’t suck (or no longer sucks, depending upon the draft). Very soon I will hand it to my agent and all the publishers will be bidding on it hopefully it will find a good home.
This was a hard one. Not as story-driven as The Society of Experience, but similar in that it features two first-person perspectives. This is very much a “trauma book” and it pissed me off when I realized this was the case. Writing about trauma takes a lot of heavy lifting, and is draining as fuck.
Here’s the Official Synopsis:
Kris is an alt-rock musician who abruptly drops out of his popular band to rake over an unprocessed trauma from his childhood; Jill is an outcast who operates in the shadows of the city, cursed with a dangerous type of magic that draws mysterious strangers to her. By chance, they start a correspondence with each other and a strange relationship begins – one that coils around their lives like a macabre spell. As they share their stories with one another, they each approach the source of their misery and risk losing themselves, even their lives, in a darkness that seems destined for them.
Everything Jill senses tells an intense story, so she numbs herself with alcohol to keep her head clear, hoping she’ll meet someone who can tell her how she came to be the way she is. Kris struggles to maintain his grip on reality as he pulls apart the threads that make up his identity. Working through fallen mentors, splintered identities, and substance dependency, the two of them try to help each other make sense of their lives, though it may ultimately reveal one of them as a serial murderer.
Radioland explores the absurdity of fame, the toxicity of trauma, and the morbid dangers unearthed as we seek a greater understanding of ourselves.
Interesting, huh?
Writing this book (and applying for grants which are never granted), I feel I’m coming closer to describing my approach. I call it metaphysical social realism; that there can be fantastical things such as time travel and actual magic…but these facts don’t change the rest of the world which contains us — rent is due, relationships require maintenance, the responsibilities of adulthood call on us whether we are ready or not.
I hope to provide more updates on Radioland as they happen.
I’ve noticed more and more over the last decade that less and less people want to use the phone. I cannot help but draw a correlation between this observation and the ubiquitous rise of digital communication. Email? Sure. Text? Yup. And what’s wrong with this, you might ask? On paper it would objectively appear that text-based communication (particularly including social media) is superior at transferring information without error, if only us pesky humans didn’t make mistakes. And this last part is key: we are not objective, we balance the objective world with our much less easily measurable experiential (or personal) reality; this second reality is informed by our experiences, which are diverse and sometimes punctuated by trauma or loss. When we talk to someone on the phone we are leaving ourselves prone — to fallibility (stammering, going off on a tangent), or having our hesitations read as something we may not otherwise wish to reveal.
