Thursday, January 6, 2011

Halloween Story Moves On

I said at the outset of this blog that its purpose was to try to exhume from a – I hoped – premature grave, a novel that I was writing.

The novel had a purpose.

I really didn’t care much about it – the novel - but, if I could put it in form sufficient to get an agent to want to try to promote it, and to try to sell it to editors, I hoped that it might become the sort of vehicle of near fame, or pseudo fame, or presque- fame ( sort of like being a young woman who catapults herself to riches by being stupid, pregnant, unmarried and extremely desirous of being paid for talking about her state of affairs on cable television) that I see happening daily.

So the reason for that hope had nothing to do with the novel that I might be writing.

That hope had to do with the memoir that I had already written: a memoir to which I am extremely attached.

My idea had been, that if I could get one or more of the twenty-one, or so, year old young women agents (as I understand it there are no men left standing who function in that capacity) in New York, none of whom have ever been to the left side of the Hudson (left if one is looking north) and feel that ever going hence is a trivial un-necessity, or if they have, by some untoward causality, been to that other Hudson-side, can’t remember having been so,(or if they do so remember, stoutly refuse to admit to that memory) who are in charge of the literary input and output of the United States of America, to become interested in a half-baked tale that I had concocted in support of - I hoped to be in support of, anyway - creating downstream interest in my memoir.

I had hoped that if I could get someone to publish and promote some schlock, I could get somebody to pay attention to something that I deemed to be pretty good.

As always, things change.

I have no idea whether I can ultimately tie all the treads that I have cast out in Jacques ( the stalking horse novel) into a coherent story, but I really want to.

The stalking horse has become the mission.

I should have known.

But I didn’t.

Halloween Story is probably going to be titled Jacques if it ever appears as a published work..

That maybe someday novel is now comfortably resting – all Twenty Seven Parts and thirty four or so  thousand words – in an MS Word 2007 document, complete with sections and a first page header.

Thirty four or so thousand words is just its momentary form.  There are somewhere around five thousand more words in my mind yet to be put to disk. And my Ouija  promises me that the rest of my ideas for this story may become unmanageable in size.

What a comforting thought.

So what I am telling you-all (y’all) is that Halloween Story - as a web blog post - is finished. It has served its – for me – unbelievably important purpose, but as a part of this blog it is finished.

The rest of its story will be between me and those young women agents in New York.

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