Comments on a book yet to be released? You bet!
Now I realize the "Author’s Note" has explanations and explications, and the prior posts on this blog cover lots of background, but it seems to me there are other things I might ought to say about the stories and folks that make up Welcome to the Dawning of a New Century, or as I refer to it, just plain ol’ Century. (Think of this as the DVD commentary track for the novel. You might want to play some music. I’m listening to Keane.)
Okay, so these are things you don’t know about the folks who live there, in fictional Century. Most of you haven’t read the book, so you REALLY don’t know. But these are things about how they ended up being who they are, maybe, or where their stories came from. (Credit where it’s due, when I can rightly recall.)
First off, I don’t apologize for the sex or language, but I will blush in front of my Grandma Massey when the time comes. Sorry, Grandma. I do apologize for any typos you find when the beautiful little book hits your mitts. (And it is pretty -- I held the proof in my hands tonight.) Those are my fault, the typos that is. And if you just don’t like it, the story that is, well, guess that would ultimately be my fault too, as I made the thing. But by then you must've bought it. Too bad. And if you read it, it’s in your brain now. Ha-ha. (That was a joke. Hence, the laughter.)
So let's make with the DVD commentary. The bold titles are chapter names. When you read the story, come back and this'll make much more sense...
Love and Loss at the Sign of the Pig:
Kenny Earl Hooper is not based upon anyone remotely related to me (nor is any member of his family), although I am remotely related by marriage to a professional butcher and he has told me stories that found their way into Kenny’s background. For instance, my in-law has been approached by customers who bought meat at a competitor’s store and wanted him to cut the meat for them. I told him at the time that I would end up using that story, and he told me to do so. Now I did.
Welcome to the Dawning of a New Century:
Sheldon Fite was an English major in college. His favorite courses involved history and literature.
A Tangled Skein:
The Rose of Sharon pattern is real. It’s one my wife was working on at the time I began writing this segment, and all the directions I quote are real. It just happens that as I was trying to write this story, those directions were available. How crazy a co-inky-dink is that? Sometimes things just happen. Sometimes they also have deeper meaning.
Our Place in History:
Simone Williams, on the other hand, was never very good at history (she tends to be vague) and should not be writing about it.
The Shape of Things to Come:
What Peltier did to Jack was a compilation of how three different teachers treated me on separate occasions at Century High School. No one like Gil was there to set them straight. I feel much better now, thanks.
Legend of the Blackcats:
Wanda’s story of the panther her father saw on the darkest stretch of Highway 29 late one night on his way home from work was based on a story my father told me, about a panther that crossed his path in the dead of night.
Meanwhile, a question I’ve been asked: "Was that you in the cemetery with the gun?" The answer: "No. This is a story I made up." For the record: I made up the girl with the Hello Kitty panties too, but Carl and Tommy may have some real-life confessions to make.
The Tempest:
Why is it like that? I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
That’s a lie. Even now, I look at it and marvel. (I’m not bragging. I don’t really know how it worked out. Just lots of nights of struggle, rewriting, headaches, pacing, deleting — you get the idea.) But it does just what I needed it to do, and mostly with the Bard’s own verbage, though turned to uses he never intended. Does it work? It does for me.
Thursdays at The Perm of The Century:
I had in mind here a geographical impossibility for Highway 29: A set-up almost like the streets in Flomaton, Ala., in which a beauty shop and a barber shop actually could sit opposite one another close enough to spy upon one another; there isn’t such a place in the real Century where two such shops coexist, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen in MY Century. (And I also had in mind here a real barber by the last name of Sunday who worked in Flomaton and was closed on Thursday and Sunday.)
A wakening:
"The morning that Mary Anne Brown awoke for the first time in a world without her grandmother, the lantana were blooming by the doorstep in pods of yellow and pink." Me too. That is, they were blooming on my mother’s doorstep, too brilliant to stare at, bright as the sunrise on the morning after my Grandma Simmons died.
The Centennial Man:
The hubcap-covered home was based upon a real place. About 22 years ago or so, when I worked for The Tri-City Ledger, I once interviewed a man who owned that building and covered it in hubcaps. He was a heavy-set white fellow, and had a cat named "Hubcat." I don’t recall the man’s name, but somewhere in a box in the attic I believe I still have a clipping of the story and a photograph of the house. I will endeavor to locate it, scan it and post it here.
The Fourth Horseman:
Brother John Blackwell was called "Jack" all through his youth. During his time in Viet Nam, he was widely known to run a floating crap shoot/sometime poker game and went by the handle of "Blackjack." It was during a search-and-destroy mission in 1970 that he and Jesus found each other.
Constant Vigilance:
Inspired by seeing a car dragged out of Lake Caroline in Panama City.
It’s Always Midnight on Mars:
Inspired by an off-hand remark made at Charlie Coram’s Steak & Eggs one night (the story has been told on this blog before).
(Misc.):
1) Carl and Tommy and Jack (or even Simone) have things in common with me, but none of them are me. No more so than any of the other characters are.
2) For more than a decade, I have worked with high school student interns at The News Herald and encouraged other student writers. Among those who have written for the Education, Generation NeXt and Learning sections while I was the editor were students with strangely familiar names, like Kenna Hooper, Laura Wendt, Shelley Fite, Jillian Weise, Jacqueline Blackwell, David Peltier, Devin Destival, Brady Calhoun, Sarah Bailey, Cara Parell, Sarah McCauley, Lindsay Gilberti, Mae Humiston, Ashley Tynes, Melanie Moroney, Chris Landry, Emily Cramer, and lots, LOTS more.
3) Recently for my 41st birthday I spent some of the money I got in cards to purchase a copy of the movie Magnolia on DVD. I think it, as much as Thornton Wilder’s "Our Town," was an inspiration for Century — how things just happen, but seem to be inexplicably connected just the same. You’ll find references to "Our Town" throughout the text, as well as Shakespeare and the Bible, and you may find allusions to Magnolia as well — some you’d never recognize because "Magnolia" is also my Grandmother Simmons' name, and there are traces of her in this fiction in places that surprise even me. I hope she doesn’t mind too much.
