Notes From the Slumber Yard

As pretty much everyone who is capable of being bombarded by Facebook ads probably knows already, I recently published my first novel.  For anyone who missed the countless sponsored memos, "Dreams from the Slumber Yard," is available now in both paperback and for the kindle on Amazon.  (See how subtly I worked that in there?)While I don't want to become the sort of person who drones on endlessly about my minor personal achievements, or constantly subjects my friends and well-wishers to a Jay Sherman-esque plea for sales, I have been getting a lot of questions about this project.  They range from "where did you find the time?" and "how many pages is it?", to the most frequently asked question, "why didn't you tell me you were working on a book, you big secretive jerk?"  While to some it may have seemed to have came out of nowhere, this book has actually been my main writing project for the last year and a half, and I thought I'd take a few minutes to give everyone a little background.

The story originally began over a decade ago.  I was taking a screenwriting class in college, where I had an assignment to write a short film.  I'd been kicking around a few ideas when a single joke popped into my mind, which was followed quickly by a single scene.  Unfortunately, due to the passage of time and my less than infallible memory, I don't remember exactly what the first joke was.  But the scene that developed around it was cheap, local mattress commercial where an oblivious business owner dressed up like an angel and attempted to hawk merchandise through mildly sacrilegious humor.  It may not have been much of a starting point, but it made me giggle quietly to myself, so I felt like I was on to something.  From there, I started brainstorming a few more ideas for similar commercials, which quickly filled up a few note cards and continued to make me snicker.  But it wasn't a story yet.  I wanted to know who this man was outside of the studio.  What was his life like that these feeble attempts at creativity were the highlight of his existence?  I envisioned him as a lonely, delusional man, trapped in cycle of mundane monotony who was desperately searching for something to help validate a life that was no longer fulfilling.  And in trying to do something meaningful with his life, no matter how trivial, he ended up becoming a laughing stock behind his back.

At the same time, like most people in their early twenties, I was also busy taking my own personal relationship drama and blowing it way out of proportion.  And again, like so many young people, I was going through a phase where I imagined that all the things that were going wrong in my life would last forever, which also didn't help my fixation on the issue.  Of course, now that I'm older and wiser, I realize that nothing I believed to be important at the time actually was, and that life isn't defined by a single thing going badly indefinitely, but by a ever changing series of things going differently badly in rapid succession.

At any rate, as I was writing the story of the mattress man, I was so obsessed with the idea of spending an entire lifetime alone that I decided to inflict such a fate on my newly minted hero.  And to make matters worse for him, he wasn't alone because circumstances had conspired against him, an monstrous appearance that would repel anyone short of an idealistic undergrad trying to prove to her friends that looks don't matter, or unexpectedly apocalyptic turn of events that had left him as the only surviving member of the human race who hadn't developed a hankering for brains.  Rather, he was alone because of the person that he was, and the choices that he'd made.  Like myself, he was sad, self-hating, afraid, and had no one to blame for his fate but himself.  This didn't stop him from becoming bitter and blaming anyone who came close enough to cast a disapproving glare at.

Things were already starting to get dark for the mattress man, but even so, my passion for writing has always been rooted in comedy, and that's what I wanted his story to be.  I wanted it to be an uncomfortable yet romantic comedy about a guy who was completely and utterly smitten and would do anything for his true love.  But instead of winning her over with cliched series of grand romantic gestures that reveal his true inner beauty and wear down the reluctant object of his affection, his unfamiliarity with personal relationships would cause him to nervously behave in an increasingly strange and creepy manner.  He'd remain charming and likeable on one level, while being frighteningly obsessive on another.  When I first started writing, I wasn't sure if I wanted people to like him, hate him, or pity him in the end.  But I wanted to mash all those reactions together and see what came out on the other side.  The original one-line description I would always give people who asked about the script was, "It's an awkwardly romantic comedy about a middle-aged mattress salesman who starts stalking a younger woman."  So, you know...just your run of the mill boy-meets-girl love story.

And so "For the Grace of You," as it was originally known, was born.  The title came from a lyric in the Simon & Garfunkel tune, "Katy's Song," which goes:

And as I watch the drops of rainWeave their weary paths and die,I know that I am like the rain,There but for the grace of you go I.

Years later I would learn that fair use didn't allow you to use song lyrics without permission.  And while I wasn't entirely sure that Paul Simon could sue me for lyrics that were already partially lifted from The Bible, I didn't want to risk any lawsuits over a frivolous personal project, and changed the title and the line of the script that quoted it accordingly.

But again, being in my early twenties and suffering from the delusional sense of self-importance that usually accompany them, I was convinced of two things: First, I was an indisputible genius who had produced an incredible film script that the world absolutely needed to see.  And second, that I would have no trouble finding someone who recognized my undeniable talents and would put up the cash to make my movie.  Which I would also direct, of course, reassuring my eventual investors that my lack of directing experience was inconsequential because "I have a vision."  After all, that's how all movies get made, right?So I quit my first job to make my first film.  And the experience wasn't a total loss.  My producing partner and I did manage to hire a fund raiser who successfully raised less money than her two-week salary.  We took a business trip to Philadelphia where we met the man who invented the infomercial and ate a frightening amount of consecutive cheesesteaks.  And I got some invaluable insight from a professional script doctor who told me that the script was so good that he would love to help me, but only if I gave him the large pile of money that we hadn't raised.  As useful as those learning experiences may have been, they weren't enough to get a production off the ground, and my filmmaking career came to a swift halt before it even began.

And so the script sat on my computer for a number of years, read only by the few friends and girlfriends I would occasionally share it with.  When I decided that I wanted to write my first novel, I decided to revive the project, thinking that it would be an easy way pump out a book and start experimenting with the novel for a bit.  After all, it was already written, right?  All I'd have to do is transcribe it from Final Draft into Word, do a bit of reformatting and fill in a few gaps, then boom!  I have a book!However, when I sat down to re-read the script for the first time in many years, I quickly realized that I hadn't accounted for a few things.  First of all, scripts and novels are incredibly different types of writing, and what you think will work on screen won't always translate perfectly without visual aids.  And secondly, I realized that like most people, I hadn't been anywhere near as clever as I thought I was at twenty-two.  The overall story was there, and there were occasional lines that I still liked.  But the script was full of plot holes, unfunny jokes, Olympic class leaps in logic, and some rather nonsensically "poetic" voiceover about the nature of loneliness.  Like I said, it wasn't an entirely bad script, but it was nowhere near as closed to done as I thought when I picked it back up.

What I thought would be an easy experiment with a new kind of writing turned into a life-consuming passion project that sucked up nearly every free minute I could find.  Over the next year and a half, I would come home from work every day and write.  And re-write.  And re-write again.  I did three major drafts of the novel, each one a nearly complete overhaul from the version that came before it.  I re-wrote virtually every word of the book on every single pass until I was finally as happy with it as I had once been as a naive kid in his early twenties.

What I came away with is something that may still be imperfect, but it is something that I am immensely proud of.  I'm proud of it as a goal that I set for myself and accomplished; I'm proud of it as the completion of a decade-long project; and I'm proud of it as a story.  Equal parts funny and unsettling, it's a complicated tale of love and obsession, and I'm so glad that I'm able to share it with you all.  The book is available now from Amazon in both paperback and for the Kindle, and I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.  Or, to put it another way:

 -TC