This being my introductory post for this blog, I’m going to do something totally original–punt. The missive below is adapted from the foreword to the inaugural book in my “Tangled Minds” series, Loony Locals and Other Lopsided Lamebrains. It will tell you pretty much all you need to know… for now.
I’ve never thought of myself as a writer—you know, with a capital “W.”
I think I can write—but to actually call myself a writer? All I hear is Truman Capote’s legendary put-down of Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”
This particular typing project started over forty years ago, when I was barely old enough to drive. A classmate had begun concocting very crude but very funny comic strip stories about our fellow students and teachers. They were horribly drawn, the grammar and stilted dialogue were hideous, and the situations insane; but in spite of—or maybe because of—how badly done they were, they absolutely cracked me up. But then, let’s be honest. Teenagers will laugh at just about anything. I wanted in on the act, too, and somehow my efforts took the format of a soap opera.
Mind you, I have always been fascinated with soap operas. My mother was a faithful viewer of Another World during the ‘60s, but her absolute favorite was All My Children. As I got older, the comic potential of the genre was shown to me through the absurdly hilarious “As the Stomach Turns” skits from The Carol Burnett Show, Johnny Carson’s equally bizarre “The Edge of Wetness” segments on The Tonight Show, the sublime “The Days of the Week” from SCTV and, of course, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Soap.
I wasn’t very satisfied with what I came up with, though. I wanted my soap opera to be as nutty as my friend’s comic strips, but it just wasn’t happening. My abandon was not wild enough, and my desire for proper grammar and structure were too strong to make the results “so bad it’s good.” After a couple of abandoned attempts, I tried again with a thing I called “Wacky People,” and was purposely a bit looser with my imagination. By then each was being written in quasi-script format and ended, in true soap-opera fashion, with a series of questions followed by a tune-in-tomorrow-style tagline. That particular story continued for over fifty episodes before I ended it by killing off every single character. George R.R. Martin has nothing on me.
“Tangled Minds” is a descendant of those crazy stories and was begun sometime in 1979 under the title “The Loony Bin.” It had several false starts and re-starts, but something drove me to stick with it, and it eventually found its footing and took off. I continued writing in my free time, whenever the mood struck; whatever came into my head spilled onto the page, without any pre-planning or thought to where the story might be going. I never showed what I’d written to anyone. I did it simply for my own amusement–to burn off the stress of the day, stave off boredom, whatever. I wrote in that fashion for almost twenty (gasp!) years.
By 2003, I’d moved from North Carolina to Texas, started both a relationship and a new job, and had little free time. I hadn’t written anything new in several years, and all that I’d done before lay stagnant in a filing cabinet. I’d long wanted to convert it all to electronic format, but the enormity of entering nearly seven hundred handwritten pages into a word-processing program made me want to vomit. I sucked it up, though, and started the arduous task of converting graphite to bits and bytes and, in the process, found myself pretty much re-writing every stinking sentence. There are those pesky things like continuity, pacing, fleshing out the characters, their motivation, etc.—things that a writer kind of has to care about. You know, if one considered oneself a writer.
The material in Loony Locals was originally conceived during and either side of 1980, with extensive recent re-writing, all without the aid of mind-altering chemicals. I caution the reader that there are characterizations and situations that were probably politically incorrect back when I originally wrote them, but even more so now. I ask that you bear with me; it will all eventually make sense (yes, really). I have kept the quasi-script format, as I think it reads easier and lends itself better to my dialog-heavy style.
Also, rather than try to update the entire story from the early ‘80s to the present day, where everyone would have a cell phone, iPad, computer, or 60-inch TV with 500 channels, I decided to split the difference. Our story begins in 1990, just on the cusp of the digital revolution. Bob Barker had only recently jettisoned his hair dye, and Regis and Kathie Lee ruled the morning.
Enjoy the typing.
TANGLEDMINDSBOOKS.COM 