I first sat down to write this story more than two years
ago. It began as a sketch on how horribly depressed I felt as a man having to
live within the confines of his own mistakes. Under the thumb of consequence.
Having to look myself in the face when the reflection in the mirror was the
picture of futility. Heavy stuff, indeed, but I’d argue then as I do now that
there are a lot of us out here mired in failure, frustration, and the deep sand
of personal responsibility. It’s anything but easy.
As I moved through that desolation, I couldn’t get away from
my little sketch. I called my protagonist by a simple letter: K. I didn’t know
what else to call him. It was easier anyway, since so much of the story was
autobiographical and K can, by extension, denote Chris. Okay maybe I'm reaching. Anyway my sketch was just a simple scene in which a man is awakened
by the oppressive sun streaming into his bedroom on an early September day in
Meridian, Idaho. It would be hot and bright and washed out. And he knew he
would hate it. So he thrashes around with the blankets and the alarm clock
until he realizes he cannot avoid responsibility and consequence any longer: if
he doesn’t get up and get his butt to work, he might lose his job—all he has
left.
I continued to work on it, share it with my friends at the
Huckins Writers Guild, get critiqued, and then work on it some more. It began
to grow. Before I knew it I had produced about 100,000 words. Somewhere deep
within, though, I wasn’t satisfied with it. It was sophomoric. Kind of
childish; undeveloped. It lacked grit, intensity. It wasn’t believable, even to
me. And that’s when it hit me: I knew what was wrong. Strangely, it had to do
with mechanics. Spelling and grammar type stuff. More specifically, tense.
It reminded me of when I was in high school, playing the
trumpet, or learning how, more like.
The sound I produced in real life wasn’t always equivalent to the sound I heard
in my head. When improvising a solo over chord changes, the melody in my head
was far different than the one I could wrestle that recalcitrant instrument to
produce. It was the same with my new stillborn novel, K. In my head it played like a movie; I could see it all in front
of me. But on the page it was stale, impotent, cold, disengaged. So I set about
making a few changes as an experiment.
About that time, I was finishing work on another piece; The Marsburg Diary. Since part of it is
set in the late Victorian age, I was hitting up old dictionaries apace, looking
for period-accurate vocabulary. I came across the word phantasmagoria. And that’s
when my working title gave over to the final title: K [phantasmagoria]. I decided then to write three novels in a series, with K [phantasmagoria] the first in the line.
I finished Marsburg
and shifted to K. My experiment—changing
the first chapter’s past to present tense—just flat out worked. While there
will be some, like Les Edgerton, who protest against the use of present tense
in fiction, as for me I’d found my happy medium. Writing in what I call CenterCode lent the sizzle I required. So I set out to change the entire book.
In that process I found out that I needed more background
for K as my protag. It wasn’t quite right, just waking him up and throwing him
into a massively explosive precognitive event on his way to work. I needed
something more, some background, relationships that made him more human, gave
him something to lose. So I introduced new plotlines, like the new first
chapter, [Provocation], new characters like Quincey the cuz, and Essie Gray the
Harley riding girlfriend, and Dr. Charles Wen, K’s government mandated
psychiatrist. All of it gave me more opportunity to ply the conflicts in the
story, and really set up the explosive main event that happened originally in
my little sketch on the frustrated man.
It’s been said that all fiction is autobiographical. It
helps me to know and believe this, because I can make peace with the idea and
not hold back in my writing. K is 100% me in the sense of my experience; i.e.
my perspectives on things. But as a character he’s an amalgamation of people I’ve
met in my life and gotten to know. I suppose, really, that includes me. Those
who know me will recognize bits of him as self-portraiture, certainly, but not
all of him.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve not held back in this work. I
made an executive decision with this book to include profanity, for instance.
My rationale for it is that it creates a different environment than could be
made otherwise. It makes the characters more believable, more fun to write, and
raises the stakes a bit, providing a little more intensity. But that’s not the
only area I’ve tried to push things a bit. I don’t, for instance, believe it’s
wrong to struggle with life or wrestle with God, and I certainly don’t think it’s
apropos to stick Him away in some God Locker, cloistered within the confines of
Christian fiction or the subculture du
jour. He swaggers front and center on these pages sometimes, and K wrestles
him all the way, from start to finish. Some of it may seem irreverent, but keep
reading. I think wrestling, in season, is all good, and I’m not afraid of it or
what questions it may provoke in people. Questions are meant to be asked; God
has all the answers.
This book, K [phantasmagoria] part one, is
intensely personal for me but I think there are more out there like me who dare
to ask tough questions. There are more out there who are at peace with their
decision to ask, even if there is no clear answer forthcoming. This book is
about that. It’s also a piece of fiction in which, hopefully, you’re kept
guessing until the end about what’s really going on here. Evil has many brands,
many faces. You’ll see lots of those in this book. Sometimes what we wrestle
has to be dragged kicking and screaming to the light… even if it’s us. I hope
you’ll begin the journey of the K
series with me; it’ll be quite a satisfying ride, I think.
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