| Briefly, let me give you a bit of history. I'm from Warren, Michigan originally, but I've lived in numerous places around the Metro Detroit area without ever actually living in the city. I attended "good" schools: St. John Lutheran, in Fraser, Lutheran High School North, in Macomb Township, Michigan. After graduating high school in June of '91, I began attending Macomb Community College, more or less because I still felt a sense of obligation to be in school. My dream since about the age of twelve was to someday make movies, and I had always thought the best way to get in would be to write a novel so good that some studio would feel compelled to produce it as a film, although how I would be the one to actually direct was beyond me. I think I figured that if I just honed my talent it would be impossible to ignore, and they would have to be fools not to let the creator direct his own idea, right? I can laugh about that, now. I have seen the light. Until December of '94, I bounced around my hometown of Detroit, learning about life, women, and other things I probably shouldn't mention here, all the while thinking in the back of my head (and sometimes the front, as well) that I was subconsciously gathering material to re-invent as great fiction. Eventually, this city began to "get" to me, and I began to physically hate this place. All I wanted to do was move away, and move anywhere. This vague destination turned out to be Florida. I had heard somewhere that Florida had cheaper tuition for in-state college students, and I had an obsession for attending Film school. At this time, the Independent Film movement was still new. Sundance was a novelty. "Pulp Fiction" had just come out and revolutionized the way people saw films. Film School was still something that only major universities offered, and only then if you had a stellar grade point average and twenty thousand a year. At the ripe old age of twenty-two, I felt if I didn't make a move then, I would somehow be too old. The next three years were hell, or something very close to it. I lived in Naples, Florida for a year and a half, delivering flowers for a living, involved in a relationship that was like slow-death, but still consumed with writing the Great American Novel. I wouldn't have traded this period for anything, because even now, I believe we have to have some introduction to Hell before we can hope to see Heaven. I thought I was paying dues, and maybe I was. On the other hand, maybe it was all a grand miscalculation. I was attending Edison Community College, trying to finish my Associates Degree (in nothing, a program called "General Studies"). It was a period of work ... and almost constant depression. I was holding on to the dream like Indiana Jones dangling above the pit of fire by his fingernails. In April of '95, I re-located about four hours north to Orlando, where the film school at the University of Central Florida was my vague destination. I figured I was a shoe-in. In all my years thus far, I had never met another novelist my age, or even anyone with serious notions of making films. I suppose in my naivete, I believed there would only be a few other applicants. In reality, there were a couple thousand. Needless to say, I didn't make the cut. Whether I was beaten by quality of work done, or simply overwhelming competition, I'll never know, but soon after that, I abandoned Orlando. I had realized the dream was with me, and it didn't matter where I was. I moved back to Michigan in the Winter of '97, and set myself to editing the novel I had been working on through my Florida experience, tentatively entitled "The Truth: A Fantasy." I was twenty-six when I finally landed an agent. After that, I thought it was all downhill. Such was not the case. I spent about a year editing "Truth" and changed the title to "Fixing Truth" as kind of an in-joke. "Fixing" was drug metaphor for heroin users, and although I was not a heroin user, the novel obviously had drug overtones. The story is about a drug called "Truth" that isolates its user in the arena of his/her soul. The novel does not advocate drug use, but it was aimed more or less at the rock n' roll audience, and harkened back to ideas and notions I had absorbed from reading Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, William S. Burroughs, and Stephen King. I wanted to address the novel to that generation/ideology. The joke in using "Fixing" in the title was about me always "fixing" my damn novel in editing. My agent was not able to sell "Fixing Truth" to any publishers and, for a while, I believed it was simply because the novel was not yet good enough. This may be true ... but it may also be true that my agent was more like a guy with a fax machine and business cards, then a true agent, who knows publishers on a first-name basis, maybe even plays golf with them occasionally. The experience taught me a lot about agents, and the nature of rejection. Sometimes, it really has nothing to do with you. MORE... |
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