So I spent yesterday up to my eyeballs in the guts of Agnosis. Why would I do this, you ask? Well, it turns out that I queried/partialed a certain major SFF publisher about this novel almost a full year ago — an act which I had largely forgotten because, well, it was almost a full year ago. This is all in spite of the fact that I have that query living in my “E-Mail Submits” folder in my Inbox.
Fast forward to yesterday, mirabile dictu!, and I’m cleaning out my Junk e-mail folder to find a response from said SFF publisher apologizing for the delay and requesting a chapter-by-chapter synopsis plus a larger partial. The twisty bit in all of this for me is that when I’m writing a manuscript, fairly early on in the process, it invariably occurs to me that I should start scratching down short descriptions of what a chapter is about so that I’ll have it later when my memory has grown fuzzy and/or an editor inevitably requests a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.
I never heed this occurring thought, mind you. But I do have it.
So, as I said, I spent most of the day yesterday synopsizing with the end result that I now have a fairly clear idea of what this novel is actually about. What surprised me most, and at the risk of tooting my own horn, is that the whole process took about four times longer than it should have because I kept getting caught up in reading my own story to find out what was going to happen next. I also spent a good portion of my time alternating between sentiments of “Dude! That really kicks ass! You are awesome!” and “What the fuck were you thinking? You write like teh shit.”
In other words (as most writers will recognize): situation normal.
Which, given my history with this book, is a good thing. A very cathartic thing. A whomping sigh of relief thing.
Anyway, so part of the fun with the synopsizing was working to music. I don’t write fiction to music generally. It’s too easily distracting, but I really dig writing code and/or documentation with a soundtrack. I was looking for something a bit different yesterday, and happened upon the Glam Rock preset on Slacker. We’re talking a whole day with Poison, Warrant, Guns n’ Roses, White Lion, Skid Row, etc.
I swear to God, I thought I was in heaven. It was high school all over again. Made me want to break out my leather jacket and cut some holes in my jeans. That, of course, led me to YouTube, where I watched a bunch of the old Headbanger’s Ball videos and realized definitively that Jani Lane is still one ugly motherfucker and even at my age and state in life, I’d probably still sell my immortal soul to date the girl from the “Cherry Pie” video.
(If you don’t know the “Cherry Pie” video, you’re officially no longer allowed to read my blog. Please leave.)
And all of this, of course, reminds me of the classic “Cherry Pie” origin story that Jani Lane used to tell. The apocryphal version goes like this: Warrant’s first album (Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich) sold like 700 trillion copies, so the record execs were hoping for similar success with the band’s 2nd album, Cherry Pie (the album, not the song). The band goes into the studio, cranks out an album that they really like, only to be told by the record company that it desperately needs a hard rockin’ anthem. Lane, pissed off to no end because he feels like the band has made the album it wants to make and this is just mindless, sell-out record company tampering, scratches out the lyrics to “Cherry Pie” in like 15 minutes and fills it with as many thoughtless, sex-metaphor cliches as he can muster. The band spends all of a day throwing together a tune and an arrangement and plunks it on the album.
“Cherry Pie” eventually cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard Charts and became the most popular song — some might say the signature song — in the band’s history.
That’s it for me today. I’m going back to listening to my Best of Poison CD and reliving my rock hard youth.
D.
Filed under: Miscellany, Writing Tagged: | Cherry Pie
