Four years ago today I got laid off from my job @sixapart. What have I been up to since then? Well, I decided to take some time off, and it turned into four years. To me, that feels like a significant, and resonant, span of time.
Four years is a fundamental unit of human civilization; the length of time between Olympic games, and US presidential elections. It’s how long high school lasts, and college, too–unless you’re a slacker like I was. To choose an example perhaps closer to home for those of us in the Bay Area, it is the standard period for full stock vesting when working for technology start-ups.
Four turnings of the calendar, four orbits of the earth around the sun. A year may seem like a long time, but as anyone who’s worked in software can tell you, it can get eaten up surprisingly quickly. Put four of them together, though, and it’s long enough that you can iterate, go down blind alleys, make mistakes, learn from them.
That’s why this anniversary feels like a significant event to me, and an opportunity to take stock and see what I’ve accomplished. It also gives me an opportunity to update you all on the status of the Complete Works of Chris Ernest Hall, following up on my “Status Update” post from last fall. Since then I’ve made significant changes, and have arrived on the final configuration. There are now five volumes, though one is divided (at least until it’s finished) into four parts, so that means a total of eight physical books. Here follows a volume by volume break-down of where they stand:
1. Something Interesting to Read: Long-time fans may have noticed that the picture included in this post did not include Collected Works, even though that was the first book I produced during my post-layoff hiatus. That’s because it has been superseded by the this volume, as well as the next one. SITR includes the short stories (with attendant commentary) and my closet screenplay Therapy, in exactly the same form as they appeared in Collected Works. Since it’s essentially just a repackaging, SITR’s status is done and it will be available for purchase today.
2. Notes For a Future Novel, 20th Anniversary Edition. Almost a year ago, I decided to break out my first novel from Collected Works and publish it separately. To sweeten the deal, I also added almost eighty pages of out-takes because I got feedback from readers that they wanted to read even more interminable conversations between Michael and Tim about literature and abstruse philosophical issues (not really.) NFFN20 will be available shortly, once I finish my review of the proof copy I just received from Lulu. Update: NFFN20 is now available for purchase!
3. The Deep and Savage Way, 20th Anniversary Edition. I hadn’t really looked at this work in a while before I prepared this editing edition. It needs a fair amount of work, by which I mean a substantial teardown/rewrite. Sometimes my old writing is better than I remembered, but for some reason this novel was worse. Maybe because it was written in Seattle. (loljk, PNW friends! Love you!) Release date is TBD.
4a. Celebrated Summer, Book One: Out Into the Light. By now you’re probably sick of hearing about this book. It’s the same one I’ve been cramming down your throats for the past two years. If you’re not, please make my life seem temporarily worth living by ordering a copy or two.
4b. Celebrated Summer, Book Two: One Night In Z-Town. But wait, there’s a sequel?! Yes, and it’s completely written. I think it needs another rewrite or two before it’s ready for prime-time, though. CS2 continues the thrilling story of Tim Page and his burgeoning romance with April Hall, as he becomes increasingly immersed in the scandalous goings-on at the movie theater he is working at in downtown Santa Zita. It’s my tribute to such classic coming of age movies as Dazed and Confused, American Graffiti, Superbad, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, since the entire action of the book takes place in a single day, and culminates in an epic party in which the hero must out-wit his rivals and overcome his fears in order to win the girl of his dreams. I’m hoping to release it this summer, possibly on August 5th, the 25th anniversary of the day that the book takes place on.
4c&d. Celebrated Summer, Books Three and Four. As you can see in the photo, these two books are not yet produced in bound editions, but exist merely as drafts produced with a good old-fashioned laser printer. Although I have done a tremendous amount of work on them, including writing more than 51,000 words of CS4 last November during NaNoWriMo, there are still major gaps and holes in the plot, not to mention vast sections that needs to be heavily rewritten. Release date is TBD, but my hope is to have something releasable by 10/17/89, the 25th anniversary of the Loma Prieta quake.
5. In Search of Narrative In America. The final volume of the Complete Works is my Dead Letter Office/Odds and Sods collection of fragments, unfinished tales, and other random detritus from my archives. This volume includes Helen of Santa Zita, which I was thinking of publishing separately last year, but decided was too thin (literally, when I published it with Lulu it felt more like a fat pamphlet than a paperback book) to stand on its own. This book needs one more round of editing, plus there are two stories in it I’d like to finish, so it will not be available until later this spring.
Once these books are finished, I am going to declare victory and call the Complete Works done. It’s been fun, going through my archives and whipping these old works into shape, finally getting some sense of closure, but I think it might be time to move on. Who knows, maybe I’ll write something that isn’t set in late 80s/early 90s Santa Cruz. Or get a real job, we’ll see.
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