Literary Mix Tapes: Eighty Nine

There’s some stories that come easy. They fly off the fingertips as fast as you can type them before all their cool dialogue and descriptions escape your brain. And then there’s the difficult ones. The ones that come out partially digested and malformed, slow as molasses in winter. They’re your babies so you want to love them. And at the same time you want to shove them title first into the nearest shredder and put them out of your misery.

“Diavol” was the latter. It was a problem child. And like any good parent I still liked it. But what I wanted was to really like it.

When Jodi (the editor and mastermind behind the Literary Mix Tapes series) asked me if I’d be interested in giving LMT a shot, I gave it a go. After all, this whole 89 thing was a bit of a mystery and I’d never done anything quite like it before. The exception being 100 Stories for Queensland, which had a more strict edict for its writers.

So I signed on, not because I had any idea what it was about but mainly on the strengths of Jodi as an editor. It wasn’t until the names of the writers were being pulled out of a hat and paired up with their respective songs that it started to dawn on me what it was really all about. This was chaos of the mind being harnessed to generate interesting stories. It was exciting and scary at the same time.

Don’t take my word for it. Observe:

You can imagine how it might have felt at that time. Everybody getting themselves sorted out of two hats like Harry Potter Gone Wild.

If you skipped the video, I’ll tell you what song picked me: Poison by Alice Cooper. Oddly enough it was the only one I wanted. Hard rock and heavy metal are a horror writer’s best friend.

Before we go any further with this story, I should explain more about what Eighty Nine’s edict was: each writer was given a specific song from 1989 to work with. And they had to work 1989 into their story in some way. Whether or not it was significant was left up to the interpretation of the individual writer. The only other condition was a hard upper limit: 1,575 words. That works out to about 3 pages in Word.

No matter how much I looked at all of the events of 1989, my mind kept going back to the Romanian Revolution. This is due in no small part with my fascination with that country, its culture, and its history. I already knew many of the major events of that particular revolution, so again it was a no-brainer for me to choose that as the setting. It was out there begging for me to come visit it as a writer. Now that opportunity had presented itself.

In 1989 I was 11 years old. I was more concerned with going with my friends to see Batman at the local theater than world events. That was the stuff of Social Studies class and boring homework assignments. However, it was hard to ignore what was going on that year. It looked like the rest of the planet was undergoing massive upheaval from my youthful perspective. There were so many different revolutions going on it was hard to keep track of them all. Romania seemed to come and go at the end of the year without me noticing. Not this time.

I had a song and I had a major event in 1989 to work with. But the story had to suit my own tastes. With Mr. Cooper playing on loop on my MP3 player, I listened to the song nonstop for days to find some kind of an “in”, some hidden entrance to this inscrutable problem that would give me a foothold on the story.

Five days later I thought I had it. That idea was quickly discarded (sometimes you just know) in favor of a few other possible paths into Bucharest on December 22nd, 1989. After much gnashing of teeth I said out loud, “I bet this is why a lot of writers drink.”

KAPOW! If it had been a lightning bolt it would have fried my innards. The first scene formed up. I saw my protagonist Anton sitting at an empty bar drinking to forget while the Romanian Revolution raged outside in Palace Square. What could motivate him to want to drink and not join his fellow countrymen in overthrowing their dictator? It would have to be something strong.

An anniversary. Of losing a loved one. His loved one. The only woman he ever loved (he was a bit of a stony soul, all that communism) that was taken away by the Securitate. He saw the revolution as too little, too late for his own selfish wants. Sure, he ain’t perfect, but I like my characters with some flaws and warts on them.

With that kind of motivation keeping your main character firmly planted on a barstool, it would take something overwhelming to get him off of it and into the fray. The only thing that could was seeing his (maybe) dead girlfriend, Crina.

This is where it gets complicated. I wanted to be in that crowd protesting the communists, but it was only a backdrop to the real story going on. Anton was supposed to be following Crina, or someone that looked quite a lot like her. I was as lost as Anton was in that crowd. I did eventually get him out of there, but it was tough. The story was in danger of going off the rails.

One lyric from the song came back to me. It was another hook, another doorway back into the story that gave me a crystal clear still picture in my mind:

I wanna taste you, but your lips are venemous poison

Anton and Crina would have to meet, only it wouldn’t end well for our boy:

My pain, your thrill

The rest of it fell into place. But it was still lacking something. I searched for a theme. There was one there but it felt like a meek mouse hiding in a corner from a large boot. Was there something wrong with the color of Crina’s coat? What did that symbolize? Suddenly I was a high school English teacher trying to derive some meaning from my own story. It wasn’t pleasant.

The deadline was coming up. Had already passed with an extension to be exact. There was no more time. It was time to send it out for judgement under the watchful eye of my editor.

I pushed the Send button knowing it was bad. I wanted it to be good. There was a story in there somewhere but I kept beating my head against the wall trying to figure out what it was. All of that analysis of theme, color, character motivation, all of it only served to stymie me.

About a week later I got notes back from my editor Jodi. At this point I have to say one thing: Jodi is possibly one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with. No joke. I felt bad, absolutely terrible, sending that abortion to her. It didn’t meet my own expectations so why send it only to be diced to hell? I felt like I’d broken some Great Unspoken Rule that every writer knows inherently but doesn’t speak of: never send your editor crap.

The notes weren’t bad at all. They were lengthy and detailed in what she thought the strengths and weakeness of the story were, along with a lot of suggestions. Two pages worth to be exact, all nicely bulleted in the e-mail. Reading through them, they weren’t commands or anything snide. This was Jodi saying that my abortion of a story wasn’t so bad at all. “It’s not ugly,” she was saying in the notes. “See? If we just give the hair a good combing and put it in some clean clothes, it’ll be beautiful.”

That’s the mark of a good editor. Jodi has that mark. They give you suggestions for changes that you make, as opposed to axing whole sections of your work without any input and rewriting things you had written a certain way for a reason.

Suddenly I was seeing “Diavol” through a new set of eyes. This was real collaboration. It wasn’t forceful or polarized with opinions, but it was constructive and helped me for the first time in my nascent writing career when there was stumbling and thoughts of not being able to do it.

Post Mortem Blues

My experience with Eighty Nine doesn’t end there. After reading through the proof copy I was excited. I wanted to do more. I wanted to help promote it, not because something I wrote was in it; I wanted to help promote it because all of the other stories were great.

Each one was from a different, unique voice. They were all engaging and fun. Some were creepy, others harkened back to Stephen King (not I, said the fly), but they all made it look so easy to take a song and a year and look at it all through a different lens.

So, in using what other meager skills I had, I put together a quick teaser trailer for the book:

Honestly, there was so much from 1989 that came flooding back as I chopped this together that it was difficult trying to pick a frame here and a frame there that best suited the varied tone of the book.

All in all, it was a bigger learning experience for me as a writer than it was simply writing. And that problem child grew up and made something of itself. Now all it has to do is keep from beating up its cousins after a wild night of drinking.

Anyway, the book is now officially out for sale if you’d like to buy it. And hopefully this long, strange journey you took by reading this post has not shied you away from buying it.