I’ve talked before about knowing your audience. Whether that’s an audience of one or one million, have an idea of the person you’re trying to appeal to. I wrote Beneath the Wood for young women who may be grappling with goodbyes and forgiveness in a world that too often hurts them without apology.
I wrote Five Talents for the young adults, starting out their careers as I once did trying to find their passion and success, and the difference between the two- and what success means to different people.
I wrote Drawful the Awful for my niece to have a story she can read someday about a Princess who aspires to be a Queen, and ends up a hero.
I started my latest novel, Production Notes, this past week. I’ve got several thousand words down pat, and the story is (so far) flowing pretty nicely. This one, however, is for me.
I wrote a Foreword for it over the weekend. The story itself is shaping up to be another relatively zany misadventure in LA, but in my Foreward I stated a mission for myself:
It’s an ambitious goal, but that’s where the Kanye Poop Dilemma came from. That’s where a lot more dissection of the foma that drive us and cause all kinds of mishaps, confusion, and comedy is coming from. Religion, politics, all the things and contradictions about who we’re supposed to be, how we’re supposed to look, feel, behave, and appear?
For my own sake, I need to dump it all out onto the page. I need to put them all up against each other in this story and see what I’m left with at the end of this crucible:
I need- what I think we all need- is a clean set of directions of what we’re supposed to do, and who we’re supposed to be at any and every age. I think what we wind up with is far too much and we either give up on the aspirational tone of our lives or else end up trying to open a window to make love to the world which is a quick way to catch pneumonia and freak out the general public.
I think we’re supposed to review the clutter from time to time and determine what our primary tenet is, who we are supposed to be and what we are supposed to do.
That is what this book is for me. It’s a silly story about a man who accidentally makes a movie, but along the way he, and hopefully I in writing it, will break, edit, delete and rewrite the articles above into something simpler, something elegant.
Why?
Because I am supposed to enjoy this thing called life, and live it with a heart full of ready and ample love for the world and myself.
Part of that crucible, is the absurdity of how we treat and behave towards the natural and universal need to occasional go to the bathroom for a poo. There’s a lot more, like how we’re just as much pressed by social niceties to care for one another as we are protected from extending the effort if we have the right amount of deniability.
I’m writing this for myself as something of a mission statement under guise of comedy. I’m looking to tell a long form joke (or series of them), the punchline and laughter to which echoes with: “love one another, for it covers a multitude of strifes and struggles.”
As always, we move forward.
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