After nearly 20 years, I wanted to finally publish something. Although I had always intended to publish the ‘book within the book’ on its own. Ideally, after the novel was published. As I’ve mentioned before in previous blog posts, the story of Seven Ways to Disappear, which is still unpublished, was birthed 20 years ago. And as a result, so was the ‘book within the book.’ However, after many fits and starts and long years of stops, I still have never finished Seven Ways to Disappear enough to be published. But I do recall the day I finished its first draft. One day our writing group, The Wish Box Writers, took a trip to the beach as a retreat. I remember us sitting on the beach watching the waves crash in, us climbing up a big rock, and us taking time to write.
By the time this day occurred I had written about 97 percent of the first draft of the entire story of Seven Ways to Disappear. Toward the tail end of our retreat, I declared to my writing group that I had actually finished my draft! It was a great feeling that I was planning for since knowing we were going to be going on a retreat. I had been toiling away at this story for months and was ready to be one of the first to finish a draft. Back then, like now, if I have a goal, an incentive, and a time frame for accomplishing something, I’d most likely accomplish it. The result may not be the best. I may not necessarily be the first. But I’d complete the task. And that’s sort of how that day unfolded as I declared myself finished with my first draft.
But the next step - the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and final step leading to a final draft never materialized. As these things go - I’ve been left thinking about this story and these characters for 20 years!
And I haven’t been able to let them go. They’ve been taking up real estate in my head as I’ve tried to finish their story, enhance their story, change their story – finish their story. So, during the pandemic, I decided to start working on Seven Ways to Disappear and pull out the ‘book within the book’ to have a sense of accomplishment. To finally close a loop. But there is still the larger story to finish.
Seven Ways to Disappear, the unpublished novel, is about four friends living in Los Angeles the week of September 11th. The story is told from each of the characters’ point of view as the characters go through their daily lives the days leading up to September 11th. There’s Hugo, a hustler; Danielle, a schoolteacher; Scout, a musician; and Julian, a model. They are all friends, with varying degrees of closeness. None of whom are terribly close to one another. Between them they talk about a book that they’ve come across, which is called Seven Ways to Disappear that they discuss intermittently throughout the story. The ‘book within the book’ isn’t laid out in whole ---there are only excerpts from it throughout the story. However, back then, I planned to have the ‘book within the book,’ placed at the end of the larger story, in its entirety, for readers to enjoy.
The book they read, Seven Ways to Disappear, outlines ways that one can disappear literally, metaphorically, and symbolically (which is the book I published). In the larger story, I use the ‘book within the book’ as a plot device to propel the story forward and have it be the one thing the characters have in common that they can relate to with each other. Some of the characters take the book’s content literally, some of them see it as ‘just a book’ that they debate about, back and forth, on its merits. However, when the events of September 11th occur, each of them turns to the book for guidance. In the story, the book is written by someone named Corbin Kennedy, which are two names that are close to me and my family. Corbin Kennedy would have written Seven Ways to Disappear in the early 1990’s in the vein of a Doestoevsky, or Poe, or Ralph Ellison, even. Overall, there’s something intentionally subliminal about the book, and even out of place, for it to be sold at a place like an Urban Outfitters store.
As I came up with the idea and started to flesh it out (20 years ago), I started to think that it was something that I could publish on its own and have people in real life experience like the characters in the book. The reason why I thought it was something that could stand on its own is because we all have thoughts of disappearing, or we engage in various disappearing acts knowingly or unknowingly throughout our lives. Why? Because life can be hard, overwhelming, and difficult to manage, especially if external events, which are out of our control, impact us in ways that we could never imagine.