Drawing/Blending Fiction From/With Reality

Writing is simply capturing a series of moments in time, in words, on paper/screen. Hopefully, when you have finished typing, you have told a story.

Luckily, throughout my life, whenever anything the least bit interesting happened to me or I witnessed some exciting event unfold, it always got filed in the back of my head somewhere. It became part of this collective field.

But we are taught from an early age that here are all kinds of rules to writing. There are entire, specialized and expensive post grad programs developed to teach you those rules.

Anyone who has read The Claire Saga knows that I ignore most of them.

My spelling is atrocious, my grammar horrific. I butcher my native tongue. I am a repeat offending malapropist. I switch narration from first to third person (whatever happened to second person? Poor fucker.), and back again, sometimes within the same paragraphs. I capitalize nouns based on whim and whimsy. I love to abuse the “em dash” and the “en dash” interchangeably – with improper lengths and spacing to boot — to erratically break up my thoughts in my writing. I use commas the way an Italian grandma uses oregano. Season to individual taste. And I love starting sentences with “and” and “but.” But I am consistently inconsistent in my misapplication of all of these “mistakes.” (by the way, I hate fucking putting a punctuation inside a close quote, it’s unnatural). I am the Slip Mahoney of the literary world.

And constantly being reminded of those literary restrictions probably kept me from being a writer for most of my life. Until I just stopped giving a good fuck about rules, especially about writing.

Oh yeah, did I mention I also I love to lace my stories with expletives.

I’m a huge fan of the word “fuck.” Anyone who has ever spent five seconds in my presence can attest to this. I appreciate its versatility. https://mentalhealthathome.org/2022/02/22/linguistic-versatility-fuck/

Even my magical mule, Claire, has a potty mouth.

Now you would think that rebelling against rules all my life would make it tough to work in the Legal Field.

It did for as long as I had lifelong rule followers as partners above me telling me what I could and could not write. I was in a creative straitjacket.

There was one I won’t name who actually took a ruler to measure my indent margins. True story.

But, for the last seventeen years, I’ve worked with a wonderful, funny and intellectually brilliant lawyer named Robert “Never Bobby” Meloni, who out of friendship, fear and/or abandon has allowed me free rein to fashion our legal briefs, pleadings and other legal documents as the spirit moved me, as long as we are meticulously right on facts and the law.

Throughout that time, Robert has only regretted one of my “the other side is handing the Court an elephant’s phallus in a darkened room and trying to convince your honor that it is a snake” analogies for which he was playfully admonished in open Court, but I digress.

So I write as I like and we are confidently and quite successfully right in our positions.

This incredible show of support from the outset is how Robert captured his role as the main mafia attorney in TWA. There’s a reference to him getting out of the life in AAA. Switched over to entertainment. I wanted to enshrine him in a Godfather, Goodfellas pantheon – he can quote every mafia movie – and has a touch of Vinny Gambini in the way he can control a deposition and a courtroom. He is truly mesmerizing.

But anyway, this transitioning to formal literary lawlessness has freed my creativity to the point that when I sat down to write TWA, I just went with the flow and threw the fucking rules out the fucking window.

Now I believe that this freedom has greatly impacted the authenticity of my writing.

Reviewers are always commenting on how the tiny details in my stories always cause them to wonder if what I’m writing about is true. I leave those decisions to their imagination.

Let’s take for example, the other night.

There I was, relaxing comfortably in the basement on my tan leather chair with my legs extended on its accompanying ottoman – a gift from the extraterrestrials Everette and Michelle – binge watching episode six of The Three Body Problem – the film series adaptation of the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy on Netflix. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel).

Lisa was asleep with Blue on the couch beside me.

Just as the The Stars Our Destination episode was ending I felt a strange tingling that you sometimes get when some part of your body – like your leg – is about to cramp. I was compelled to leap out of the chair like my ass was on fire. I started stomping and stretching my legs to repel the numbness that was rapidly rising through my body. I felt like I was losing control, being forced to surrender.

I grabbed a nearby thick brown metal support post with my left hand just as this invasive energy pumped through my entire body from the ground up. Every muscle contracted, my body and neck locked into a set position. I tried to call out to Lisa but could not even cry out. My throat was paralyzed. I would like to suggest that my eyes continued to function but I am not sure that I wasn’t witnessing what was happening from inside or directly outside my body. I do know that I remained completely conscious throughout the event. Every second of it.

The next moment every cell – and I mean absolutely every fucking cell in my being simultaneously experienced the most intense pain I have ever suffered in my life. This wasn’t a localized event. I wasn’t suffering a heart attack or a brain aneurysm. I wasn’t wounded. But I wasn’t breathing. My mind stayed right in the moment. Fully functioning. Totally aware.

The pain must have lasted for at least sixty seconds and was so intense that I remember thinking while it was happening – Holy shit, maybe this is dying.

And then I felt a strange acceptance of the possibility that I might be leaving this energy plane. I realized that it was all out of my control so I just had to go with it. I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing and wondered about what was going to happen next. Would it be like I believed it would. Crossing the veil.

The pain then subsided just as quickly as it struck, and I regained control of my body. I remember having to grasp onto the back of my leather chair for support. I looked up at the screen and Netflix was counting down the loading of the next episode on the bottom right corner of an otherwise darkened television screen. I could see the still sleeping Lisa and Blue on the couch.

They both seemed so peaceful, I didn’t have the heart to wake them. I just shut off the television and went up to the tower to bed. I slept like a log, and have not shown any residual signs of the event. In fact, I feel better than ever.

So, did I just make all that shit up to prove a point? You decide.

Well, now the sun is rising and I need to get a move on.

Kitties to cuddle and rounds to make.

You fine, five readers pay attention to the tiny details of your life. That’s where the stories hide.

Go have that last cuppa and then dance with Thursday while you really wrap your summer workweek.

Watch some interesting television tonight.

And no matter what else we get up to, let us make today a great one.

And Netflix, The Three Body Problem, as interesting as it is, pales in comparison to The Claire Saga.