The Importance Of Being Jimmy

People often ask me why I wrote Finding Jimmy Moran after The Claire Trilogy. FJM is the prequel to TCT. It fractures the timeline.

Part of it was that I really didn’t think anyone would give a shit about the Jimmy character without Claire by his side. Before Claire, Jimmy didn’t exist.

As I have said many times, Claire created the first story that became The Wise Ass, and neither of us really believed anyone would ever read it.

It’s success was pure luck. Lightning in a bottle.

The Claire Trilogy grew with Claire’s popularity to resolve issues created in the prior books. And when those three books were complete, I thought, “okay, that’s it. Nothing else to see here.”

But as those books became more popular I started having a lot of contact with people from my past, some important people in my life who didn’t make it into TCT, so I thought, why not write something where I can explain to the now already engaged readership, who were asking for another book, what went into transitioning the young Jimmy McCarthy character they are first introduced to in The Wise Ass, into the man that could become Jimmy Moran in TCT. You see, Jimmy is a morally complex character. He made a lot of what ended up being good decisions for all the wrong reasons. The rest was pure luck. FJM show you how that started.

However, a primary reason I wrote FJM was to tell the story of how Jimmy met Gina, the latter being one of the main characters whom the readers have uniformly loved. What’s not to love?! Thank you Lisa. And The Claire Saga overall is basically an intergalactic love story.

You’ll really get to understand that last point in Where The Ley Lines Meet.

Another major reason that I wrote FJM when I did was that I wanted to thank a lot of the people who helped get me to this title of “author” with TCT by immortalizing them in a story while I still have people willing to read it. FJM was an homage to growing up at a place and time that no longer exists, with a series of family and friends that made my childhood and youth truly magical. No cell phone, internet, or helicopter parents. Lot’s of drinking, swearing, fighting and sex. All wrapped in the innocence of youth. Some of the people are represented by the disguised institutions suggested or by one or two thinly veiled characters that may represent an entire crew.

I may have also felt guilty about killing off my brothers so early in TWA.

TCT is a story about Colorado and beyond. FJM is all New Yawk. I love my new hometown and my constantly evolving spiritual life but, to my dying day, I will always proudly consider my core to be Bronx Irish Catholic.

Finally, Claire would not leave me alone – it was totally her suggestion to tell FJM in retrospect so she could remain an integral part of the story, and she was right again. I used FJM as the set up for Where The Ley Lines Meet, the storyline for which developed in my subconscious during the writing of FJM. During the course of telling a story five hundred years in the future, I got to lace the narrative with gold nuggets that suggested what had occured in their universe over those five hundred years. And the readers needed to meet the Muse. So pay attention. The Devil is in the details. For the record, my recently reacquainted and now deceased buddy, Pete Flanagan, caught every single one of them and gleefully connected them during our conversations to the storyline in WTLLM. He read the publisher’s manuscript. Well done Petey.

FJM is the reader’s last look at the fragile and all too humanly flawed character Jimmy Moran, before he has one final(?) adventure with Claire the magnificent mystical mule in his fully evolved and enhanced Centaurian Hybrid form. But it’s juxtaposition as book 4 is the perfect set-up for what you will experience, because it is Jimmy Moran’s humanity that drives his character once again to the very edge of heaven in WTLLM.

And as a bonus I got to work another group of new and old friends into this final book.

Which leads me to the title of today’s blog – a knock off of the Irish writer, Oscar Wilde’s most famous play. You see, in The Importance of Being Earnest, many of the names and ideas in the play were based on people or places the author had known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest 

There you go. Write what you know.

So, for any of your Clairettes that were hoping to skip from KMAG directly to WTLLM, you may want to reconsider while you still have time to burn through FJM before Tuesday, April 16th.

Oh, and in closing, while I may have appeared to incorporate a lot of my neighborhood, experiences and friends growing up in the story appearing in The Claire Saga (ALL OF WHICH I HEREBY DENY – IT IS TOTAL FICTION – JUST ASK LENNY, JOE OR BC – EILEEN HELP ME OUT HERE) I’m not Jimmy Moran. I mean that. Couldn’t hold a candle to him.

But Claire is everything I’ve said about her. Then some.

And I’m still waiting for that one additional wonderful reader to bump FJM‘s rating/review from 199 to 200 before April 16th. Fingers crossed.

So, that’s all I’m going to say about FJM. For today, at least.

I hope you fine, five readers have absolutely nothing left on your weekend to do list, and can just fuck off and read a book.

I’m going to cuddle some kitties and make my rounds. Then I promised Riverdale ex-pat Karen Cruiser Beck a favor.

But whatever we all get up to today, let us make it a great one.