Bill Kerwin's Blog: Big Sleep City News, page 2

It's a book filled with the dead, and yet these characters are alive. And I feel they wish to be more alive. In a sequel? Certainly, but also ... in the minds of all the readers of Big Sleep Boogie, the readers yet to come.

Whatever the Land of the Dead is like, I hope it isn't a cliche. No harps, no wings, no cloud-sitting. Instead, how about a giant potluck on the weekend? After that, we spread out into the land of the living to comfort the hearts of all of the desperate who sit alone on a Saturday night.

Stendhal once said, "a novel is a mirror carried down a highway. One moment it reflects the bright blue sky, at another the mud beneath your feet." Stendhal never said the highway couldn't cut straight through the cemetery.

I enjoy putting original songs and hymns and quotations from dead poets into my novels. I like the texture they add: it's like using a pallet knife on one section of a painting. Helps all the rest stand out.

In conversation, Coleridge once said that prose is "words in their best order" and that poetry is "the best words in the best order.” I revise until I achieve prose, and strive--at crucial narrative moments--to turn that prose into poetry.

My characters. I call them my children, but they are puppets. I manipulate them from within, I make them speak with my voice. Sometimes, though, they speak their own thoughts. And, when they do so, they fill me with pride--and fear.

A comment I've heard more than once: "I was surprised there was so much of you in Big Sleep Boogie." I see what they mean, but--after all--what else could be in it but me?

All Saint's Day. Today I am thinking of two of my saints, without whom there never would have been a Big Sleep City: my mother Trudy, who played piano and sang duets with me; and my father Bill, who, sharing his love of reading, introduced me to King Arthur, the Three Musketeers, Nero Wolfe, and Sherlock Holmes.

I signed my first autograph yesterday. It made me feel defenseless, and grateful. And somehow absurd.

Revision week for Big Sleep Blues. I know now how it feels to be a killer. I killed off actor Ronnie Greenbaum, and replaced him with English professor Jack Sutton. I ripped Ronnie from his life in Big Sleep City. And I didn't even bat an eye.