My Debut

I'm an admirer of Jorge Luis Borges, whose longest work is a little over 5,000 words. One lesson I learned from him is that a book idea does not always need an execution: it's more efficient to pretend the book has already been written, and provide a commentary on it. That is what he did in stories such as "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" (1941) or "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" (1935).

Today is the twelfth anniversary of my debut novel, Dormir amb Winona Ryder. I have mixed feelings about the occasion: on one hand, I owe a lot to that book; on the other, it's trash. Definitely not worth reading. However, like Borges's unwritten novels, it might be worth a commentary. So, if only for my curious anglophone readers, allow me to tell you about my first book on the condition that you don't give it any more attention.

I started DaWR in February 2006. I was 24. I had been churning out short stories and sending them to contests for some years; August 2005 was the first time I won one for a piece I liked. At the start of '06 I had quit a job that made me miserable. The plan was to take a two-month break to write and draw before getting a new job. DaWR stretched that break into a whole year.

I wasn't only busy with the novel; I was also writing more stories to keep me afloat. Looking back, I'm astounded at how much material I produced that year. And it made me money too. Even paid for my first trip abroad, to NYC. I was on fire. In seven months I finished DaWR just in time for the deadline of the most important award in Catalonia, I sent it in, and sat back to wait for the check.

December 2006, I lost. March 2007 I was moving back with my parents.

•

I am not trying to write a cautionary tale here; I don't care if you make the same mistakes I did. I'm only trying to tell you good things I remember from that time: I was having fun, I had high morale, I was discovering what I wanted to do with my life. And yeah, I was stupid too, but let's not fool ourselves: I'm pretty stupid now.

I was focusing a lot on Winona Ryder too, and that felt good. A big part of why I don't wipe the book from my memory altogether is because, you know, it was terrible, and pretentious, and embarrassing, but it gave me an excuse to blabber about Winona Ryder, and that made me happy. It's not something to wave off, the chance to spend quality time obsessing with a celebrity crush. I will never dismiss the good effect she had on me, on my mental health; how much her movies comforted me on bad days. How much she's helped, from 6,000 km. away. At the time, I had strong feelings for a girl I was slowly falling apart with. Toward the end of our acquaintance, she read the manuscript, and said, "You show emotions for Winona that I didn't believe you capable of."

Barcelona's World Trade Center in 2005, where I often wrote.

Dormir amb Winona Ryder took its title from a blog I used to run, a dream journal. It also borrowed several oneiric sequences from the blog. Dreams are a resource I continue to use; I love beautiful randomness that masquerades as meaningful.

The novel was based on Borges's story "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim". If you've read it, what I did essentially was to write that fictional book, replacing Al-Mu'tasim with Winona Ryder. Borges gave a few guidelines that I adhered to: the novel needed to have 21 chapters, and it would end with the narrator arriving at Al-Mu'tasim's doorstep.

Several friends of mine appeared in it. Some told me they'd liked it a lot. I appreciate that.

•

In June 2007, DaWR won a contest (the third I sent it to) and was acquired by a major publisher. This and the short stories got me back on my feet. If 2006 was the year I worked most, 2007 was the year I reaped the profits. I also found a great job, which I still keep.

I was very unhappy with the edition when the book came out in November. There were so many blunders, so many stylistic choices that proofreaders had changed without my consent, I emailed the editor begging to reprint. He appeased me by saying it would all be fixed in the second edition. Obviously, there never was a second edition. The book was so wrong to my eyes, I avoided opening it. This experience hardwired into me the idea that publishers are people to be wary of, not to trust. It wasn't until I started working with Doubleday that I eased up on that notion.

Reviews were lukewarm. Critics tagged me as "a young promise", an epithet I came to hate (I had already written a book; I had not made any promises). Sales tanked. Then in February the book won a second, bigger award for best novel published in '07. Sales continued to tank, but I was invited to TV shows, big parties, highbrow literary venues where I stuck out like a sore toe...and I didn't even like the book I was promoting. All in all, I had a weird debut. Nothing went as I planned. I got cash, newsclips, concert tickets (I'm still very thankful for those), and the book didn't sell a thousand copies. 

Carrer Budapest, in Barcelona, 2007. My pic.

I had already shelved away DaWR long before the celebrations ended. I think I abandoned my last copy in a park in Guinardó (I liked the hills in Barcelona now, not the seaside). Sometimes I remember a passage and cringe. I always make sure to point out it's the book I'm over with, though—not the subject. And if nothing else, the ordeal fueled my second novel, of which I'm slightly less ashamed.

It's funny how, out of the two main themes in "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", the one about books that are better reviewed than written has always stuck with me, whereas I keep losing sight of the other one, which was something in the lines of, "it's the journey, not the destination." It is implied in Borges's story that the man who is searching for Al-Mu'tasim becomes Al-Mu'tasim in the process. I did not become Winona Ryder (though I became "the Winona guy" in the Catalan scene; that epithet I like), but the process of writing DaWR, and publishing it, and hating it, did get me closer to my idols somehow: it demystified them for me; it helped me see that their art, even well-paid art, even multi-awarded art, may be botched in their eyes. And yes, I'm the kind of fanboy to listen to Sinéad O'Connor's first album or play Cuphead or watch Bo Burnham's What and scream, "How is this possible—this is a perfect work on the first try!" but I bet the artists behind those things see how short of perfection they fall all the time. Winona said decades ago (Life, Dec. 1994) that she hadn't been proud of her acting until her twelfth film. Matter of fact, another thing I learned from my debut is that interviews rarely convey what you meant to say, so I'll take that statement with a grain of salt, but what I mean is, I understand it. My first book was trash, but writing it put me in the position to write less trashy books now. And the books will never be perfect, I guess, but that's how it works: at some point, I have to stop trying to improve a manuscript, and hope it will improve me. So be it. God knows I could use the improvement.

Cooling down

>run statrprt.exe file:WIP.odt

MANUSCRIPT STATUS REPORT OT:2019/09/21 ψSC:UNKNOWN

word count: 169,493
page count: 656
# of chapters: 121
longest chapter length: 5,041 words
shortest chapter length: 221 words
opening paragraph length: 7 pages
# of footnotes: 15
# of pages in meter: 5
longest string without punctuation marks: 24 lines
# of named human characters: >200
# of chapters featuring most featured character: <20
status: cooling down
title: HEAVEN PARK

よくやった！

 heaven_park_snaps

Proof that sometimes I plan ahead

There are literally eight major character deaths plotted here.

Fade In

Guess what we're writing these days.

Quicksand & Apricots

I was due to write a post but I couldn't think of a subject, so I asked for help, and this is what we got.

So about A.Z., what's it like for Adrian when Zooey's knocked out, and vice versa? Static? Cognitive impairment? Does he gain full control over her hemisphere, and why doesn't his personality change? Researching for, you know, reasons.

It is said somewhere that both Adrian and Zooey have control of the whole brain the whole time: their only problem is agreeing on what to do. Two pilots, one plane. You can see Adrian without Zooey in chapter 7 and Zooey without Adrian in chapter 10: they're just less frustrated when the other's sleeping. However, both personalities alone are too radical for their own good, so it's best to compromise and help each other. Adrian needs Zooey to show empathy and not to antagonize everyone. Zooey needs Adrian to grab the steering wheel while she plays air drums.

Do you ever get bored of a story during the writing process? I can't tell if when it happens to me if it's because the story is boring, or because I've just been sitting on it for too long and it's just not fun to me anymore.

Bored as in, I'm not interested by this subject anymore, not that I can remember, no. Bored as in, I would rather be playing Terraria right now, yeah, quite often. Take breaks!

Oh, also, about how old is AZ?

I'm gonna say 31. It's how old I was when I met them.

How smoothly does the editing process usually go? Are you ever told to change things you don't want to change/write things you don't want to write?

From my experience, the editing process is sort of a negotiation. I doubt any editor expects an author to take 100% of their suggestions. On the other hand, taking 0% is arrogant and self-righteous. So sure, you can refuse some changes. But you also have to wonder whether you're doing it out of pride: if you and your editor truly see eye to eye, you must listen to their input. Since Meddling Kids, everything I've published has gone through the same editor at Doubleday, and he has improved all of it. We've argued, but I'm glad he stood up to me every time, cause he was right. Also, keep in mind that editorial suggestions seldom come in the form of, "This doesn't work--write this instead"; they're more often like, "this doesn't work--find an alternative," so there is ample room for solutions that please everyone.

The biggest and most specific change that was suggested to me was in The Supernatural Enhancements. I refused it, but I explained why and proposed a different solution, and the book turned better than the manuscript.

Hey Edgar, any advice to someone trying to break into the publishing industry?

I don't like giving writing advice because universally good tips are painfully obvious. Plus, my own beginnings were in Catalan, which is a completely different scene, so my experience doesn't help. Therefore, I only have the usual platitudes for you: write stuff, finish it, and then write more stuff. Don't skip steps 2 and 3.

Thanks all for your questions! Keep them coming!

Hollywood Hills...

...és Vallvidrera amb palmeres, si fa no fa.

Disaster In Progress

DIP is the endearing term I use to refer to my next novel. For years, the DIP was the last page in the file where I list all my project ideas—just one short paragraph with a pitch and a footnote saying I wasn't yet good enough to undertake it. I'm still not good enough, but I've been fiddling with it in my spare time for years now. It kept me pretty busy in New York: for some reason, writing about Catalonia in English and from 6,000 kilometers makes it more interesting. And it's going to be weird, and personal, and different from anything I've done before, and there are bits I'm really proud of so far but right now they're like fragments in a shipwreck. But my editor likes it, so it's going to be the next novel.

I often think that the research, the notes, maybe even the plotboards are a writer's excuse to delay the actual work of phrasing what's in your head. If I'm right, then this thing here is a big waste of time. But it's cute.

The white squares represent units I haven't written yet. The colored squares are units I've written—kind of. The struck-out squares are those that I'm happy with. When all the squares are filled and struck-out, the novel will be ready.

Good thing we're writing TV projects in the meantime.

I live in LA now

Yup. Good post.

Some thousands of words about covers

So I want to share something with you today, but first, some backstory.

Recently, during a panel at Denver Comic Con, some authors discussed whether book cover artists actually read the books they illustrate. My position was that mine did, at least since I publish in the US.

I know this isn't always the case. Never was, never will be. It's how the industry works. For my first novel, Dormir amb Winona Ryder, released by a big Catalan publisher, designers sent me five proposals that were, at best, illustrations based on two-word concepts jotted down by someone who had read it. Emphasis on "at best": one was just a flower pattern. We went with a sixth proposal, just as random.

For my next book, Vallvi, I insisted (tooth and claw) on drawing the cover myself. In the end, they accepted the illustration, but went with their own design. (Left is the actual book, right is my proposal.)

This said, I have good reasons to affirm that my cover artist at Doubleday, Michael J. Windsor, reads my books before doing his job. First, I've met him and he's told me so. Second, just check out the back of the jacket for This Body's Not Big Enough.

That little thing in front of the car is a roadrunner. The roadrunner is a very minor theme in the book. No way a synopsis, even a thorough synopsis, would mention it. This is the kind of thing that tells me whether the artist has read the book or not.

And now, here's what I wanted to share: this design for the Brazilian edition of Meddling Kids is clearly by someone who has *SO* read the book.

The illustration, I'm told, is by Jefferson Costa. And I think it's my favorite design for anything I've written, ever. It's not that the looks are perfectly dark and fun, it's not just Kerri's lavish red hair and the car that really looks like a Vega Kammback Wagon (and I even like the color). I mean... let's zoom into some details:

That little Kerri there seems to be reading something longer than a mysterious note to the BSDC. I'd say she's reading a love letter. (Also, check out the six-limbed wheezies!)

A figure lurking from the *round* attic window of Deboën Mansion. That's a very accurate rendition of my words.

And that's Pierce in Andy's hand. What can I say. Bravo, Brazil. Hope you enjoy the book as much as the artist seems to have.