Day 47, The Be Brave Project; All the King's Horses, Plus Movement on the Novel Front

Howzat for an original title? Cos' things are falling apart here in North America, you see, and now in Europe. Failed European conference over the weekend resulted in Monday's blood bath at the NYSE, and yesterday was worse. I read last night that Iceland's money is worth 40% of what it had been the week before.

The Wall Street Journal has cut their on-line staff, the New York Times has 86'd its "Metro" section due to costs, Los Angeles Times cut their staff by 75 people, and papers are discussing the "long slow bleed of journalists out of NY's capital" after the New York Sun folded last week.

I only got this home because the guy living here was relocated back to California, due to his office being shut down. . .let's hope I can continue to earn enough to live here. It is very very cheap for NYC, but if there's no work there's no rent.

In short, this might be the perfect time to stay home and work on a book. Looks like plenty of others will be doing the same.

At least I know how to wait tables. Just hope there are some customers.

Anyway: 2 months' worth of money is what I have, so I'd better get cracking on the book.

What do you want the book to be?

Novel, first person narrative by a woman. Film noir voice, hard-boiled. . .dark atmosphere, comic undertones, lively description, a sense of what it feels like to live nowadays but always poured through that noir filter.

Length: 250 pages. The least I can get away with.

Plot, as far as I know: Augusta Gunn, aged 35. Ageing cage dancer recently moved over into management but still working the floor sometimes. She lives in a family owned apartment in _________. Every day she wakes out of a blackout, puts on a filmy old robe and negligee, fixes a cuppa joe and obsessively watches old films on tv. . .every day she does every thing she can to not think about her past. The man she loved and (this is where a lot of research needs to be done), the child she thinks she lost/killed.

Or perhaps she should think she killed the man??? Probably should go with that.

Anyway, one night she's at work, out on the floor, swinging in a cage in the strobe light that makes her still look young, that highlights her body parts like packaged meat; a flash of thigh, a dead white expanse of arm--and then she thinks she sees him.
Her ex husband.

She stands above him, shouting for his attention, but he keeps looking around. She screams, her face Toulouse Lautrec-ed in the garish light, over the throbbing tech beat--for some reason he turns and looks upward--he sees her. And then turns and pushes his way out of the club.

So that would be the first 1/3 of the first act, pretty much--the status quo and what happens to change that status quo.

And if Augusta did think she killed him (maybe the child thing is just too dark, though it is extremely similar to what happens in Women's films of the 1930's when kids were offed for sentiment and plot development all the time, and also to make depression-era mothers feel better about their secret resentment of their children's stranglehold on their lives)--she's going to start investigating what really happened.

Which means that she'd recreate that last night they were together in her memory. She'd start asking people who were around that evening questions. She'd really focus on whoever told her the guy was dead, and what evidence they'd come up with that convinced her it was true.

She would have required evidence: She is hard boiled but extremely sentimental beneath. Who provided the evidence? And why? Booze has made her selfish and lazy, but it has also increased the sentiment--there will be times when she gets choked up over the littlest things. Think of John Self in Money.

OK. That's good work for today! Tomorrow I will try to move forward.

-Create a document that is the plot synopsis.

-Use structure model you used for screenplay adaptation.

• think of screenplay length, but 2x as long.
• screenplay structure works with this, as cinema (and "partiality of perception" is woven into this book.
• take screenplay structure work to library today and work on it.
• draw up map for structure.