I wrote this for Max Boothe III's Ghoulish newsletter the week my first book, LIKE REAL, was published...
How resonant it would be if I had some tale of physical catastrophe that led to my idea of a man with a machine hand that wants to be human. I do not.
Maybe my story sprung from seeds planted in my youth by that asskicking scene in Evil Dead 2 in which Ash fights with his possessed, disembodied hand.
Or it could be a by-product of the depression dogging me my whole adult life. In a fun way! Yay for fun stuff resulting from depression! In moments of chaos or sadness, I found comfort and control in lists, in planning what I should do with my life, or at least in a single day. Being in charge of stories and worlds I created also helped. I remember an entire afternoon when I was eight spent wandering around the living room, which I’d imagined was a restaurant that I ran, with invisible guests and their orders of dishes I knew from my mom’s kitchen. Two orders of lasagna, please. One helping of liverwurst for the most horrible customer!
I’ve been writing since my first crappy book at age eight about flying around on a four-poster bed having adventures. Derivative, right out of the gate! My dad told me he knew a publisher and would see about getting it released. I never asked for an update and he never gave one. That was my first time being too timid to follow up, for fear I was “bugging” someone. I wonder how different life would be if I harangued my Dad until he had to admit: “It ain’t gonna fly, kid, and none of the kids are gonna fly, either. It’s a dead deal, and them’s the breaks.” In my hypothetical fantasy, he talks like a Brooklyn Rough with a cigar hanging out the side of his mouth.
I segued to poetry, and long epic verse about Peter Pan and the Beat poets, and also wrote a few short stories. My favorite was called “The Odious Stink,” which was loosely based on a true story.
(michele is my legal name I rarely use)
The real-life incident happened in 9th grade. A girl in class hadn’t changed her maxi pad and thus created a pungent aroma in the hot Los Angeles bungalow classroom. I set it in an post-apocalyptic world wherein an odious stink might also be deadly chemicals. Our teacher handled it delicately by sending the boys out of the room for a just-us-gals talk.
Plays and screenplays came next. Some were produced, some written for-hire, most never saw the light of day. This was a world I enjoyed, but it offered little money and no sense of control over my direction. There was also the problem of my follow-through and persistence—my hustle was for crap.
I started to get corporate gigs and enjoyed the writing/copywriting/research/blah-blah-blah money. For many years I straddled both the corporate and artistic worlds.
Then, something definitely outside of my control happened: a big layoff. And that’s when I decided to pretend I was a full-time writer, at least as long as my savings held out.
Sensing a ‘control’ theme here? It’s in all my work. Favorite Universal Horror monster? The Wolfman, a man who loses control thanks to a curse. In fact, my second book, June Bride, for which I’m trying to find a home, is a Wolfman story about a harried bride trying to plan her wedding while dealing with the cursed bite of a Reptoid.
Like Real is about a man who loses control of a prosthetic hand. It’s a comedy and sort of love story. I’ve written tons of female characters, but this one needed to be a dude.
The story began in a Max Adams’ screenwriting class called ‘First 30 Pages’ (highly recommended for any screenwriters out there), and I workshopped several scenes in her excellent 5150 screenwriting group.
I finished a first draft, then let it sit for eight months until I saw a post on Facebook from John Skipp about how to turn a screenplay into a novel. (Skipp’s foreword on my book contains all the cool deets) Nervous, rusty, I walked into his place to find a great group of writers, which due to life events, whittled down to myself and Brian Asman, whose stellar prose blew me away. We began with free-writing on notecards, then floor-work, which involved—you guessed it—the floor, on which we’d spread out our notecards so we could manipulate them into an outline.
Each week I’d bring in a scene based on a beat in the screenplay, but soon found the story moved in directions I hadn’t considered. The biggest transition from screenplay writing to prose fiction was interiority. For screenplays, you write what can be filmed. No internal thoughts, and a mere glance at the environment. You get in with some action verbs and a couple adjectives, and get out as fast as you can. The benefit of the screenwriting training was my ability to paint pictures fast and to the point. The downside was mastering interiority without going too far.
Okay, I’ve now lost control of this essay, so I will bring it to the end with a note on my characters.
I love fools, weirdos, assholes, creeps, braggarts, extroverts, unstable introverts—the endless banquet of so-called losers, of which I consider myself a member. It hurts to watch a movie or read a book and find a two-dimensional ‘weirdo,’ who’s only there for a (shitty) punchline. In this and all my work, I try to cast these freaks as the stars.
In summation: although I have no control over whether you buy Like Real or read Like Real or review Like Real, I will hope that you do so. At the very least, please never forget the title “The Odious Stink.” 17-year-old me was quite proud of that title.
Thanks for your time and attention.
Shelly