Ariel (41 page)

Afterword: Taking A Dump In Lothlorién
1

I. Some Background (1979-1981)

I was just about to start my second year of college at the University of Tampa, Florida. DISCO SUCKS T-shirts were nearly as ubiquitous as disco itself. Guys wore wide collars, bad perms, and shiny belt buckles. Blondie's "Heart of Glass" was playing on the radio about every twelve minutes, and the big media decision being forced on households was VHS or Betamax.

I was eighteen.

Fiction-writing classes were held around a yellow-lighted table in the school rathskeller under the aegis of Professor Andrew Solomon. I had been writing since I was five years old and sending short stories to magazines since eighth grade. In high school I won a writing scholarship in a national contest and was certain life owed me an existence as a professional writer.

I was about to walk into a tunnel twenty years long.

* * *

Fiction came easily to me. I went to college knowing how to write, and there wasn't much anyone there could teach me. This says more about me than about them, of course. "The problem with youth," said Oscar Wilde, "is that it's wasted on the young."

I was failing nearly every other subject because, at eighteen in 1979, I didn't care about much of anything beyond writing and getting laid. I did a lot of both. In writing class I was knowledgeable, funny, sincere, and insufferably arrogant. What I loved, I loved, and I knew why I loved it. What I hated I cursed unto the seventh generation. I set fire to more than one story in that rathskeller. Literally. With a green Bic lighter.

Over the summer break after my freshman year I started a short story about a Boy and His Unicorn. It had the unbearable title of "The Sound of Silver Hooves."
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I had just read "On the Downhill Side," by Harlan Ellison, and
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
, Madeleine L'Engle's sequel to
A Wrinkle in Time
. Both stories featured Familiar-type relationships between a young man and a magical creature, so that was on my mind. I have always been fond of post-apocalyptic movies and fiction, and I conjured this mental image of a young man and a unicorn walking along an abandoned interstate fallen into disrepair. I started asking myself questions about that image (
Why a magical creature in an urban environment
? Because physical law has somehow shifted, the old rules don't work and new ones do), and a world and a relationship began to unfold.

By the time my second year of college rolled around I'd written, I dunno, fifty, seventy-five pages before I admitted to myself that, oh, crap, I have a novel going here.

I didn't want to write novels. I'd sworn never to write a novel. I was a (sniff) short-story writer. Once I admitted to myself that the damned thing really was a novel, though, it just sort of uncoiled before me, a long path leading somewhere I'd never been and most certainly never meant to visit.

Sophomore year started up and I workshopped the first few chapters. Some people loved it, some hated it. By this time in my young academic career that love/hate division already split neatly along personality lines: people who liked me, liked what I wrote; people who didn't, didn't. There doesn't seem to be a lot of inbetween about my fiction or about me. Oh, well. In any case, when you can poll the reactions to a piece of fiction before you ever turn it in to a workshop, the workshop is well beyond the point of doing you any good. And I didn't care about the opinions of eighteen-year-olds who were mostly indifferent about writing anyhow.

I quit going to class.

By then I'd quit going to all my other classes as well. I was obsessed with writing My Novel and thoroughly disinterested in college. I told Andy Solomon I was gonna quit school and finish the thing (the title of which I had, thank god, changed from "The Sound of Silver Hooves" to
Ariel
).

"I think you should," he said. "I don't think there's anything here for you."

I remember gaping. My writing teacher and curriculum advisor was advising me to quit school?

I quit school.

* * *

Now I have to rewind a bit.

That second year of college I was in love with two women at the same time. I don't recommend it, unless they're in love with each other too—and even then it's only a matter of time till someone's toes get stepped on. I was like the mule who starved to death between two piles of hay.

Eventually I lived with one of the women and realized the other one was not at all who I had made her out to be. Lisa, with whom I lived, was cynical and smart; her feet were firmly planted on the ground. Her wit could be quite caustic, but here I certainly cannot throw stones. The other woman was simply a fantasy; I made up most of her character. Or didn't give her room to be who she really was. I dunno. But as Steve Martin once said, I put her on a pedestal so I could look up her dress. Inventing characters is a writer trait. The fact that I didn't realize this until after I was already living with Lisa hardly set that relationship on an unobstructed road to Paradise, either.

Lisa and I moved into an incredibly tiny apartment in a place called Leisure City, Florida.
3
We worked at a U-Haul, and at night and on weekends I worked on
Ariel
. I got fired and Lisa quit and then waited tables and supported me while I wrote
Ariel
, gained weight, and got a little weird.

A strange dichotomy occurs when you work on a first novel—at least it did for me. If you intend to make a living writing but have never published anything or received money for something you wrote, and you are not fortunate enough to have publishing magnates for parents, some part of you must have a great deal of faith, disgruntlement, confidence, and impracticality to sit on your ass and fill pages with words until there's a stack three or four inches high.
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On the other hand, you also are thoroughly convinced you are fooling yourself and are gonna take slap after slap when you submit your work.

They're both true. They're
still
true. But you have to act as if you're gonna sell the book anyway, because if you don't write it, you sure ain't gonna sell it. This combination of confidence and complete uncertainty can be difficult to deal with—for yourself and for others. (It still is.) Plus, being supported by someone else while you walk blindly into the woods hardly does wonders for your self esteem.

Writing fiction is something I've never been able to take lightly. I do it easily but I don't do it casually. If you are able to treat your writing as a job you do, I envy you. You will have a less turbulent career and possibly a smoother life. Taking your work personally takes its toll.

First novels can be like first loves.
Ariel
was my obsession. It towered monolithically. It owned me. It was a terrible mistress, the consuming, passionate love that grows you up as it breaks your heart. Maybe even because it breaks your heart.

I was well into
Ariel
before I realized it was really about learning how to live with the reality of Lisa and letting go of the fantasy of that other woman. It's not apparent in the text, and it shouldn't be. But it's the emotional engine that drives the novel, and I like to think it's what gives what might otherwise be a fairly archetypal, escapist action fantasy some depth and texture and emotional truth.

I could be wrong.

* * *

I typed the last line of
Ariel
late at night on New Year's Eve of 1980, about eighteen months and a whole life away from when I started what I thought was going to be a short story. Lisa was asleep in bed five feet away. There was a Yoda poster on the wall beside the bed. The window curtain next to it was a white bedsheet, pale orange in the streetlight outside.

I wrote
Ariel
on a Royal manual typewriter
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on a rickety green metal typing stand with folding arms facing a blank bedroom wall. Lisa used to go to sleep to that sound. Sometimes she'd wake up if I stopped typing, like the old story about the lighthouse keeper who, one night when the foghorn doesn't go off, pops awake and says, "What's that noise?"

I loved the feel of her asleep near me while I wrote.

So I typed the last line and stared at it a while. I slid the paper from the platen and added it face-down to the hefty stack on the left arm of the typing stand. I turned the whole thing right-side-up and stared at that a while. I remember wondering what it was I felt. I got up and picked up the stack and dropped it on the bed beside Lisa, which woke her up. "It's done," I said. I don't remember what she said.

Then I went to sleep.

So
Ariel
was done. I waited a decent interval (probably a week, knowing me) and rewrote it.
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Back then that meant scribbling all over it and then retyping it. (Thank god for WordPerfect. How quickly we forget. And to those of you who use MS Word: how quickly you forget.) Then I started sending the manuscript out to publishers. It was thick and cost a fortune to mail. Man, was I flying blind: no publication history, no agent, not the slightest idea how to get an agent or even write a cover letter. I'd been sending out stories and collecting rejection slips since junior high school; these and the ones
Ariel
garnered were put up on the wall with that gummy yellow crap that leaves an oily smudge.

I filled two walls.

Lisa and I moved to Gainesville, Florida, and ended up living in, I swear to god, an asphalt-shingle shack with a tin roof in the middle of nowhere beside a scum-covered pond. The floor of this princely abode was wavy and off level. The shack had one tiny gas heater in the living room. Gainesville has twelve-degree winters, and we moved the bed into the living room and slept in our clothes with our dogs. Mornings when we got up, the water in the dog bowls was frozen. We'd run hot water in the shower and put baggies on our feet because the floor was so cold and we had no slippers, and we'd race into the bathroom and wedge a towel under the door so the heat wouldn't escape while we got dressed in the warmth. I remember saying how I hoped some day I'd look back on these times and laugh. Well, I'm looking back on 'em now, and they big moby sucked.

Lisa waitressed and held odd jobs. I worked graveyard at a Majik Market (think 7-Eleven) before getting fired for failing a polygraph test on which I told the truth, which told me something about polygraph tests. I landed a job word-processing for the History and English Departments of the University of Florida. That was a
great
job. They let me use the equipment after hours (shhhhh) so long as I used my own supplies. This was back when it took a ribbon or two to print the manuscript on a daisy-wheel printer and the novel took up about fourteen 5½" floppies. PCs were so new that people weren't sure what you'd want to use them for. I typed the novel into the Lanier NoProblem stand-alone word processor and revised it a bit and sent it out. Andy Solomon from University of Tampa and I had stayed in touch, and he lent me the cover letter he'd used for his first novel so I could have a model. I recall that
Ariel
was rejected about thirty-five times, all told.

Money was a little better, and Lisa and I rented a three-bedroom house with a yard for $375 a month. I continued typing 12th-Century Merovingian Latin manuscripts (hello out there, Dr. Geary!), correcting the grammar of Ph.D.s in English, and collecting wallpaper.

One day at the university I got a phone call from an editor named Sue Stone at Ace Books in New York City. They wanted to buy my first novel.

* * *

One time I watched a writer named Kate Wilhelm get irritated at a bunch of beginning writers. They were all asking her the Question, the one professionals hear constantly from amateurs: How do I break in? How do I get published?

"You're all so fixated on that first big sale," she said. "But you know what you need to do, and either you'll get published or you won't. But let me tell you something:
getting
published is a thousand times easier than
staying
published."

Those words haunt me to this day.

* * *

II. Some Trivia

1. The manuscript originally submitted to Ace (
Ariel
's first publisher) was a fairly long book—just shy of 200,000 words. I worked closely with my editor at the time, Sue Stone, to cut out around 45,000 words—180 manuscript pages. For art's sake, you ask? Nope; it's because at its submitted length
Ariel
would have cost X dollars to print, which meant they'd have to price the book at around $3.95 (ah, 1983) and sell Y number of copies, risking that a book by an unknown writer costing a little more than average (which was $2.95) would tank. But at 180 pages shorter they could sell the book for Z dollars and run less risk.

O, horrors! Poor stalwart Author, falling victim to those corporate Philistines who put commerce before Art. Right?

Well, guess what. Publishers ain't charities. They can't survive to offer you more books if they don't make money. Guess what else.
Ariel
is a
much
better book for all the cutting.

I always have been a long-winded sumbitch (this is news to you, right?), and
Ariel
was a
very
talky book.
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Sue Stone acted in an editorial capacity now sadly rare in publishing: hands-on, page-by-page supervision, working closely with me.

I have only two regrets regarding the truncation of the manuscript. One is the loss of the chapter with George's family.
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To be honest, its absence or presence hardly changes the face of literature, but I think the chapter, though a bit broad, is funny and adds to George's character and the reasons Pete and Ariel go to such lengths to help him. I'm delighted to be able to restore it to this edition.

My other regret regarding truncation is the damage it did to the character of Shaughnessy Taylor. As
Ariel
now stands, Shaughnessy is the fall guy. People
hate
her. Originally she was more sympathetic—or so I like to think—but she arrived late in the novel and didn't play all that active a role until the end. Shaughnessy is a time bomb I planted and hauled around until time for her to go off. Most of my characterization of her was through dialog—largely arguments and discussions with Pete. Ariel never did talk to her much; she could hear the ticking from the start.

But making Shaughnessy the heavy is too facile and convenient a dramatic device, and to this day I feel that I did not serve her well. I gave brief thought to using the opportunity of this edition to restore some of that deleted material and help her out, but ultimately I decided not to. Those deleted stretches of dialog really are irrelevant to the book's engine and would bog it down.

I also would feel the need to revise them, if only because everything else in the book was revised a zillion times even after selling it. I'm uncomfortable with "special edition" books and movies wherein authors and directors revise earlier works. You could spend your whole career bettering a work. Once you've let it be released, in a certain sense it doesn't belong to you anymore but to the world. Pour your heart into it, dress it up, walk it to school, and then let it go and let it take its knocks.
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My rule in this reprint was a modest restoration of omitted material and absolutely no repair beyond the aforementioned fixing of egregious errors. No sanding, staining, and sealing. Not even any dusting, unless you count proofreading it (again!). The novel stands, warts and all. It's who I was and what I knew about writing at nineteen—well over half my life ago. Changing it to reflect what I've learned since (assuming I've learned anything, but let's don't go there) would do that nineteen-year-old a disservice. Besides, I'm not sure I could emulate
Ariel
's narrative style now if I tried.
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So Shaughnessy remains a heavy. If I wrote
Ariel
now—well, I probably wouldn't, but assuming I did—I would know how to characterize Shaughnessy more deftly and economically. I hope. And I'd probably figure out a way for Pete to end up with McGee anyhow. I dunno.

But I beg you go easy on Shaughnessy, Gentle Reader. We are flawed creations all, and her creator was still a child.