Middle of
The End
How my first novel came to be from soup to nuts
How do you find a missing person during a pandemic?
Synopsis
Sonny is recently divorced, newly sober and mostly depressed. Haunted by his past failures, middle aged and running a small time illegal sports book in small town Meriweather Montana, he is searching for what life will throw at him next. Turns out life is going to send him on a road trip of a life time. Sonny is tasked with finding a missing girl in the middle of a world wide pandemic. How can one find a missing person while navigating the world of quarantine and state wide shut downs? Sonny is about to find out that this is will be more difficult and complicated than he thought.
Some Context Would Be Nice…
How did this book get written? Well where do we start?
I am not exactly sure where my semi-fascination with writing originated from but I can tell you it happened early in life. Just like a lot of young children who had the opportunity to grow up in a stable household and receive a halfway decent early eduction, I loved making up short stories and putting them on paper. Having a copy of something you created in your hands was fascinated to me at a very early age.
Ever since that first binded copy of my dumb horror story I have loved fiction. All kinds and genres, it didn’t matter, as long as it hooked me in someway, which is easy for me.
I am sure it’s been a constant thing with me subconsciously that I have always wanted to be a writer. In high school I fell in love with Hunter S. Thompson and of course like everyone at my age JK Rowling and Stephen King. In college I found the intellectuals like Ayn Rand, James Baldwin, Asimov and Orwell. In my late twenties I went noir with Chandler and Crumley. In my 30’s I look to the American classics like Hemminway and Keroack along with the great novels of history like Joyce and the Russian sad boys. Now I’m doing my best to get into poetry. I think it’s because poetry scares me, it intimidates me because I don’t understand it. It’s not cut and dry. The only time I can tell if poetry is bad is when I write some. Everyone else seems to have the key to the secret underground party except for me, but I can hear it happening through the sewer grate. Keats, Yeats, Bukowski and my favorite Richard Hugo are so enchanting to read, so daunting in their work and when you read their personal letters, they seem so sad. Maybe that is another reason I want to stay away from being a poet, they never seem happy, even when things are going great.
So for some reason in June of 2020, I think because my brain was finally able to function without the need of alcohol and drugs, I got a wild hair up my ass to start writing a novel. It would be a modern noir private eye and by modern, well it would be as modern as it could. How do you find a missing person in the middle of a pandemic? Read on reader and find out!
James Crumley lit a fire in my belly that surprisingly still hasn’t burnt out. His novels are so gritty, real and insane I feel a load of second hand anxiety from the shit his characters say, think and do. I want to write like James. He was a professor here in Missoula for a long time and has inspired millions across the world with his work. I even lived blocks from his favorite bar, the Depot, where they have a special chair in the corner with his picture and a plaque. It’s called Crumley’s Corner.
I was also balls deep in the epic western Lonesome Dove, which really put me in the mood to write something gritty, real and slightly depressing. On top of that I was binging a ton of self-help book like Dr. Jordan Peterson and a ton more on subjects of self-motivation, self-awareness and taking charge of ones life. So needless to say I was full of ideas, most of them probably not good.
One day in June of 2020, I just started writing. That small house in black and white at the top of this page, that is where 98% of the book was written, my small rental house that I watched my family grow in.
I got to it and just let the words and story flow out. What came out was a lot of the frustration I was seeing happening around me that people were having with the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment, lockdowns, misinformation, scare tactics, conspiracy theories, lack of human decency and lack of control. The government was taking away a lot of our freedoms and we all went along with it because we didn’t want to be the asshole who got Grandma and Grandpa sick and eventually killed. No one really knew what to do or how to feel. I felt stuck, scared and unsettled. I had a feeling a lot of people did too. So during COVID I read. A lot. Mostly fun fiction and a lot of James Crumley. His best book, The Last Good Kiss had a missing girl plot and like all good noir stories the plot is hard to remember. What sticks are feelings, emotions and the characters. So I thought, if a Crumley like character had to find a missing person in 2020, how would they do it? That’s how it started, the book that is. It went from a single idea to eventually evolving into a cathartic exercise in grief, airing of grievances and an exhausting exercise in discipline.
I am happy with the work. I did my absolute best to keep politics out of the novel and the little bit that is in it is meant to show you that it’s all fucked, no matter who your mascot is. I did my best to keep out hot button topics like gender but felt compelled to touch on items like BLM, riots, defund the police and government shutdowns. Those items hit close to home for me and subsequently for my main character Sonny. Some will maybe read it and see it as more right of center which is fine because at times that’s where I sit. Other times I am more left. Business man Nathan is sure as hell more conservative but family man Nathan can be very liberal when it comes to the quality of life for my loved ones. I believe love is love and that people should prosper no matter race creed gender or orientation.
I hope people read the thing and the only reason I say that is because the book is a monster. My editor suggested a bunch of passages that could be cut but I left most of it in. The side stories, the asides and tangents I felt were important to the world building of the slightly different, bizzaro like world we live in. Large books are intimidating but I always think of when I was a young lad and would wait at midnight to get the new Harry Potter book and see how large it was and think, fuck yeah! Don’t be intimidated, it will be fun to read, I promise.
I wrote in spurts. I would get home from work at 2am and just start banging out story. I would edit in the morning the previous chapters and then log details and plot points into new sheets to keep my story in order. It all came very organically. The only other time something like this happened was when I was living in Phoenix and tried my hand at writing a comic book script. It was a fun exercise but ultimately went nowhere. I wrote another small book that is honestly too embarrassing to write about but it had some good ideas in it too I guess. It just has to do with Zombies and I just can’t even right now with Zombies.
I wrote for probably seven months then would do a rewrite and reread. I loved every second of it and got utter and complete joy from the experience.
I am absolutely confident I could not have done this drunk or high. No fucking way. My mind would think of some wild shit while high but man do I turn into a slug. Unmotivated is a very watered down word to describe my mentality and overall being when using drugs. Plus, all my wild ideas came when I was laying in bed and there was no chance in hell I was going to get up, write down that thought then lay back down. Thats not how weed works for me.
Drinking? No way. The last thing I want to do while drinking is be creative. I want to do a lot of other things while drinking like watching TV or…..well just watching TV I guess. That takes away from writing time. I can say, for better or for worse, this book was due large in part to sobriety.
Raise our empty glass to sobriety! To helping me write Middle of the End. Cheers!
“If your gunna be dumb you better be tough”
Life Motto