Bryan Charles
But let me back up again here, this time to last fall, late November to be precise. I had just quit another day job and was about to leave town for two months to go to an artists’ colony in New Hampshire and start work on a new book. It had been well over a year since I’d finished Grab and I was bursting to begin this new novel, which I’d been planning and outlining—on company time using company office supplies—almost since the day I’d set foot in my cubicle.
Now, at the risk of personal embarrassment, I wish to be totally candid with you about my state of mind in the days after I quit my job but before I left for NH. I felt like a young prince. A genius. One of the best minds of my generation. Other writers had nothing on me, my talent, my drive to be great, my determination to truly matter to the culture. I had applied for and gotten into a place where the artistic process was valued so highly that lunch was delivered silently to one’s doorstep in a basket (and I must say of the food there as a whole that I never ate better in my life). And after this great adventure there was the publication of my first book to look forward to, when my life would surely come to resemble those amped-up fantasies of heaven we associate with suicide bombers: golden copulations on perfectly formed clouds, warmed by pure, radiant sunlight. And the best part was it was all in the future, on the horizon. All I had to do was sit back and think about it. All I had to do—my only occupation—was anticipate. Sweet.
Soon this changed. Two weeks later I took the bus to NH and set up shop deep in the woods and started writing. The weeks passed. I gained some weight; made some friends; got drunk every night; played a lot of ping pong; made crackling, satisfying fires in the fireplace; received the galleys of Grab; and the most important thing, got a lot of good work done, over a hundred pages. I took these good vibes back to the city. My money was holding out and I was on a roll. I felt, for the first time ever, like a real pro, deep in the first draft of a new novel while simultaneously shepherding an earlier book into existence, the way John Updike must feel every day of his life. Sorry. Can’t have lunch tomorrow. I’m meeting with my publicist.
And then just like that, as quickly as it came, all of this was gone. This was about, I’d say, six or seven weeks ago. Work on my new book tapered off. I didn’t lose faith in the material or start seriously doubting its quality (I use the word “seriously” because a certain amount of self-doubt is present in all writers all the time; if not, the odds are good you’re a fraud), I simply couldn’t concentrate at the level required to keep going. The first two reviews of Grab came in, and they offered not drooling, unequivocal praise from big-name reviewers, but flat, plot-summary heavy assessments from anonymous critics who’d probably read twelve other books that day. That’s when I got the first inkling that my small coming-of-age novel was not going to save literature. And that the world at large was not waiting for it with held breath. And that I would not be fornicating in the misty glades of Shangri-la. —BC
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