Post-Lostine Novels?
This is something of a touchy question.
LOSTINE, the novel, is one of those sublime things that are doled out to most artists. To some artists, whatever their medium, several such sublimities are given – but usually not. I don’t know yet if I’m a “usually not”er. At this point in time, creatively, I just live in LOSTINE’s shadow.
A number of years ago, unanimously, the lovers of the voice of LOSTINE’s narrator agreed that I should write a sequel. Instead, I started a prequel. But I found out that voice is one thing, but coupling voice to a story and characters with LOSTINE’s power is another. Out of my subsequent-to-LOSTINE efforts with that narrator voice, I have developed a story I am calling Training-Wheel Mother. Training-Wheel Mother’s narrator is about a year younger than that of LOSTINE. I am at about 75K words. I want to say that building this story has been a lot like trying to get tire pressure exact. But that is an over-simplification. LOSTINE is about cosmic love where even the individuals of the couple don’t understand it. They are literally driven together by an invisible force. Their lives are never again the same – they are never again, as individuals, free to “hog the ice cream.”
Initially, I titled LOSTINE’s prequel as Mothership – a story extolling the role of motherhood – straight-whiskey-forward. But as time and the re-writes have marched on, I find myself wanting the story to hit much harder than that. A mother is rarely simply “a mother”; she’s hardly ever that tidy of definition. That’s why my title has metamorphosed into Training-Wheel Mother. That’s where I think the cosmic mystery stuff comes in – where the real complexity of the force of the personality of most mothers originates – in her “Little Women” days.
Relatively-speaking, I think Training-Wheel Mother is about the personal price of motherhood – as observed from my stationary frame of reference.
10/9/21 – At the time of this posting, I am calling the above-described story “Gimme Back My Mom!”
It’s plain, I only partly understand what this story says. A promo blurb about this story might say, “When our 5th-grade narrator’s dad left nine months ago for his second Tour over the Gulf of Tonkin, he told his son, ‘Take of your Mother.’ But every day, watching his mom struggle to evade aggressive would-be suitors, our desperate narrator only sees his old family fading away. Worse(?), with the single throw of a rock at a bum on a passing freight train, our reckless narrator has managed to build himself a raft of trouble only evidenced by a man’s amputated finger his mom finds in her son’s pants pocket.”
Also, our narrator is reluctantly thrown into a relationship with a girl he calls the “Training Wheel Mother” - the younger sister of our narrator’s neighborhood arch-enemy.
The title Gimme Back My Mom! aptly reflects the narrator’s truly desperate state of mind. I hacked a coupla early chapters out of the M/S because they didn’t move the story forward enough. I’m right at about 73K words.