From The What, How & Why Now Of My First Book by Adam Fike.
Part One: Introduction.
I must have been eight or nine, at the People’s Drug store near our house, when I really listened to the words to Paperback Writer for the first time. I have a mental image of the narrow aisles as it played from the overhead speakers.
I took away a couple things that day. First, the Beatles were sort of mocking this guy, who wrote this thing and seemed to be begging a little. Must be easy when you’re a Beatle. Second, I wanted to be that guy. (I’m still not sure why. Something nice about used book stores, I guess.) Even if Paul McCartney made fun of me.
This series of posts are the What, How and Why Now of my first book, now out in paperback, called Lights Along The Interstate. Or, Forty Thousand Words That Took Me Twenty Years To Write. The book answers to either one. It’s just happy to be out of drawer.
Why so long? Good question. Hopefully, in here somewhere is that answer.
In book blurbs I sometimes call it: The Canterbury Tales meets Paradise Lost at a roadside diner, except the apple falls from a needle this time . . .
The dot-dot-dot is key.
And: A retirement home escapee heads for parts unknown. The Devil quits, he’s in love with a waitress. Unexpected gunshots create late-night companions. A traveling salesman picks his own place in the Universe. A wandering ex-priest looks for answers between the lines of a legal pad. Somebody’s flinging pennies at a naked businessman and she’s not at all sorry it hurts. Stranded, a student finds himself, and dinner, in the middle of nowhere. A drunk widow skips the service. An overdue family reunion solves nothing and resolves everything. Two lost kids the age of grownups decide something big for the rest of us. And all the Bus Driver’s praying for is a good night’s sleep.
And, sometimes: An often joyful, sometimes heartbreaking journey. Full of dry humor among late-night strangers traveling that long road to elsewhere.
It’s dedicated to my Mom, my Wife and the nuns who were first to get their pointy fingers into my pretty little mind.
I just wanted to get that marketing stuff all out of the way. See, I’m a big believer that it doesn’t matter what the author was thinking. That what you take away from the object they created is the only important thing.
So, anyway, here’s what I was thinking:
The idea is to get out of the way of the story. So the writing is spare and present tense. Many characters are named for their function. There are no quotation marks because it’s always the narrator talking. These stories are meant to be fun. Irony always wins. And I write like this. With lots of starts and stops. For that, I have some very good reasons. But maybe that’s another essay.
To provide moral support for an overall style that may, at times, seem too simple, I would like to reference this recipe by Dean Martin:
MARTIN BURGERS
1 lb. ground beef
2 oz. bourbon–chilled
Preheat a heavy frying pan and sprinkle bottom lightly with table salt.
Mix meat, handling lightly, just enough to form into four patties.
Grill over medium-high heat about 4 minutes on each side.
Pour chilled bourbon in chilled shot glass and serve meat and bourbon on a TV tray.
If it helps, my shortest explanation is, this first book happened while I was daydreaming in English class. The next book leans more toward Action & Adventure, so stay tuned for that.
Meanwhile, I’ll let you be the judge. Because, like I say, what choice do I have?
For more info about: Lights Along The Interstate by Adam Fike on Goodreads and Amazon