![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/xwires_small.jpg?resize=164%2C246&ssl=1\" "\\"Crossed")
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[In a post<\/a> a few days ago, I started to nose around my “issues” with writing mysteries, thrillers, and the like. This is the perfect time do something I really don’t like to do, much — to lay out the story behind one of my formative experiences as a writer: the publication, in 1992, of my first book. In a couple days, in part 2, I’ll cover how it got to print. In this part, I’ll try to purge myself of some second thoughts about the book itself. And maybe, in the process, I’ll get the damned monkey off my back.]<\/em><\/p>\n Crossed Wires<\/em> didn’t get many really good reviews, a fact which stunned and wounded its author. On the other hand, I learned that even when reviewers found some honest-to-God fatal flaw, they were nearly always generous enough to close their reviews on an “up” note.<\/p>\n I’ve got a folder of Crossed Wires<\/em> reviews sitting on the desk here, right by my hand. But I’m not (for now) going to quote specifics. Instead, I’m going to talk in generalities — categories of things which bothered reviewers. The complaints were of three kinds (not all equally easy to dismiss):<\/p>\n It’s this third sort of critique which I want to talk about here. And I’m not going to argue the point, either. I’m going to agree<\/em> with it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Here’s what I’m going to do:<\/p>\n First, I’m going to post without comment the first few paragraphs of the Crossed Wires<\/em> prologue. (There’ll be a link to the whole thing if by some chance you want to read it.) Following that, I’ll post an equivalent amount of text from the Crossed Wires<\/em> sequel-that-never-was, called Trapdoor<\/em>. (With a link to that, as well.)<\/p>\n And then I’ll talk about some stylistic differences between the two, and why I think those stylistic differences matter. Which will lead, finally, to why I’m even doing this exercise publicly (besides the aforementioned need for exorcism).<\/p>\n Here goes. First, a few paragraphs from the beginning of the Crossed Wires<\/em> prologue:<\/p>\n Excerpt from Crossed Wires<\/em>: Prologue<\/p>\n Traffic shishes past on a darkening street, early in an autumn evening; the streets are slick with wet brown leaves; overhead, a thin scimitar of a crescent moon is just poking through the clouds, barely illuminating the tumbled-blocks structures of an apartment complex in the suburbs of a large city. Telephone lines shiver and gleam in the wet; death is perched there at first, then effortlessly soars aloft for a moment, stoops, and comes to rest, silently, on the landing outside the door of one apartment.<\/p>\n Through the curtains in the window of this apartment seeps a pale yellow light, echoing the moonlight above, and on the other side of the window, at a desk in a corner of her bedroom, sits a young woman. If we could peek inside this young woman’s mind, we might observe that she is both young enough and old enough to be both always confident with men and always surprised by them; that she has in fact loved many men, with just this mixture of pleasure and confusion, been head-over-heels with a few, even; but that she has never loved any of them in quite the way that she loves what she sees on the glowing green screen of the computer parked here on her desk.<\/p>\n Across the surface of this screen, two, three, or more times a day, dances an ensemble of words written by people whom she has never met and never will meet (none of them, that is, except for one: very briefly, and very soon), people who, like her, sit as though hypnotized before an unblinking glowing rectangle, a green or white or multi-colored eye, their thousand fingers clicking across their keyboards like the chattering of teeth. Meanwhile, spouses and lovers go ignored, children and pets unfed, jobs uncompleted — all put on hold, for now, all for the sake of faraway, invisible friends.<\/p>\n Invisible, yes, but neither nameless nor without substance. Some of her friends’ names are real (a John, a Liz, a Sharon, and others) and a handful are patently fictitious (Butterfly, AntMan, and so on). One friend makes a joke out of everything; one friend is always ill-tempered and discourteous unless you need advice; one friend seems always caught helplessly in some life-tangle or another, and can suffocate you with his dependence if you let him. Minnesota, New Mexico, Georgia, Japan, Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, California, England, New York, Virginia, France, Saudi Arabia: yes, they reside in all these places and many more. But they sense one another only through their machines, as if only there do they truly live<\/em>, inhaling and exhaling — taking life in and expelling it — through a little box attached to each machine, a little box from which snakes a wire umbilicus to the telephone network.<\/p>\n (Read the whole thing<\/a>)<\/p>\n [wincing, getting a grip]<\/em> Now, about the same amount of material from Trapdoor<\/em>:<\/p>\n Excerpt from Trapdoor<\/em>: Chapter 1<\/p>\n A week later, Volley Santino would stride into Tony’s Barber Shop and get his head shaved.<\/p>\n “Volley?<\/em>” his boss at the plant would exclaim, the Monday morning after that. “Zat you<\/em>?” Volley’s live-in girlfriend would move out, citing certain unspecified “irreconcilable differences” but unable to hide a final shudder of distaste at his pale, stubbled noggin. His kid brother would bark his kid-brother laugh and tell Volley that it really did not look that bad but he’d never find a rubber big enough. And Volley’s Ma wouldn’t be able to speak at all; she’d just stand there, wringing her hands, blinking back tears, uncomprehending. (After all, it had not been even four months since she’d “loaned” him the seven hundred fifty bucks he’d needed for the Ultra Membership in Head’o’Hair, Limited.)<\/p>\n Like, who the hell cared? They<\/em> didn’t have to live with what he’d<\/em> been trying to live with, did they?<\/p>\n But all that would come afterwards.<\/p>\n Now, at this moment sometime after midnight on a warm Saturday in May, Volley Santino was possessed of this marvelous thatch of thick black curly hair, ever so slightly gone gray at the temples. Volley was sitting on a barstool in McGarrity’s Pub in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the end of the bar closest to the heavy oaken door, and whenever the door thwupped<\/em> open and shut, a fringe of bangs tickled his narrow forehead in the sudden breeze.<\/p>\n This place had a great selection of jukebox oldies — currently The Drifters and “Up on the Roof” — but, sadly, lacked a mirror behind the bar, which would have allowed Volley to marvel at all dimensions of his tonsorial splendor. Limited as he was to the tactile, his fingers ran ceaselessly through his hair; and with the full force of his mind, he was attempting psychokinetically to manipulate the fingers of the auburn-haired woman at his right to do the same.<\/p>\n Pssst — yo!<\/em> whispered Volley’s mind, all sibilant urgency. You wanna, like, touch my hair? Go ahead. Come on. Touch it. Touch it. You know you want to….<\/em><\/p>\n But it wasn’t working. The woman’s fingers remained curled obdurately around the stem of her wine glass, and she remained deep in superficial conversation with a guy to her right. A guy, as it happened, with a thick mane of wavy, straw-colored hair. He also had a nice mouthful of straight, white teeth that kept flashing at the woman — on, off; on, off — like the guy got a firefly-butt transplant in his jaw or something.<\/p>\n The woman turned to her left a bit to sip at her wine. Not for the first time, Volley glimpsed a corner of the self-adhesive name tag plastered to the saffron fabric of the blouse over her left breast. Hi, Volley knew that it said, My Name Is APRIL<\/em>.<\/p>\n (Read the whole thing<\/a>)<\/p>\n (Well, I’m<\/em> certainly exhausted!)<\/p>\n Some observations:<\/p>\n First, the Crossed Wires<\/em> thing: e-freaking-gad<\/em>. Could I push any harder? Especially, as here, not pushing to tell a story with some mysterious events<\/em>, but pushing to dazzle the reader with style<\/em>. Semi-colons: cripes. Paragraph lengths: horrible. The personification of death. Baroque sentence structure. Imagine a reader, on learning that this is a mystery s\/he’s about to open up and begin reading. Imagine the sheer bafflement. Even some touches which, under other circumstance, might be not-half-bad — like that shishes<\/em> — come across as florid distractions.<\/p>\n Now consider the Trapdoor<\/em> excerpt. This was written about a year after I wrote the Crossed Wires<\/em> excerpt, and I gotta say, it sounds like a completely different author. Sure, there’s stuff I’d change now. For instance, I was clearly still getting the hang — or trying to get the hang — of paragraph lengths. (And yet, on average: much more variety, and simply shorter.) There’s some showy diction there: tonsorial; <\/em>sibilant; psychokinetically<\/em>.<\/p>\n But on balance, compared to the Crossed Wires<\/em> bit — maybe not really there<\/em> yet, but what a difference. And (dare I say it) what an improvement<\/em>.<\/p>\n What happened in that year? To put one obvious possibility to rest, no: I had not begun taking drugs or abusing alcohol.<\/p>\n All I’d done, really, was… [wait for it]<\/em>… relax.<\/p>\n\n
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