I got another call yesterday from another man who had read my book about Peggy, thanking me for doing it, even though I told him I am in the middle of changing the book because of some of the comments I got from some of her other boyfriends last December. He didn’t have much more to say than what I already knew, but the call steered me down one of those questionable roads in regard to my poet friend and the massive amount of journals, poetry and other writing I have assembled over the last year – just as I had in the midst of dating Peggy all those years ago.
Will I try and turn all this into a novel, the way our former temporary boss is doing with his journals about his ex-lovers?
To date, I have written this extensively about only three women in my life, my ex wife, Peggy and now this poet.
My ex wife inspired more than a dozen novels, so far, with notes for many more if I live long enough to write them.
I started the novel about Peggy based on journals back then deliberately publishing chapters in my underground newspaper in an attempt to “save her,” a foolish notion I realized only later, after I learned of her death. I wrote several fictional versions, but only revised them to non-fiction after her death, and with new information I’ve obtained since, I’ve revising some of the original novel somewhat – and still much of what went on with Peggy remains a mystery.
I know much more about our poet friend, partly due to how revealing she is in her poetry, and also the fact that she left a more significant cyber foot print when no internet existed in Peggy’s time and what I learned came from people who knew her or my own experiences.
Do I dare write a novel out of this mess of material the way I have written about Peggy and my ex-wife?
With Peggy, I disguised everything by setting the whole thing in the City of Paterson, and used my journals as inspiration.
Turning fact into fiction is difficult in that it requires a leap of imagination, of creating scenes and developing a plausible plot. I made some attempts to fictionalize this in two novels, “Hudson City,” and “What is and what should never be,” both using my standard fictional hero, Sam, the private eye, as the central character, the first of these told in first person, the second in third person. I plotted out both loosely based on these journals, but full of TV drama intrigue.
Hudson City opens with the death of a colleague that occurred in late 2011, which I fictionalized into a possible murder, kicking off Sam’s pursuit of some devious plot to which the murder was associated.
I set both aside in order to rewrite the non-fiction Peggy story.
The second novel focuses on a fem fatal, full of betrayal and other stuff.
I basically plotted out both novels, wrote a significant amount for Hudson City, before getting distracted and letting them sit, handwritten volumes waiting for the right time for me to approach again.
The call from the guy yesterday made me wonder if perhaps I should pick up these novels again since unlike with Peggy there will not likely come a time when I can write a non-fiction version.
With my job preoccupying so much of my time, I suppose I’ll have to put them both on the back burner until I finish tweaking the Petty novel.
As noted back in December when I got the first calls about Peggy, there is a strong similarity between Peggy and my poet friend, although my poet friend is much better educated, significantly more talented, and potentially capable of rescuing herself, where as Peggy was doomed from the start, and any novel dealing with the poet must consider these things rather than the doom and gloom that surrounded Peggy, even when she was still alive.
Peggy didn’t have what it took to rescue herself, where as the poet does, and even though I haven’t a clue as to how the poet story might end up, I’m almost positive it won’t be a leap from a roof top, where as Peggy was always going to end up how she ended up.
Anyway, I’ll dust off the old book notes on the two novels and see what I can come up with.
Maybe I’ll be able to have a best seller, eh?
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