well sort of, now travelling the circuit of good friends who are my critics for this thing. As I posted on my website, it is being decided if the warts are tumours needing to removed before it can go to press. My early feedback is that the first third is okay/good. That's about when I stopped having fun writing the book so who knows how much will be diagnosed as the existential angst that the story is about and how much is just too much to handle and enjoy. In the meantime I wait and get distance which I need because I don't yet know which is more difficult to wrap my head around: that it is finally done or that I killed off my central character. Jacob West has been my alter ego in every story I've written so this is a very big deal for me and something I do need to think about.
The story was originally motivated by my contempt for Auster's 'New York Trilogy'. I felt it could have been done much better and especially in my view since so many celebrities still claim this is what they are reading. I suspected it was a carefully conceived response to suggest that the celebrity was smart or thoughtful and in this case that the book must be quite good. It was painfully not, to my way of thinking. However having now undertaken my own version, some of Auster does make sense; like how hard it is to sustain this type of story over more than 90 pages. Ergo his trilogy and on the flip-side, what a good boy I am for taking it to novel lengths (though to be fair I had to resort to employing devices). If Wiki wasn't dark today I'd look up Auster's age when he wrote his story and maybe that's the secret for his fame, having done it when he was young but then that still doesn't explain the other thing, so it doesn't really matter.
The nuts and bolts of 'Level Crossing' is the question of identity and communication. I attack the subject from the standpoint of anonymity and misunderstanding. The subtext is a political statement about Chinese consumption and our willingness to sell out. Religion like so many of my other stories is relegated to scorn for the context we have created for faith in our lives. Absent a love story which to me is also telling.
The process from start to finish spanned the better part of fourteen months. I didn't have a plan in any form. There was no plot, theme, point to be made and no story board or template when I sat down at the keyboard. There was just the need, disguised as confidence, to write because something else in my life had gone wrong.The book would be my proof that it wasn't another mistake I had made; only more bad luck and at a shitty time in my life when time wasn't any longer a concept to be debated but something real that slips away.
This is the first post of me then, with no voice now because my talking head is buried, trying to explain what happened and what it means.
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