Midnight in Key West

With only two nights to go in Key West, I wanted to post a quick something about this scene, nighttime on this section of the island, only hours after the bustle of the tourist-friendly Duvall Street closes and the customers and employees scatter.  This is the "Blanket," Key West style, and it is a time of night I've grown accustomed to while here.

It is in fact so safe to walk these streets late at night, that for me, it's a little unnerving.  The area in and around Duvall Street reminds me so much of New Orleans, with Duvall being closer akin to Bourbon Street, and the neighborhoods surrounding looking like parts of the Garden District.  But in no way would I consider taking to either one of those neighborhoods in New Orleans on foot after hours, especially when there seems to be not a living soul around!  It truly is amazing.  Where does everybody go?  Walking through the French Quarter for so may years has wired me to check for movement in passing car windows and to keep a steady, peripheral awareness that produces a special kind of tunnel vision.  Here, I lapse into that pinhole-size perspective, and it makes it quite hard to sightsee.

But the points of the late-night walks have been all centered around a certain centering, for processing the night on stage, for exploring the storefronts and points of interest for any daytime outings, and more importantly, for walking around inside of my writer's mind.  I felt like Owen Wilson in Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," and what a coincidence it was that I was in the land of Hemingway.  I was looking for that old Rolls-Royce around every corner.

What Inspires Me

Greetings from Key West, Florida.

Been here for three days now, performing nightly with my band at Sloppy Joe's Bar, the alleged place where Ernest Hemingway tied quite a few on in his day.  But if you eavesdrop on one of the tour trams that pass every now and again, you learn that the original Sloppy Joe's, and Hemingway's liver, have remnants further down the block in an entirely different location.  But I digress.  Key West has gone off my radar as far as rants go.  It is what it is, and I'm here first on business, and second, to get lost in my imagination for a solid week.

Which brings me to this post, which was inspired by a Twitter feed in which a fellow writer blogged about their influences.  I'd never thought to do that myself, usually reserving that information for when I was a drinker and would talk many an ear off about literature and writing and the best of both.  But those days are gone, and with it went the bravado of a loud drunk.  Nonetheless, I'd like to take this time to mention the latest book I've read (pictured above), which I found very inspiring for reasons I'll explain, and then say a little something about what influences me as a writer.

First and foremost, I have to mention the Queen of the Damned herself, Anne Rice, my surrogate mother of letters and inspiration to this day.  Her contemporary fiction is what put me on the path of the novel as my primary means of storytelling, and I admit it without shame that she has been most all I've read in that field to date.  I can't remember the last book I've read (fiction, mind you) that she hasn't written, with the exception of one (again, pictured above).  I just recently saw a YouTube video of her in her little office in the California desert, and it made me think about perseverance.  Anne used to live quite the extravagant lifestyle in New Orleans, but apparently lost all of it due to bad investments and a crashing real estate market.  That information came from a separate interview I read recently, but when I put it all together, it made me think, "I can and will write everywhere."  Anne used to write in a Garden District mansion, and now, by the looks of it, she writes in a small room in a suburban California condo.

Now, before I go further off track here, let me mention The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (that's right, pictured above), a wonderfully written and structured book that inspires me in its simplicity.  I'm sure Mr. Davidson himself would not be so kind with my calling his work "simple," mainly because according to the background information on him, the novel took seven years to write.  But the book is simple only in the fact that it manages to carry two story threads framed in a plot-space that is really uneventful.  Without reviewing the book, I just want to make the point that it showed me how less can absolutely be more, and Davidson is very much akin to my approach.  It's vivid, beautiful, and internalized in the Romantic tradition.

Back to what inspires me, I have to mention the very same Romantic tradition, more specifically, the English Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century.  Even more specific would be the second generation led by Byron, Keats, and Shelley.  It would be downright weird for me to claim that as a novelist I was influenced by them stylistically, being that they were poets.  But their philosophies are what molded me, and the study of their time and work is what gave me the Promethean flame that I write so much about.  That flame, in my opinion, was carried centuries later as the writers of the Beat Generation -- another great influence on my work -- internalized their passions and made the written word like new, post-World War II monuments of expressive achievement.  William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg truly believed they were changing the world, like the English Romantics before them, and in a way they did.  Only it was the world inside.

Yes.  The world inside.  Writers can't move into any other words unless they're satisfied with the one inside.

That is what inspires me.  What inspires you?

Third Draft

The third time is the charm!  Here is the draft on which I'll build, the one that will be placed gently into the hands of beta readers and potential agents.  The Internet was down when I completed it, which is probably a good thing.  It reminds me of stories of mass conceptions during power outages.  It has been nine months between drafts! 

Anyway, this one clocked in at 422 pages, which means I was able to chop 44 pages from the previous draft, a statistic that only now in finishing I realized.  I would never have expected that.  There was numerology involved in today's completion, today being August the 3^rd, 2011 (8+3=11), and as if to punctuate my belief that my work tends to be in sync with the universe, by no effort of my own, the novel was completed at 11:11 a.m.  My "Silver Screen" channel was on in my office, and while the final pages of the manuscript slipped out of the printer, triumphant soundtrack music accentuated the event!  But in all seriousness, today is the culmination of quite a bit of personal growth, and it is a testament to how far I've indeed come.  I love you, Jessica.

As is one of the main purposes of this website, there will be more posts to follow regarding plans for the future of this piece.  We will track my pursuit of agency representation, and ultimately, of legitimate publication.  Let's do this together, shall we?

Key West Revisited

Thought I'd post a little something here about my recent week spent in Key West, during which time I edited my new book during the day and played music at night. It was wonderful in this regard. As long as I have this opportunity, my Key West weeks will double as writing sabbaticals.

But I do want to mention the literary significance of Key West, namely, the well-documented fact that Ernest Hemingway lived on the island for a short time during one of the most prolific periods of his life. The Hemingway House is a tourist attraction, and I did make the trek on foot to the house, and I did take the tour, and I did buy a souvenir coffee mug. Now, I did all of these things during my first trip to Key West (sans the coffee mug), and I have to report that the Hemingway mystique was much more potent that first time around. I think I know why.

Simply put, I grew up as a writer in New Orleans, the same city as a literary idol of mine, Anne Rice, also lived. I'd pass her house on a regular basis in the Garden District of New Orleans, the mansion sitting behind the gates on the corner of First and Chestnut, the residence the model for the Mayfair house in Anne Rice's own The Witching Hour. I even had the privilege of being inside two of her other properties, one being her house on Third and St. Charles during the Bacchus parade back in 1997. I remember walking around the house saying, "This is what words on paper built." I actually imagined the walls themselves being made of pieced-together manuscript pages. It was something to aspire to, an atmosphere that even now I try to reproduce in my own home. I dream often of being in her house, roaming the halls in search of her writing space, just to have a look.

I can't say the same for the Hemingway House in Key West, and to be fair, I'm going to assume that the main reason has to do with the fact that it is not a very well-kept place. Window fans circulate what little air there is in there, and aside from evidence of a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom, the house doesn't really look lived in. It looks like what it was, and that was a place for Hemingway to entertain and then eventually crash while on his never-ending benders in Key West. He does have a "writing studio" in a separate small building that the tour guide said was once connected by a walkway straight from his bedroom, but even that looked stifling and uninspiring. But the six-toed cats that roam the property were ... well ... there were six-toed cats that roamed the property.

Therefore, Key West for me is just as I had mentioned earlier, and that is a place that I have the luxury of going to twice a year (for now) and spending a week inside of my writer's mind. I saw very little of the island aside from certain streets that were essential for me to roam in order to survive. Unfortunately, Key West represents everything that I no longer am as a man two years sober, yet I will move confidently into the midst of this beautiful part of the United States and take from it what I can. Thank you, Key West!

Progress Report: The Home Stretch

I'm writing this after only moments ago finishing Chapter 20 of 30 of my new book, and in the moments between then and now, I've already taken the news to Facebook and Twitter, and now here to TedTorres.com. This is the excitement of a project drawing to a close. This is the vision of another black binder materializing in my office with another snapshot of where I am as a writer inside. This is why I do it, and it's why you should do it, too.

From here on out, the chapters are shorter, and thus, I can more easily incorporate my "edit, insert, read, and move on to the next chapter" regimen with an accelerated sense of progress. I've worked through the clunky prose, passed the point of my sobriety, and now I'm sharing the drive and enthusiasm that the writer of the pages I'm editing right now had when he worked in a trance-like state at the Hoover Public Library. However, this is also usually the time when I start planning ahead, although this time around, my aspirations are more grounded in reality.

Five years ago, and weeks after my mother and I settled into Alabama after Hurricane Katrina, I had in fact had most of Scenes from the Blanket written and edited. Only the final three chapters (if I recall correctly) needed to be written, and I remember carving out a workspace and going to work in the very small apartment I had rented, downing cup after cup of coffee and pounding out the rest of the book. But the planning for the future part was all about getting it published as quick as possible, using the crutch of having survived the ordeal of Katrina as my justification, or more to the point, my reward. I was going to self-publish yet again, and this time, I was going to do it right … whatever that meant.

Well, as I've preached over and over again here on TedTorres.com, self-publishing is not the way to go. It creates an instant stigma in the industry, and there is no amount of promotion that can be done, either by yourself or through outside agencies (I actually hired a publicist during this time) that is going to blur the reality of that stigma in the eyes of anyone even coming close to taking you seriously as a novelist. It took two knocks upside the head with this lesson to finally learn it, and it is why this third book will be worked into the system legitimately, and it is the only plan I have for this book as of now.

But this is not to say that I haven't made other plans! They are just the more constructive kind, manifested in the form of a stream-of-consciousness Word file that I started yesterday (this is primarily how I outline my novels) with notes for a fourth book. It will mark a departure for me, leaving this Blanket Trilogy I've created behind as the first part of my literary canon (while, of course, still pursuing legitimate publication for this new one), and marking my launch into a genre more akin to dark comedy.

The new book has a working title, but it will change. It has to. Like everything else in life.

How I Think I May Have Quit Smoking

I am constantly recording voice memos to myself. It's kind of part of the gig. I used to carry a notebook, now I carry my Android phone. And here's a transcript of one that I left about a week ago:

It's April 19th, 2011. I do not need be obsessed with numerology when it comes to quitting smoking, with regards to how many cigarettes I smoked today, or the date, or anything like that. I just simply need to stop smoking. Especially considering how I feel today -- short of breath, heart palpitating, tingliness in my head and scalp, pain in my jaw, and just the usual symptoms of everything pointing towards blood pressure, hypertension, circulatory problems, etc., etc., etc., all from smoking! Smoking, which couldn't possibly help any of these symptoms at all. I need to stop smoking, and I need to stop smoking … right … now.

That was around 5:30 p.m. that day, and I haven't had a cigarette since. But what I did do was remember this "60 Minutes" piece that I saw not too long ago, one that gave me hope, one that forever banished the consideration of patches, lozenges, and even a recent obsession with "electronic" cigarettes. I went out and bought this product immediately. Sure, it's replacing one addiction with another, but in the end, at least I'm not lighting something on fire and sucking the hot exhaust into my body!

Progress Report: The Half-Way Point

Goodbye, Amy Tan. You were posted during a time of high fever, and although I loved the lecture, it's time your face moves down a notch on TedTorres.com.

With that out of the way, once again over a month has passed since my last post. But it's been a busy month, occupied with recuperation from a minor illness, lots of shows with my band, and as I am happy to report here, lots and lots of editing on my new novel. In fact, I'm only pages away from the half-way point in both the edits and the inserts, and soon it will be time to implement the third part of my three-part plan, which is to send this completed first half to an editor in New Orleans.

Most of the work on the book was done in the building you see pictured here, the Hoover Public Library, with its rows of quiet study cubicles, its in-house coffee shop, it's art gallery, and its post-modern ambiance ... especially at night. Among other locations in the library, this room was where most of the new book was written before my moving to the country, and I've since had the pleasure of revisiting the library a few times during trips into town, utilizing its resources for a few more hours of intense work, reminding me both of how good it can be to get out of my office at home during the editing process, and how much love and nostalgia I have for this facility. If you ever find yourself in the greater Birmingham area, be sure to visit. It truly is one of the most amazing libraries in the country.

Now, as a completely unrelated aside, I would like to address the lack of recent movie reviews on TedTorres.com, reporting that I have in fact seen lots of current releases, but at the same time, admitting that my takes on most of these films have been so to the contrary of most mainstream critics lately as to almost look as though anything I'd post here would be intentionally argumentative (if that's even the right word). In no way am I the guy that will say the sky is red or that water isn't wet just to prove some point, but I'll be damned if even Roger Ebert and I have been on opposite ends of the opinion spectrum on a lot of these films, and I've always considered Ebert to be the closest (at least 95% of the time) "real" critic there is out there to me. I've in fact wanted to write about most all of last year's films, and I even had a pretty good rant about how sick I am of the media complaining about how long the Academy Awards show is every year. C'mon! If you're a movie fan like myself (and unlike myself, if your not working on Sunday nights for the past four years!), a show that celebrates film in all of it's facets like that one does couldn't go on long enough!

Glad I got that out.

Peace.

COMING SOON: a special offer from TedTorres.com!

Amy Tan on Creativity

While sick in bed today with nothing by way of any sort of editorial productivity on the horizon, I instead found this very relevant clip on what influences creativity, or in my case right now, the lack there of.

I am a strong believer in the whims of the universe, especially when it comes to omens as to whether or not I'm on the right track, from perfect page numbers and word counts, to having just enough pages in the printer to print exactly what I've written that day. It is the same place where ideas come from, the same energy that pushes and pulls everything into its rightful place.

Amy Tan touches on this wonderfully, and it's the only reason I need to justify why my mind is sick and can't work today. Who am I to ignore the signs? I found this clip, didn't I? And it's got my name all over it ... literally.

The Writer's Journey

I am on the Writer's Journey, and I am reminded of this truth every time I lapse back into some reminiscence, some nostalgia for times in my life where I feel as though I should have done more, where I should have been more engaged.

But I was already on the Writer's Journey at that point, drifting naturally into worlds of expression both related to and mutually exclusive from my own, shooting movies in my backyard, penning lyrics to a heartfelt song.

Merely a landmark of where I was on the Writer's Journey, a mile marker where others chose to exit and prosper, but where I had no choice but to continue on, a very part of the road itself.

I am still on the Writer's Journey, you see, and even though I may have visited your towns and took the name of your resident population, I have always considered myself something other than.

It is why the Writer's Journey has placed me here, aware of the growth of the settlements I've helped create, yet moving in a self-contained circle held together by something natural, something that is as real to me as anything could ever be.

And so here is a postcard from the Writer's Journey, sent from a place where the transience has stabilized, letting all of you know in the brotherhood and sisterhood of expression, that I'm still doing the best work that I can.

"Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening"

I wanted to post a little something here about Buddhism Without Beliefs by British author, teacher, and self-proclaimed "secular Buddhist," Stephen Batchelor, because the book always seems to become relevant in my life when I least expect it. I bring it up now, for instance, only because mention of the book had to be edited out of my current manuscript for reasons of extraneous detail. But there it is again, on my mind, and here it needs to spill.

I first came across the book about ten years ago while working at Barnes & Noble during a semi-lucid morning shift, shelving books in the "Eastern Religions" section. The mere appearance of the book caught my attention -- a light yellow sliver of a volume shoved between the other books like a forced card. I grabbed it and started flipping through, and hours later, I had bought my own copy and was making notes in the margins, notes on Batchelor's stripped-down overview of Buddhism that set me on a course of study for the next couple of months.

For the writer in me, the Buddhist idea of the reorganization of perception was akin to both the English Romantics of the nineteenth century, and the writers of the Beat Generation in twentieth century New York, both literary movements having been a tremendous inspiration on my own writing then and now. I thought, Something had to have set Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg off on their spiritual journeys, right? Now it was my turn.

Granted, I never went so far as to proclaim myself a practicing Buddhist (although I did experiment with Batchelor's process of mediation), but I cannot deny that the easy-to-understand explanations of a religious system that, according to Batchelor (strictly from his agnostic perspective and in no way meant to insult traditional Buddhism), is more of an internalized modification method than a religion, and it has stayed with me to this very day. A particular highlight for me was the section on "Compassion," and how mastery of this emotion through basic and solid reasoning (Batchelor's walk-through of how to understand a perceived "enemy" is nothing short of revelatory) is not only essential to the human condition, but is a common thread of all religious systems to which most of the Western world adheres. Want to understand why you should love your enemy instead of just doing it because a man named Jesus said so? It's all there.

Progress Report: The Three-Part Plan

By way of a quick progress report, I've implemented a three-part plan to complete the final draft of my third novel. I love the number three. I always have. I always will.

See? Like that. Three declarative sentences in a row.

Anyway, the first part of the plan is to forge ahead no matter how difficult this red pen stage is, although as I've mentioned earlier, I have broken through to the more inspired and sober parts of this book. And again, I have to report that this stage has been, for lack of a better word, misrepresented on TedTorres.com as being my "favorite" part. I was actually referring to the second part of the plan ...

Which is the inserting of the corrections. This is the part I love due to its certain level of finality. After doing as much as I can of the edits, the second part of my daily regimen is to go back and put chapters in the can, so to speak. This second stage sort of reminds me of the old "Billy Boy" cartoon, where the goat eats up the train tracks, the snake eating its own tail. But it's a productive consumption of track, bringing me all the more closer and quicker to getting the finished manuscript into the right hands.

And some very specific hands are part of the third part of the plan, again happening in conjunction with the first two, and that is to get the finished pages to you (and you know who you are), my invaluable confidant on the outside. In this regard I feel like William S. Burroughs in Tangiers, feeding his finished pages to Ginsberg and Kerouac in New York, telling them that it doesn't matter in what order the pages go, just publish it.

Well, I'm not that liberal with the piece. My OCD won't allow it. I've already written my Naked Lunch.

Behold the power of three!

In Memoriam

Today would have been the 71st birthday of my mother, Diane Cucinello Torres. It's been almost four years since her passing, and even now the thought of memorializing her seems otherworldly and strange. The idea that she's no longer with us is still shocking to me, and the realization that among other things, I'll never hear her generous laugh again from the other room is more than likely why I've waited so long to revisit this topic.

But as the story goes, six months before Hurricane Katrina, and one month to the day after my father's passing, my mother suffered a debilitating stroke that left her bedridden and in a state of mental regression. During this time, most of which was here in Alabama, there were good days and bad days, and the good days were almost always highlighted by stories of old New Orleans. My mother was a bit of an amateur historian when it came to the Crescent City, and as the few years we had together here went by, she would love to tell both myself and her nurses alike about how her and her friends would take the streetcar into downtown on a Saturday afternoon to shop at all the big department stores. And one doesn't have to think hard to imagine the scene with all of its period automobiles and wardrobe, the image of a group of young girls from the 1950s dressed in their best, huddled together at the malt shop with bags from D.H. Holmes and Maison Blanche scattered at their feet. Yeah, that was my Mom. She knew about all the old restaurants, from Antoine's to Brennan's, from Court of Two Sisters to Tujague's (the latter of which I remember going to as a very young boy), and one always got the impression that she'd lived the New Orleans experience all of her life, was truly a resident of the city in every way.

And she would go on to tell the nurses and I about the family that we had who settled into the old Italian section of the French Quarter, and about how she used to visit them during her downtown shopping trips as a little girl. These particular stories always brought up conversations about her side of the family, which unlike my father's side, was scattered with aunts and uncles that lived until just about my own teenage years. And they populated her stories like something out of a historical novel, vivid and colloquial as she spoke with her heavy New Orleans accent. The nurses used to ask her, "Mrs. Diane, say 'New Orleans' for us," to which she'd smile up at them and say, "Nawlins!"

As a real estate agent through most of the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, Diane was a member of the Business and Professional Women's Club in our home parish of St. Bernard for many years, and prior to that, she worked for the St. Bernard Parish courthouse under Sidney Torres, a position that would prove to be a fateful one as Sidney arranged for her and my Dad's first date. After that date, according to my godmother, Teddy and Diane were like teenagers. They were married in 1968, and four years later, I was born.

I've mentioned that I believe I've inherited certain real-life skills from my father, and it has been my longtime assumption that I've inherited a certain type of imaginative trait from my mother, one that is directly related to storytelling, and more so, to stories about New Orleans. It was my mother who I could talk to about movies, books, and music, about my favorite directors, writers, and rock stars alike, and it was my mother that took me to the movies and bought me the books and the records. She instilled a love of the city in me from very early on, one that has been a thread of fascination for me when thinking about her, all the way up to the point where we both discovered Anne Rice at right about the same time, loving the rich tapestry of the novelist's stories, and as always, prompting my mother to tell me more stories of her own. She always supported every endeavor into the arts that I undertook, and like the photo I've written about in my father's memoriam piece, one of the only surviving pictures that I have of my mother was one of her holding a copy of The Petrified Christ in Barnes & Noble, the picture almost a bookend to the one of my father doing the same thing.

They both now sit framed side-by-side in my office.

And it's those pictures that I look upon regularly when I need reminding, reminding that grief is always more of a personal process than anything else. The truth is, in no way would Teddy and Diane want me to live in a perpetual state of grief. My parents dedicated their lives to the sole purpose of protecting me from harm and pain, much in the same way I was devoted to protecting them from the same in their final years.

Why would any of us want to stop now?

Happy Birthday, Mom. I miss you. And don't worry … I'll take the stories from here.

"The Green Hornet" (2011)

I'll be totally honest and not pose a bit when I say that I have absolutely no frame of reference when it comes to The Green Hornet television show aside from the iconic images and the knowledge that Bruce Lee, whom I've been a fan of since I was a kid, played Kato. And the television show probably was not the only incarnation of these characters, but again, without doing any research for the sake of objectivity, I'm admitting ignorance on the universe of The Green Hornet.

That being said, the new "The Green Hornet" movie worked for me on levels that I didn't expect, nor do I think most audiences would have anticipated after seeing the less than impressive trailers that hit theatres not too long ago. Turns out, it's a damn good blend of action and comedy, a really fun ride rooted almost entirely in the chemistry between Seth Rogen as Britt Reid A.K.A. The Green Hornet, and musician/actor Jay Chou as Kato. Throw in some pretty impressive ... and violent ... action sequences, and I was reminded of what Rogen contributed to "Pineapple Express," which was a surprising balance of his trademark ironic humor within a kinetic action movie that gave him more than enough opportunity to play into his everyman vulnerability. The character of the Green Hornet is making it up as he goes along, hoping he doesn't get too badly hurt in the process, and we're right there with him. I don't want to say that liking this movie totally depends on whether or not one is a fan of Seth Rogen, but it sure does help. Rounding out the cast is the always charismatic Christoph Waltz, who more than adequately fills-in the blank of "villain," and Cameron Diaz, who to be honest again, I kept forgetting was even in this movie until I finally saw her on screen.

It's just a good time at the movies. And let me report that the 3-D is quite good, an instance where, for lack of a better word, they seemed aware that they were making a 3-D movie. Hang around for the end credits. You'll see what I'm talking about.

"Tron: Legacy" (2010)

The world of "Tron" (1982) was one that as a ten-year-old, I was completely and totally immersed in. I played the video games, I had the toys and action figures, and I even engaged in Frisbee fights with my fellow "Tron" nerds on our front lawns that doubled as the Game Grid. I was in love with the colors, and perhaps unique to me, I loved the sterile coldness of the world, a word of corners and canyons that existed entirely inside of a computer. It was the dream of running around inside of a Lite-Brite!

But I didn't stop there. I actually went further into the psychology of the movie, programming my Commodore 64 computer with a series of "programs" that would respond to me and go into my imaginative little system of 64 bits and do things. What I saw going on in my computer's mind was exactly what the filmmakers of the original "Tron" had fully intended me to see, and it was this charm that kept me engaged as I watched the new "Tron: Legacy," an updated version of the vision, but the charm wore off quick.

I'm not quite sure what I expected, but I was disappointed, and I contribute this entirely to the elephant in the room, which is that technology has advanced so much since the early nineteen-eighties that the mere concept of "Tron" crumbles under its own weight. In a world where the Internet is commonplace, and where smart phones and GPS navigation systems and everything else that technology has given us is fully integrated into our everyday lives, "Tron: Legacy" feels like it's strangely behind the times. Even attempts to update the role of programmer Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) as sort of a Buddhist philosopher trapped inside of his own creation, seem far too expanded to work inside the parameters of such a simple, initial concept. Back in 1982, it was somewhat easy to surrender to the idea of this universe due to our own collective naivete about computers. Today, it just seems ridiculous.

With the exception of the somewhat impressive digital manipulation of Jeff Bridges to play both the Kevin Flynn of the eighties and his program counterpart, Clu, the technology of "Tron: Legacy" is not at all groundbreaking. And I'm sad to report that once again, the 3-D is not used to it's full potential, an asset that would have more than likely kept me intrigued strictly for the sake of the visuals. Remember, I did love the colors!

If you were a fan of the original, all the reminders that you loved "Tron" are there, from the glowing disc duels to the iconic light cycles races. But in the end, what you're left with is an attempt to update a universe that not only didn't require updating, but also defied it.

Chiseling Away

It's a new year, and what a better time to get back to one of the main purposes of TedTorres.com, which is to trace the creation of a new novel through completion for my fellow writers out there. And so, here's one of what will be many progress reports to come.

Okay, what you see above is a single page from one of the opening chapters of the manuscript, and what I'd like to point out here is the amount of red ink scribbled in both the text and in the margins. Yes, it's been a difficult beginning so far, but I know exactly why, and it has everything to to with the approach with which I took this time around with the actual writing.

I'll tell you this: no more will I run through a draft without looking back. I don't care what Stephen King preached in his book, On Writing. It never worked for me during the first two books, and even the initial thought of working that way in theory never settled well, even as I started this new approach. I do not recommend it. The experiment was a success only in the aspect that I learned what not to do the next time around.

It's quite obvious that these opening chapters, written over four years ago, were done in times of great distraction, and only in completing the first draft did I finally develop a tone for the book, one in which I now have to go back and keep consistent throughout. In essence, it doubles if not triples the amount of work during this next run-through, making me think twice about a previous statement I'd made claiming that the red pen stage was my favorite ... not like this, and not with such admittedly amateur prose.

However, I can report that as of a few days ago, I have chiseled through the marble of the early expository stuff enough now to where I'm starting to see the better written pages. Whew! I knew they were there somewhere. I mean, it hasn't been that long ago that I was writing the thing, and I certainly remember how meticulous I was then. Who knows? Maybe I hit some sort of stride as I writer somewhere in the early sections of this book, finding my style and then going on auto-pilot throughout to the end, with those early pages the only evidence of my stumbling around looking for a voice.

But then again, it could be that I got sober somewhere in there, which made me pick up speed in every aspect of my life, especially the productivity part.

There. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I'm going to go with that second one. If it weren't for putting that bottle down, and if it wasn't for the support of my Jessica, I would have never even completed a draft.

You know this book is going to be dedicated to you, Jess. Just deal with it.

Merry Christmas from TedTorres.com

Almost a month has passed since I last posted, and many individual topics for this site have hovered in my mind without any actually anchoring. For example, I've been obsessed lately with the unrelenting genius that is Radiohead's "OK Computer" record, and I recently spent a week in Key West with my band, which was an amazing example of how easy it would be for any of us to go into some self-imposed, creative exile (I visited the home of Ernest Hemingway and peeked into his writing studio). But while both of these topics made it so far as to become entries on my daily work list, none of them actually made it to the site ... at least not yet.

What will make it to the site today, however, is what you see pictured here -- our living room at our house in Jemison, decorated beautifully by Jessica for the Christmas season. I first saw this picture the night before leaving Key West to come back home, and it has been a beacon of comfort and a symbol of "home" that I've cherished ever since. Jessica and I are busy people, and it's rare nowadays that we do get to spend much time in our own home together. Last night, for instance, I sat alone right where you see, wrapping presents next to the glow of the tree while listening to Christmas music on the seasonal digital music feed. And as a reminder, the tree and decorations were done by Jessica while I was away. Imagine what we can do under the same roof? On second thought, never mind. This is a family post. Bah-dum-pum.

Point is, I have been bitten by the Christmas spirit here, folks, and I owe it all to the people around me, especially Jessica and her family, who are now my family. They've given new meaning to this time of year for me, to the point where I was indeed sitting under a Christmas tree by myself wrapping presents, and I was enjoying every minute of it. Lots of sentimentality here, and a tremendous amount of thanks to everyone on Team Torres, both personal and professional, who have helped changed my life for the better.

Merry Christmas!

In Memoriam

November 30th holds a special place in my heart for various reasons. Not only would today have been my father's 84th birthday, but it was also the day that my mother and I settled into Alabama after months of displacement five years ago as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Two years later, on this same date, my father would receive the ultimate birthday gift as I would reunite him with his wife, placing her ashes alongside his casket in his crypt in New Orleans.

On February 3rd, 2007, seven months before my mother's own passing, I had written a piece commemorating my father, Theodore Vincent Torres Sr., and with some slight modifications, what follows is that essay in its entirety:

Two years ago today, my father, Theodore Vincent Torres Sr., passed away after a mercilessly long and drawn-out battle with cancer. He was 79.

In remembering my father, I recall first and foremost his almost encyclopedic intelligence, which he applied to everything in his life. A natural and life-long outdoorsman, my father was unmatched in the ways of the old-school New Orleans men who made their living in the marsh. Whether it be as a fisherman, a hunter, a trawler, or a trapper, Teddy was the last of a master generation who passed his knowledge down to the next. Since his passing, I've been told story after story about my father's vast reservoir of knowledge on topics ranging from rope tying to aerodynamics, from carpentry to electrical engineering. Having had me rather late in life, I was not privileged enough to have been a part of that consecutive generation, a group of men and women alike, now well into middle-age, who hold my father in the highest of regards as both mentor, innovator (I have been told that the first airboat in St. Bernard Parish was not only owned by my father, but made of his own hands), and in most ways, a father figure.

I struggled for a while with the idea that my father and I were opposites. There was no doubt in my mind that he wanted me to be the natural heir to his knowledge and skills. I was of a different mindset, however, far removed from the world of the marsh and instead naturally rooted in the arts. A perfect example of such a juxtaposition would have to be the time that he took me on my first duck hunt and handed me his childhood 4-10 double barrel shotgun to use. According to him, within the hour, he had turned to see me playing air guitar with the weapon. For some reason, I don't recall this event, although I know damn good and well that I more than likely did just that. I did, however, come away with a life-long fascination with guns, an interest that we truly did share, but the hunting I'm afraid stayed in that duck blind.

Our passions would cross again years later as he would in fact be my first editor. Intrigued and relentlessly curious about language in general, my father loved to play with words. I remember playing word games and sharing riddles, telling stories and inventing acronyms. It was my father who meticulously read through and proofread my first draft of The Petrified Christ, in awe that his son had such a skill with words, a skill that he rightfully felt he had cultivated. One of the only surviving pictures I have of my father in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is one in which he's holding a copy of that book in Barnes & Noble, grinning in profile as he admired the cover.

And such, I feel, was my relationship with my father. As father and son we were indeed opposites, yet forever in admiration of each other's abilities and motivations. Many life lessons were learned during those final years, some deliberate, and some acquired unconsciously though his spirit and task driven focus on the necessity of day-to-day life. It is his strength that guides me to this very day, his focus on work, and his protective "us verses the world" philosophy of family that insured I would keep it together and provide after what will more than likely go down as the most tragic year of my life, 2005, the year I lost everything.

And so, Pop, I'm thinking of you today up there in the blue, no doubt watching the clouds shift and morph in and out from one another to form those cloud pictures that we'd lie on our backs and spot, the ones that only you and I were able to see.

Conversations and Reflections

Of the many friendly criticisms I've received of my two books over the years, the one that always rings true is that I don't need to be in such a hurry to end my stories ... and I'll be damned if I'm not guilty of just that this third time around.

After passing the new manuscript past some eyes other than my own, I've come to realize that my ending just doesn't quite cut it. And so the plan now is to retain as much of the original ending as possible -- with a few tweaks here and there -- while going back into the body of the piece to fatten up some spots that could make the whole thing work. I'm actually excited about the prospect of doing this as I head into the second draft process next week, which consists basically of incorporating some of the previously mentioned edits, with the third draft scheduled to begin as I take the manuscript with me to Key West, Florida during the second week in December.

I have noticed, however, that I have a natural order of things that I ease into when I'm finishing the actual writing of a book, and so far, it always leads to one of the characters having a conversation with the person at the center of the conflict, and then that character reflecting on the events of the big picture.

At the end of The Petrified Christ, Daniel Foster has his conversation with ... well ... someone ... and then reflects back on the entire story while in his office at Loyola, laying down some conclusions on his personal theology to the once abrasive graduate student Rodney, and then wandering out of the building into the night. Scenes from the Blanket has a similar ending, in which Blake Worthington, after having confronted the architect of the curse and the curse itself, takes his thoughts to paper as we're given one of many glimpses into his person journal, and thus, a conclusive wrap-up of where his head is. And I'll just say that my third book has a similar ending, although I won't say who has the conversation and who does the reflecting.

It's the rhythms that fascinate me when it comes to writing, be they organic -- in which characters seem to take on lives of their own, doing and saying things that you never intended before you sat down to write them -- or constructed, as is the case with my current end trend. I'm content with it, though, and I figure that if these three books are going to make up some sort of Blanket Trilogy, then it feels right to have this common thread running through all three.

3-D or Not 3-D?

I love it when things are done for the right reasons, especially when it exposes things that are done to the contrary. There's a reason, for instance, why DreamWorks Animation's "Megamind" is still at the top of the box office this week: because it delivers what it promises -- an entertaining movie with brilliant 3-D effects put to use for the sake of the effect and not to fatten the wallets of the studio executives. I have to say that I was more than a little annoyed a few weeks ago when Warner Bros. announced that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I" would not be released in 3-D due to the studio's inability to make the 3-D transfer in time. Were they implying that Warner Bros. was willing to stoop so low as to use one of its most beloved movie franchises to squeeze out a few more bucks at the ticket window when the movie could have in fact been released in 2-D all along?

I'm at the point now where I believe that 3-D technology should be reserved for CGI animation only, where the effect can be used to its maximum potential to create a true virtual world from scratch on the screen. Otherwise, with the exception of movies like James Cameron's "Avatar," where the live-action film is shot using 3-D technology, I can't help but feel like I'm being ripped off over and over again. I'm talking to you, "Clash of the Titans," and to you, "Alice in Wonderland," and to you, Wes Craven's "My Soul to Take," where I spent most of the movie with the glasses on top of the same bald head I was scratching.

Going to a movie is always a gamble as far as whether or not you're going to get your money's worth. So why should we now have to add the side bet of whether or not the 3-D we paid to see is going to be worth a shit? Kudos to DreamWorks for keeping up the good and honest work, and shame on Warner Bros. for contributing to the corrosion of my sense of wonder.

First Draft

Well, here it is, the first draft of my third novel, completed today at 1:47 p.m. When I spanked its newborn ass, it had come in at 466 pages and approximately 116,500 words.

But the real work has just begun, as now I get to dive into it red pen first and start sculpting this thing into something that can compete in the market. Admittedly, this second step in the process is my favorite, and this will be the first time that I've written a draft from start to finish without obsessively going back and re-working every page before moving forward. The idea here is that now I should be able to edit the book objectively and take the ride almost as if for the first time, finding out what works and what doesn't, what characters need to be flushed out, and most importantly, if I've been successful in saying what it is that I wanted to say.

Not a bad way to end the week!