In November, I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month. For some time, I've been working on writing a novel based on my experiences in Porn Valley. A few months ago, I had a new idea on how to go about it. So, this will be a fresh start for me. Online, you'll be able to track my progress here. The novel's title is Happy and the genre is literary fiction. To a degree, the book is in a way a mystery, an LA-noir look at the adult movie industry; in another way, it's highly influenced by one of my favorite books, City of Glass, a mystery about a mystery. I'll refrain from mentioning the plot for now, but I'll share other matter related to the book on the blog. Last night, I did research that took me from James Ellroy to My Dark Places to psycho-noir to Fucktown to "Elevator to the Gallows." The book has six parts, each composed of five chapters. For a long time, I've thought about this book as a book about porn, a book about Porn Valley, a book about those characters that have populated that world in my mind. When I outlined the first half of the novel, I realized it's about all of that and none of that. In reality, it's about one person's descent into madness.
Was it a dream? Was it the dream of a somnambulist, a dream within a dream, and hence more real than a real dream, since it cannot be measured against waking, since it cannot be measured by consciousness, because it is a dream from which one awakens into another dream? Or was it a god-like dream, a dream of time and eternity? A dream without illusions and doubts, a dream with its own languages and senses, a dream of both soul and body, a dream of consciousness and corporality both, a dream with clear-cut boundaries, with its own language and sound, a dream that is palpable, that can be explored with taste, smell, and hearing, a dream stronger than waking, a dream such as only the dead perhaps can dream, a dream that cannot be denied by a blade nicking the chin, for blood flows at once, and everything one does is but a proof of reality and waking; the skin bleeds in the dream as does the heart, the body rejoices in the dream as does the soul, there are no miracles in the dream other than life; the only way out of the dream is to awaken into death. —Encyclopedia of the Dead
