82

Introductory Text

We All Have Skeletons
The Author's Narrative Part 11 82nd Post Posted 11 June 2016 at 04:23:00 EDT Link to original

Before writing this series, I wrote a novel. I worked on it for 6 years. The worst years of my life. As I sank deeper into alcoholism and became a pathetic trembling recluse, I held on to the novel as my one desperate hope. Maybe it would turn out well, maybe it would get published, maybe it would sell well, maybe my life would change, maybe I would escape my stinking little apartment. What dreams I had. What desperate little dreams.

As my life got worse, I told myself I was on a journey of self-discovery, that I was an artist going through a period of struggle before my great breakthrough. Every famous artist has some story of living in a tiny apartment and working a mind-numbing job and eating crap food before their first big success. Surely this was just that part of my story. How much richer would my success be after all this pathetic degradation!

After a night of writing, I would get drunk and imagine myself being interviewed by in front of an auditorium full of my fans, telling self-deprecating but touching anecdotes about my ragged days before I became I literary success. The audience full of bookishly pretty young women would titter and sigh as they related to my struggles and admired my unwavering determination. What fantasies I had!

There were other times when I knew that I was just comforting myself with delusions of grandeur, that I was trying to romanticize my lazy failure of a life by pretending to be a struggling artist on the verge of success. Really, I was just a lazy drunk on the verge of fuck all. I wasn't even some proud rebel drunk like Charles Bukowski. I hated myself. I didn't write enough or read enough or know enough or work hard enough to be a real writer. I had never read Anna Karenina or One Hundred Years of Solitude or anything by Henry James.

I was often bored when reading and bored when writing. Did I even like it? I had half-assed my way through school and work and relationships. I had half-assed everything I had ever done, and I was even half-assing something that was supposed to be important to me. I hadn't even finished one novel after six years.

And then there was the most damning evidence of all: my writing sucked.

Sometimes I felt like I was fraud, sometimes I felt like I was on the right path, sometimes I felt like both of these things were true at once, like I was on two different timelines. My view of the matter changed often. At night, I tended to regard myself as being on the very cusp of fame and fortune. The next morning, I tended to wake up feeling like a untalented dilettante. Meanwhile, this supposedly temporary period of struggle stretched on and on and on. I turned 30. Surely something would happen by 40. But what if it didn't? As I withdrew from friends and coworkers and became more of a recluse, I rationalized it as "concentrating on my writing." Except my busy schedule of drinking and hangovers didn't allow for much writing. The story of the struggling artist was showing itself to be a lie.

Then I got fired from my job and sent to rehab. After I stopped drinking, I used my newfound energy and spare time to finish the novel. I finished it in a few months. You can get a lot done when you're not entering the void every night. For someone like me, the completion a 6 year struggle is an occasion which simply begs to be accompanied by a drink, by many drinks. I had always planned to just go get drunk for an entire week after I finished my novel. Instead, I took a walk down to a nearby bar and stood outside of it for a while.

I didn't go in. In my head, my life seemed to be developing into a new story: a heroic turnaround in which I got sober and everything fell into place. Yes, surely this was how it would go. I sent letters to 30 literary agents with the hopes of getting the book published. None expressed any interest.

It hurt to be rejected. I had stopped drinking, but I still hadn't found a fulfilling job. I was able to talk to people and look cashiers in the eye again, but I was still a recluse. I had still invested a lot of desperate hopes into getting the novel published. I felt so foolish for investing so much hope into something that is just so unlikely, but I couldn't help myself. The lure of feeling some sense of purpose and accomplishment was just too much.

I wanted to be noticed. Honestly, I wanted to be rich and famous. Though they may have been disguised as "achieving artistic success" and "finding my purpose," perhaps my dreams were ultimately as crass and grasping as any Kardashian's.

I had given the literary agents 4 months to respond to me before accepting they were not interested. Soon after that deadline passed, I started writing this web series. As you may know, a few websites wrote articles about the series, and some very lovely people created a very wonderful subreddit about it, and this drew the attention of people in the publishing industry. They contacted me, and just like that, my long-held dream was again revived, and now it seemed more in reach than ever. I had been struggling to contact agents, and now they were contacting me! Oh, what a heady feeling. Again, it felt like everything was falling into place, like my life was shaping into a story with a happy ending.

Speaking of endings, I needed to come up with an ending for the series before I could finally take my rightful place as leading light of the literati (cough). A few people on the subreddit had expressed doubt that I could possibly deliver a satisfying ending, and I was inclined to agree with them. I had already noticed that the story was easier to write when I was opening narrative threads than when I was wrapping them up. What would the overall ending be?

It had to be about Mother. That was the center of the story. But what did I really know about Mother beyond a few vague memories? I had long puzzled over these memories. Back when I was drinking, I was convinced that something had happened to me one summer, something beyond my understanding, something monstrous. But after I got sober, I was encouraged to digest some hard truths about myself, and I decided that it was entirely possible that I had more or less made it all up. Not that I simply lied to myself, but more that I had latched on to some vague memory, perhaps a recurring nightmare, and built it up in my mind over the years, perhaps as an explanation for why I was so emotionally fucked up. It was easier to face life as a victim of some unknown, half-remembered evil. It gave me an excuse to crawl into the bottle.

I needed to provide a satisfying ending to the series and to my quest to get published. Being intertwined, both of these tasks rested on a hazy collection of sinister memories. Then again, couldn't I just make some shit up? Hadn't I been doing that all along?

The solution presented itself to me one night when I was talking with my roommate Shawn. He told me that back when he smoked crack, he used to break into abandoned buildings to see if there was stuff to steal. He said that once he broke into a warehouse downtown and found set of stairs that led to an underground room, which led to many more rooms that went deep underground. Over the course of a few weeks, he went deeper and deeper into the complex, taking various stuff, but always leaving quickly, because it was a spooky place. On the last night he snuck into the complex, he found a room where the walls were covered in human bone.