My What-If book, & Hello!
(1st post––just before the snow hopefully hits the desert!)
Hello from the high desert, near Pecos, New Mexico. I exited the Bay Area with my wife Julie just before Covid hit and have never felt luckier. Having today taken up this personal challenge to jump into Substack, I’ll see if I can make a decent contribution as have writers like Sherman Alexie, who’s postings I’ve been greatly enjoying (I was already a great fan and enjoyed meeting him a while back in my Pacific Northwest days). And I’m surprised that even Garrison Keillor has touched me in ways I didn’t expect (thanks again, Substack). Never met him (Ha), and in fact was never a Prairie Home Companion fan, but his damn infectious posts remind me of (1), my Midwest/Chicago frigid-winter roots, and (2), that I sometimes shouldn’t negate or poopoo something before I even know what it’s about). Also, posting by Hanif Kureishi are cherished––he reports from his terribly unfortunate disability after an accident. It’s these writers who inadvertently have made me decide to try this path of communication.
Some background. I’ve been writing books lately, including “filmmaking” ones, plus three “Treasury of Art” photo books about my and wife, Jule Schachter’s art collection, and that lark—making beautiful picture books––has turned into something more.
Until recently I thought of myself as a filmmaker first & foremost (feels like my output of 26 indie features was a pretty good place to call it a day), though I did write a how-to in 1988, entitled, FEATURE FILMMAKING AT USED-CAR PRICES (Viking Penguin), which bailed me out of recurring lab debts from my first 3 features. If you don’t know my movies maybe check out reviews for my punk contribution:<https://letterboxd.com/film/emerald-cities/>. And here’s the movie’s trailer: <https://mubi.com/en/us/films/emerald-cities>.
In an earlier downtime (1999) of neither having a burning film concept, and/or any $ to do something about it (charging CCs was finally a no-no), I wrote more and tried my hand at a “conspiracy/suspense/thriller entitled, BLACK PRESIDENT. After all, I did get an agent from the film book and hoped I could get some revenue flowing, maybe enough to even keep my house a bit longer. The original title was “Kennedy’s Twins” because that’s what it was about—two Black men growing up, youth in Chicago to adult politics, while secretly being the unknown sons of JFK.
After beating the bushes awhile, submitting BP blindly to whatever Houses caught my online eye (my agent also tried to sell it) I came across a UK house, Picnic Publishing, and blindly submitted it like I had to others (I’d spent a pretty penny FedExing it there when they expressed interest) and got a shockingly positive, multi-page email response (yay for slush piles!), which resulted in that indescribable feeling of hitting the jackpot—1st novel PUBLISHED!
I was suddenly in seventh heaven (is there a sixth or 5th heaven that’s also good?) and enjoyed all the steps of interaction with that small house and its co-owner, including suddenly having a former Sussex House editor in my life, who firmed it up with what he reported was “five passes, and still loving it.” It did sell about 1000 copies initially, in Europe and elsewhere. And ultimately I added a new cover graphic after turning it into a 3-part TRILOGY ABOUT AMERICA. Please take a look: <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NWCN6XG>. Got it on Kindle, soft and hardcopy, plus a monster-thick, 792 page ‘COLLECTIBLE,’ all-in-one “door-stop size":” <https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22824828591&cm_sp=det-_-bsk-_-bdp>).
So I’ve been extremely lucky when flirting with this second occupation. A full account of getting the “USED-CAR FILMMAKING” book to publication against all odds is covered in my book, NEW DARK AGES––How a Punk Movie EMERALD CITIES Got Its Improv (Light Video Books, ©2020, Chapter-6): <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FZRB93P>.
Enough looking back. My newest book, “Other Lives, Bends in the Road, and What-Ifs” is, of course, my current darling––and something to worry about…Will it find an audience in the midst of all the other self-published orphan-books out there in the amazon swamp. In a nutshell, it’s about several of my personal “what-Ifs,’ covering some of the important choices I made in life (“REAL-LIFE” STORIES), and their corresponding “ALTERNATE UNIVERSE” fiction accounts, me fantasizing about where my life might have led if the choices were different. Feedback from my friends has happily informed me that it works in a way I hadn’t expected, that each person who’s read it was flipped into thinking about their own life in this manner. Where would I be today with different choices? Here’s link: <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLJR2KY1>.
And pretty affordable copies available in Germany, where I just released it in B&W/wire-bound: <https://www.amazon.de/dp/3758423279?tag=lovelybooks-rdetail-21>.
Thinking about attempting a Substack launch today included the thought that I had several more Alternate Universes I hadn’t covered in this first edition of WHAT-IF’S. Mainly, I purposely bypassed my “LAHAINI STORY, based on if I had taken either the bus-boy or waiter job I’d secured while on a short Hawaiian visit in 1980. Had I kept living there––establishing friends and lovers, remaining in that paradise setting––I may have been caught in the horrible, beyond imagination fire that just destroyed that town and obviously the restaurants where I was to be employed as a 36-year-old. I ultimately decided to return to California instead, needing to show my kinetic sculpture at the Oakland Museum’s “Metal Show,” and to continue contact with my young kids from a first marriage.
Anyway, this is a what-if that scared me, imagining that alternate reality…wondering how the writing would go as I fantasized how to escape, run or drive away, dealing with the minute-by-minute reality about the magnitude of the disaster––tragedy for all my people there (had I built a life…). An article covering the details of the fire just arrived in a current New Yorker and brought it all back, right down on my head. Maybe I”ll have the guts to try writing it later, up the road, but don’t hold your breath.
Thanks for reading if you got this far. I may not be a dependable-enough Substacker to deserve many subscribers, but I will be back with something more, sometime soon. Maybe even about some filmmaking stuff.
Happy writing/shooting,
Rick