Featured Book of the Week: Desperation

Oh what a book this monstrosity turned out to be.

The finished book is about 300 pages. I must admit that I wrote about 750 pages to get it done.

And then I re-wrote it completely.

I chose the tile from a Dire Straits song where Knopfler screams:

I've seen Desperation explode into flames.

I wanted it to be Desperation Explodes Into Pain but my publisher thought it was too long of a title.

But first things first.

The book started with one idea:

"What if I was born into a horrible life. Could I still be a good guy?"

And that thought was after I read about a child being born into a toilet in the ghetto somewhere. The kid was saved, but was he?

So I started off.

I wrote the entire book introducing a truly horrible villain who I named after my Uncle Jim's Insurance brochure. Billy Barth was born.

And I wrote and wrote and wrote and when I sent it to the publisher in about 1995 I was sure that the response would be overwhelming.

But it wasn't.

"It doesn't work," she said. "There's too much jumping around, and I'd like to see you write it from a completely different perspective."

"Okay," I said.

Then I hung up the phone and threw it into a drawer. There was no way I'd write it all again. I was writing things that Steinbeck wrote about! I was writing about surviving poverty!! She was wrong!!!

So I tossed it into the drawer and worked on Waldorf & Juli.

But then Bruce put out a record about poverty - The Ghost of Tom Joad - and it grabbed me again.

So I did do the complete re-write.

And looking back on it...I'm sorta' happy with it. Especially Part 2. I got that pretty well down.

But the press came calling. I was granted a really nice feature in The Buffalo News. Off of that I received a call from the Buffalo City Mission and I toured the place. I wrote a featured article that the Buffalo News published and from there a priest in Tonawanda took my words, read them in church and received a massive donation that really helped the homeless.

And that's when it hit me:

I can help other people when I write.

I donated to the Buffalo City Mission with the proceeds from Desperation.

And I enjoyed doing it.

And every once in awhile I think about Jackie Gregory and Billy Barth.

I answered the question on paper. Jackie grew to be a good man despite the horror of his early life.

But that was on paper.

I still think that Desperation mostly explodes into pain.

In real life.