The Inspiration of the Boring Book

 

A detail from the original artwork from the unrevised cover

Every story starts with a tiny kernel of an idea around which the story slowly grows. Or doesn't. In the case of my newest novel, the boring one, the kernel of the story comes from a jazz standard. More specifically, from two lines of a specific performance of that song.

For some unknown reason, those two lines evoke the wisp of ghost of an untraceable pseudo-memory whenever I hear them sung. Very strange. Strange enough to write a book about. What better subject than a ghost of a pseudo-memory of and unknown time and place?  A past life? Sadly, I don't think I actually got any closer to that time and place. In any event, it inspired a book.

The song is composed by Billy Strayhorn. Billy Strayhorn was a jazz pianist, composer, lyricist, and arranger in the Duke Ellington band for almost 30 years. The tune is Lush Life, much of which he wrote while still a teenager. The tune is about the failed romance of the song's narrator, who hangs out in "come-what-may places" to get the "feel of life from jazz and cocktails." He falls in love, and for a while, believes her "poignant smile was tinged with the sadness of a great love" for him. Alas, "I guess, ah, yes, I was wrong, again." Heartbroken he muses that a week in Paris might ease the bite of it, though all he cares to do "is to smile in  spite of it." Still, he can't get her out of his mind, so - and then come the two lines that strangely evoke that ghost of a memory of a time and place I can't place - "I'll live a lush life, in some small dive"  Where he'll "rot with the rest of those whose lives are lonely too."

But it's not just those two lines, but the way they're sung by Johnny Hartman, on the album John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman. This song, sung by Harman with Coltrane, is that little kernel around which this novel grew. 

You can hear that version of the song HERE

What makes it all so strange, is that when I hear those lines sung, I get a flash of familiarity, not even an image, but a tinge of deja vu, a fleeting memory of knowing this small, dim-lit bar in New York, where a small cadre of regulars, sophisticate men and women gather at night, every night. Stranger still is that I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I've actually been in a bar. Really, I can only think of two times. I'm not a bar person. I'm not very social, I don't drink, save for some cheap wine every once and a while, and I really, really hate loud music and trying to carry on a conversation over it. Plus, I've never been to New York. Not in this life, anyway. It was this inexplicable reaction to those words that intrigued me enough to write a story around it. 

Alas, as I said, I didn't really capture the elusive feeling I was seeking in the story. I ended up writing a story where nothing happens. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. But that became the challenge. Write a story about mundane lives. And having written it, I will publish it, with suitable warnings. I'm actually looking forward to its reception. It's a mystery. Will boring sell? Or be damned? In any event, this fall you'll be able to stop in after ten to meet the habitues of a small Press Borough dive known as the Bleu Moon, just by reading my boring novel, titled Some Small Dive.

Some Small Dive is the third Lorrian novel, set in the Chateau Clare - Glencrow Summer time line, with all new characters, plus a few cameo appearances from a couple of characters from Chateau Clare.

In the next installment, I'll talk about the cover of Some Small Dive. I had actually painted it before I finished the first draft.