HEAP. August 24 - September 19. __,000 words. Irascible "Razz" Heap, compare Incredible Hulk, is invited to give a presentation on The Correspondence Novel at the Gulf Coast Writers Conference, in Panama City, Florida, held by Pottersville Press, who have just published his Adventures in the Underground as Volume 3 of their anthology series, Postcards From Pottersville. Heap works as a custodian at a community behavioral health care center, where people put initials after their names, for their certification. He puts CN, for correspondence novelist, after his name. He prepares three pamphlets to hand out at the conference, The Correspondence Novel, 8 Short Reviews of BUSHED, and the eponymous Irascible "Razz" Heap, CN. But then he comes down with a fourth pamphlet, What's My Line, inspired by the Van Morrison song about the working man in his prime, who takes his time, washing windows. Heap neglects his custodian duties to write the pamphlet at work, is reprimanded by his supervisor, for not cleaning the toilets thoroughly, and realizes CN stands for custodian. George Orwell said fear of the sack keeps modern, Western man in line. Heap isn't sacked, but his day job is in jeopardy. He has descended into darkness and might not make it back. In the end, he fears for his sanity. He fears he's like Charles Crumb, brother of Robert Crumb, who wanted to be a cartoonist, but ended up filling his cartoon notebooks with dialogue balloons filled completely with bluer and scarier squiggles, that didn't mean anything to anyone but him. All squiggle and no graphics. No art. Dense blue squiggles.
THE BLACK MEMOIR. September 19 - October 15. __,000 words. Derek Raymond wrote The Hidden Files, a memoir, to explain what it was like to write the Factory series of detective novels, especially I Was Dora Sanchez. He calls his novels black novels. I call his memoir a black memoir, and decide to write one like it, myself, to go with HEAP, a black novel. HEAP is a peculiar novel, if it's a novel. It's like Stewart Home deciding that 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess is a nouveau roman, not the entire oeuvre of a pulp writer condensed into one book, with the heroine fucking a ventriloquist's dummy thrown in. And THE BLACK MEMOIR isn't a memoir, exactly. HEAP is part memoir and THE BLACK MEMOIR is part novel. Together they make up Goat Song: A Black Comedy, one, because the book is funny, and two, because the Greek word for tragedy translates goat-song, implying that there is a comic dimension to the tragic. We have to keep our sense of humor. I Was Dora Sanchez was pretty strong stuff. But so was HEAP. I need my job, poor as it is. I'm 67 years old, and won't soon find another. When you get sacked at my age the blacklist comes with it. I am not just putting my job on the line, I am flirting with the blacklist. And mocking the Bush Administration, too. They stalk people. They ruin people. They are a mean bunch. What we need is a rollicking good satire like Goat Song to put them in their place. THE BLACK MEMOIR covers my first 35 years as a writer, in which I wrote 281 books and didn't sell a word to New York or Hollywood. I compare my trip to the Gulf Coast Writers Conference to Kilgore Trout's trip to the Midland City Arts Festival, in Breakfast of Champions. Possibly to Yossarian in Catch-22. I compare Goat Song to Catch-22.