Week #32 Through the Looking Glass - Novel

A few months back I took a trip to New York city to attend a concert for my friend James Call’s 30th birthday. As a matter of coincidence that also turned out to be the same weekend that another old friend of mine, Mike Garlington, was passing though the city on his way back from Europe.

The trip was chaotic, fascinating, nostalgic, debaucherous and quite painful all at the same time. I slept so little and consumed so many damaging substances that I was having auditory hallucinations on the plane ride home.

The events of the trip seemed to all fit into a basic theme for me. They all reflected something I’d been thinking a lot about recently. What happens to all of us who’ve been spending our twenties behaving like it was a second adolescence when our bodies can’t keep up? What happens when the illicit desires we’d been slave to in our youth start to fade away and lose there luster?

I’d been wanting to write a novel about this for sometime. I’d written a few parts of a screenplay a while back about this subject. Interestingly a good part of the screenplay took place during the main characters return to New York. I suppose the city represents to me the hight of my youthful hedonism.

To add a little structure to this project I thought it would be good chance to do another thing I’d always wanted to do; base a story on Lewis Carroll’s less read sequel to Alice in Wonderland, “ Through the looking Glass and What Alice Found There”. I always had a soft spot for this book and it’s dream like plot with less well know characters made it an easier choice then it’s more popular predecessor.

Right now this idea is still mostly a nebulous blob existing more as few journal entries than anything else. I think the idea would be to follow the structure of the Carroll book for the stuff taking place during the weekend but also to include extended flash backs on my past with these people. The chances of me ever writing a whole novel are fairly slim but still writing the idea here makes it actually feel doable. Who knows!