Our Love's in Jeopardy, Baby

Recently I came across editing notes for an old story I thought maybe I should revise and update. Often I'm vague about dates, but I know exactly what year this one was written. In 1983, "Jeopardy" by The Greg Kihn Band was on Top 40 radio every two hours. 

I didn't get far with the update before realizing I was in over my head. First of all, I'd scanned a printout of the story and then used Google to OCR the image into text. Didn't work very well so there were intermittent glitches: big gaps of empty space, nonsense words, and punctuation marks being turned into asterisks. 

As if that wasn't hassle enough, apparently some material was missing as I found uppercase notes about creating segues and sorting out plot issues. 

The technical issues were daunting but fixable. What I couldn't fix was the story itself. It was boring. Boring and grim. I can tell you why. 

I was taking a creative writing course at the time and the fiction canon was all produced by disillusioned alcoholics who wrote stories about how everyone is awful and also horrible things happen to people for no reason whatsoever. These themes have nothing to do with what I write. I must have felt the influence of the stuff we were reading for class, stuff our instructor liked. I remember if a short story involved someone becoming maimed while doing something ordinary, she loved it, haha. I think the only tale I've written with an injury is someone tripping over her dog on the stairs and spraining an ankle. 

Nobody's scarred for life in "Our Love's in Jeopardy, Baby" but I think an unhappy couple can't figure out how to either break up or learn to be happy together. Something like that. I have brought some bits from it to this site where abandoned tales are remembered briefly and artifacts of the creative process are archived. 

I don't regret writing the original version of this or considering a revision for three reasons:

First, I learned not to write things because I thought somebody who didn't like my regular work might like a story if I wrote what I thought they wanted. 

Second, with this piece I was once again trying hard to get people to see that LGBT+ people should be represented in fiction as regular people working out problems and experiencing life. I felt strongly that he fiction should not be about being LGBT+ and that sexual orientation should be accepted by the reader as one factor in the characters' lives. These days this is standard practice but it sure wasn't in 1983. 

Third, I do love a good parody and I have a chance to share a favorite. Weird Al Yankovic did an awesome job with his take on "Jeopardy."  Here are two videos, one for the original radio hit and the other for the Weird Al version. 

Why did I save all these worn, torn pages?

The  1996 Shirley Jackson anthology Just An Ordinary Day was given to me a few years ago, and I was surpised at the time that there'd be unpublished work by the author. Once the internet happened, I'd assumed that anybody who had any work by a well-known author would have found a way to share it with the work and/or make some money with it. 

Once I read the introduction, I understood that the stories had been in a box that no one had seen since the early 1960s, as Shirley Jackson had died in 1965. From the Wikipedia entry for the book:

I was also intrigued to learn that some of the stories in the volume were revised, because Jackson's son and daughter had gone through the notes from this box from the barn, and realized that there were alternative versions of some stories. The unpublished stories were a great find, yes, but as a writer I was excited to know that someone had saved the notes and then that the family had made use of them. 

Do I have notes of my own? I sure do. And I've been very reluctant to let them go. In part, this is because I had a house fire in 1988 which almost destroyed the only copies of a completed novel and most of my short stories, some published and some unpublished. There was fire damage to some of the novel pages and it was a great help to have notes to rebuild sentences and paragraphs from. 

Now I realize I have to do the most important work first. I don't have enough days in front of me to go through pages of notes about already-finished stories and novels to make tweaks and adjustments. I might not even agree with the proposed changes since I wrote these notes years ago. I am luckier than Shirley Jackson, as I've already gotten twenty years more life than she had. But no family member of mine has the time or energy to go through my notes and do the work I could have done ealier in life if I'd made the effort. When I go, these manuscripts and notes will go into the recycling. 

I've know this for a while, but this last week I had a mental breakthrough. I realized that I couldn't let go of some of these typescipts and edited pages and handwritten drafts because each physical page is so evocative. I remember being the person who did this work using a golf pencil or a Bic pen or a Flair felt-tipped pen or a manual typewriter or a PC that had two floppy disk drives and no hard drive. The pages tell the story of coffee mugs I used and egg sandwiches I ate and pockets into which a page was hastily crumpled when it was time to leave wherever I was writing. There are pages which are scorched, and pages which have gotten wet, and pages so old the ink is half as dark as it used to be. I wrote when I had to use underlining instead of italics, and when I had to cover up goofs with skinny white strips of correction tape. These scraps and bit and clumps, often fastened with rusted staples and paper clips, show me how desperately I wanted to get these words written down before they were gone from my mind forever. 

Two pages torn from a spiral notebook with plot notes for "Sousa"

 Thurber House, in Columbus Ohio, was doing a contest for what we used to called short short stories, now called flash fiction. I liked the idea of trying to do a two-page story. The contest winners would be announced on the 4th of July and the theme was American history. At the time I was working on a novel which included scenes from the Columbian Exposition, the World's Fair held in Chicago. It had come up in my resarch that both John Phillip Sousa and Scott joplin had performed at or near the next World's Fair, held in St. Louis in 1904. I thought it would be interesting to speculate about whether Sousa could have heard Joplin's band at the Chicago fair, and possibly been influenced by the jazzed-up rhythems. 

The scrawled word at the left near the top of the notes is not "stab," but "stub." Special rail lines had been built to allow trains to get to the Columbian Exposition, and these ended in "stubs" where the track abruptly ended. It would have been a great place for Sousa's special train car. 

 The details about Sousa's career -- travel by fancy train car, the number of white gloves he went through -- came from the 1952 film "Stars and Stripes Forever," which starred Clifton Webb and Robert Wagner. I also owned and played a cornet, which was favored over the trumpet in Sousa's day. 

One thing about writing flash fiction is that it takes a lot of going over to prune away unnecessary words. It really does take much longer to write a nice tight little tale than a rambling narrative of a story. 

Alas, all my hard work didn't win me the prize. But I did end up with a good story. It can be found here..