The story is set in Maine, USA, and is inspired by the writer Stephen King. I suppose my story is a little dig at Stephen King - I don't much like him or his books, I'm afraid.
My central character, Clifford King, is an aspiring writer who sees himself as somewhat above writing popular fiction. Self-evidently, part of the name Clifford King is a reference to Stephen King; the 'Clifford' I think I must have come up with due to my admiration for Clifford Irving, a rather obscure but excellent American writer. That was my 'writer's subconsciousness' [is there such a thing?] at work: the contrast between the fortunes of the real-life Stephen King and Clifford Irving reflects the themes of the story. Clifford Irving, while an excellent writer, wanted more than that for himself: he wanted to be 'great', but he lacked either the luck or the ability, or both.
Anyway, my character, Clifford, has written what he thinks is the next Great American Novel, but he can't get it published. He also has another problem - everybody is confusing him with another Clifford King, a pulp fiction writer also from Maine! Yes, yes, I know. Improbable. But one of my favourite writers is Wilkie Collins and I just like the Victorian-style melodramatic premise transplanted to a modern setting.
I'll start with part of the novel's opening chapter. As I say, my writing isn't great, but it's OK - and I hope you enjoy the story!
KINGSTOWN
The course of my life was predicted. When I was about eight or nine, I used to write long stories, knowing and involved, capturing everything about life around me. I wrote about boys my age paddling in the ocean. I wrote about trips with my father in his boat across the Sound. I wrote about the fishermen, in their small precarious wooden vessels journeying for miles in their hunt for shark, marlin and cod. I wrote about the beehive that my uncle maintained in his garden and the honey my aunt would prepare for us to take home and share.
"Clifford, you're going to be a writer", my teacher would say, and I thought he was right. I didn't know then what a writer was, but I knew already that I would write.
It was settled. Clifford King would be a writer.
Only, that's not what happened. Clifford King did not become a writer. As I grew up, I let my writing slip. I excelled in academic work, and maybe it was a need to vindicate my parents' hopes for me, or maybe it was a need to fill some inadequacy, but what the tragic reason I had for wanting to go to college, I enrolled and majored in business and management.
I struggled through the course, through bouts of depression and self-loathing, repeating half of my exams and barely passing the others. Eventually, four years later, I emerged into the sunlight, armed with a half-baked college degree, and looking for a job. Thoughts of becoming a writer had completely receded from view and I dismissed that early ambition as youthful dreaming.
Eventually I found that job. It was as a trainee manager in the South Bristol branch of the Eastern Atlantic Bank. My days were filled with endless, pointless meetings about matters that seemed to be of no significance. The most exciting part was counting money. The Easter Atlantic Bank was the largest bank in that part of Maine, and the daily deliveries of newly-minted notes and coins and bonds were eagerly anticipated, almost an event in and of itself. Behind the glass screen, the security guard would hand over large wedges of U.S. bank notes, usually arranged into wads of one hundred thousand dollars. I was then responsible for depositing the hoard in the bank's giant vault, using a brass trolley that squeaked wherever it went.
By night, I would write. I confess, I had fallen back into the habit. I had also met someone at the bank - Matilda - and we would often go on trips to the local galleries together, as we shared an interest in art.
I first realised that I loved Matilda when I saw her in the coffee shop, across the street from the gallery. She was with no-one. I watched her lips move and her red cheeks under green eyes like pearls that seemed painted under eye-lashed that batted. I saw the involuntary blushes as her face turned, first toward me, then away from me. I fell in love with her then.
At night, I wrote about my own fears, about being trapped in a life I did not want. And unconsciously, that drove me apart from Matilda. My central character, a realtor frustrated with suburban life, could have been Matilda's husband, and probably is. As I progressed the manuscript I found a title: 'The Vacant Flame'. This seemed to sum up perfectly the realtor. Inside him was a burning ambition to live. Not to make money, not to have status, not to have prestige, but simply to live. He could not fulfill that ambition where he was, on Main Street, USA. He knew that to really live he would have to kick over the traces, give up all that he knew, give up the life he knew, renounce the value system that had been inculcated in him since birth.
It was during my second summer working at the Bank that things began to fall apart. It was a season that began with such excitement. I had all-but completed 'The Vacant Flame' and I was ready to send it to three publishing houses in New York. McDonnell White in particular I knew would be interested in my work as they had already seen a sample chapter and commented favourably on it. This was my very first piece of writing and in hindsight perhaps I approached the whole thing with naivety, but when I had typed the last of the manuscript and the novel was completed, I bundled the papers together and tied them in a parcel with a hastily-written covering letter addressed to the Literary Editor at McDonnell White.
Then I waited.
My relationship with Matilda had developed to the point that I felt ready to propose to her. Outside of writing, she was my main activity. We saw each other every day at the Bank as Mr Grimmond's office was just down the hallway from mine. She would pop her head around the door at 12 sharp each day and we would take lunch together. Things seemed perfect between us. We had not slept together, but I felt that things were special between us. I decided that we would go out to the lake and and there and then I would ask her to marry me.
It was a Sunday when we arrived at the boat house. It was always tricky for me taking Matilda out, as I did not have, nor could I afford, an automobile. As we rowed across the lake, we looked into each other's eyes. On that day, the sun was at its height in the clear blue sky and yellow dancing pearls glittered and glistened across the water. I looked deeply into her and she was full of glow, her cheeks red and her eyes like green marbles. She was an autumn girl, but the summer caught her well.
I asked her to marry me.
"Cliff....there is something I need to tell you."
She paused and looked across the water back to the car park and boathouse. A red Mustang crept slowly into view and stopped at the water's edge. The driver appeared to be looking across at us, but I could only see shadow.
"What is it...?"
"It's about us..."
"Matilda, I..."
"No, let me finish. You're a nice man, and we've been going out for a while now, but I just don't think we're right for each other."
"What do you mean?"
"Cliff, I don't know how to say this, so I'll just say it. I've been seeing someone."
"What...?"
"His name is John Wineburg. We met at the country club."
"You waitress there at weekends."
"Yeah, we met there. His father is..."
"Is the lawyer Benjamin Wineburg, senior partner of Wineburg's. Yeah, I know."
"Cliff...Oh Cliff, I'm so sorry, but this is why I came here today."
I felt empty. We rowed back to the dock, then I helped her out of the boat. She gave me a look that said 'goodbye', but there was no smile. I saw her walk to the red Mustang.
The next day I returned to work as normal. Things were awkward with Matilda, especially when I discovered she was to marry Wineburg. On the way home, I stopped by the ABC on Sowell Street and bought a bottle of Scotch.
As I stepped through the apartment door, I realised I still had it in my pocket - the ring I had intended to offer Matilda was a small, brass off-cut, gold-plated, the type you see anywhere, but with a genuine diamond. It had been used thirty years before by my father to propose to my mother and my mother asked me to use it when proposing to Matilda. I knew that I would have to share the unhappy news with my mother sooner or later and decided I would call her there and then. It was at that moment that I noticed it. The small rectangular envelope lying unobtrusively on the mat. I picked it up and noticed the McDonnell White stamp immediately. I forgot my other problems and studied that envelope. A hairy feeling of excitement overcame me and, unable to resist the urge, I tore open the envelope and quickly unfolded the letter.
Embossed at the top was the logo and name, McDonnell White, giving all the bearing of an august, respectable publishing house. Underneath was a short and to the point letter that began 'Sir' and ended 'Faithfully yours'. It was a rejection letter. "Having perused your manuscript, we are sorry to inform you that this is not a proposal that would interest us."
.......................................
In this next extract, we find Clifford King has started a new life in Jones' Cove, a fictitious town in a different part of Maine. He is working as a creative writing teacher.
......................................
The first class of the autumn term convened on the 3rd. September, at quarter past seven in the evening, around my kitchen table. There were four students, counting Mother George. The others were an Irish immigrant accountant, Sean, a lady called Alison who ran the local antiques shop, and a college student called Adam. It was Adam who admitted to us that he was a major horror fanatic.
"Are you THE Clifford King?" Adam asked me as the others began a writing task I had set them.
"Is there another?" I replied, in slight puzzlement.
"Well, yeah, so you're Clifford King the horror writer?"
"Well no. I don't write horror. In fact, to be honest, I don't write much of...."
"That's quite a coincidence..." Adam chuckled. "I mean, to have two writers called Clifford King in the same state."
"Well, I'm not really a writer..."
"Were you born Clifford King?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did you have that name from birth? Have you always been called Clifford King?"
Alison chimed in: "You know, it is funny, I was thinking that very same thing. I read something by Clifford King once."
Sean joined in now: "Isn't that the writer from up at South Bristol? You know, the one's who always in the mountains somewhere writing, never gives interviews."
"What was that book of his I read now all those years ago? Oh yeah, The Hammer Under The Stairs...." There was laughter.
"Yeah, that's the one where the kid..."
"The kid finds a hammer under the stairs that gives evil, mystical powers to the holder", I jumped in.
"So you've read it?"
"Errrmmm.....No.....Well, I'm not sure...."
"You're sure you're not the real Clifford King?" Sean joked.
"Oh, he's the real Clifford King all right, just not THAT Clifford King." Mother George came to my rescue.
"So you were born with the name?"
"Huh...?"
"You really are a Clifford King. That's your birth name?"
"Oh yeah."
"Cool. What books have you written again....?"
"Oh well, I'm writing something at the moment. It's called The Vacant Flame."
"Cool. Is that horror?"
I struggled through the course, through bouts of depression and self-loathing, repeating half of my exams and barely passing the others. Eventually, four years later, I emerged into the sunlight, armed with a half-baked college degree, and looking for a job. Thoughts of becoming a writer had completely receded from view and I dismissed that early ambition as youthful dreaming.
Eventually I found that job. It was as a trainee manager in the South Bristol branch of the Eastern Atlantic Bank. My days were filled with endless, pointless meetings about matters that seemed to be of no significance. The most exciting part was counting money. The Easter Atlantic Bank was the largest bank in that part of Maine, and the daily deliveries of newly-minted notes and coins and bonds were eagerly anticipated, almost an event in and of itself. Behind the glass screen, the security guard would hand over large wedges of U.S. bank notes, usually arranged into wads of one hundred thousand dollars. I was then responsible for depositing the hoard in the bank's giant vault, using a brass trolley that squeaked wherever it went.
By night, I would write. I confess, I had fallen back into the habit. I had also met someone at the bank - Matilda - and we would often go on trips to the local galleries together, as we shared an interest in art.
I first realised that I loved Matilda when I saw her in the coffee shop, across the street from the gallery. She was with no-one. I watched her lips move and her red cheeks under green eyes like pearls that seemed painted under eye-lashed that batted. I saw the involuntary blushes as her face turned, first toward me, then away from me. I fell in love with her then.
At night, I wrote about my own fears, about being trapped in a life I did not want. And unconsciously, that drove me apart from Matilda. My central character, a realtor frustrated with suburban life, could have been Matilda's husband, and probably is. As I progressed the manuscript I found a title: 'The Vacant Flame'. This seemed to sum up perfectly the realtor. Inside him was a burning ambition to live. Not to make money, not to have status, not to have prestige, but simply to live. He could not fulfill that ambition where he was, on Main Street, USA. He knew that to really live he would have to kick over the traces, give up all that he knew, give up the life he knew, renounce the value system that had been inculcated in him since birth.
It was during my second summer working at the Bank that things began to fall apart. It was a season that began with such excitement. I had all-but completed 'The Vacant Flame' and I was ready to send it to three publishing houses in New York. McDonnell White in particular I knew would be interested in my work as they had already seen a sample chapter and commented favourably on it. This was my very first piece of writing and in hindsight perhaps I approached the whole thing with naivety, but when I had typed the last of the manuscript and the novel was completed, I bundled the papers together and tied them in a parcel with a hastily-written covering letter addressed to the Literary Editor at McDonnell White.
Then I waited.
My relationship with Matilda had developed to the point that I felt ready to propose to her. Outside of writing, she was my main activity. We saw each other every day at the Bank as Mr Grimmond's office was just down the hallway from mine. She would pop her head around the door at 12 sharp each day and we would take lunch together. Things seemed perfect between us. We had not slept together, but I felt that things were special between us. I decided that we would go out to the lake and and there and then I would ask her to marry me.
It was a Sunday when we arrived at the boat house. It was always tricky for me taking Matilda out, as I did not have, nor could I afford, an automobile. As we rowed across the lake, we looked into each other's eyes. On that day, the sun was at its height in the clear blue sky and yellow dancing pearls glittered and glistened across the water. I looked deeply into her and she was full of glow, her cheeks red and her eyes like green marbles. She was an autumn girl, but the summer caught her well.
I asked her to marry me.
"Cliff....there is something I need to tell you."
She paused and looked across the water back to the car park and boathouse. A red Mustang crept slowly into view and stopped at the water's edge. The driver appeared to be looking across at us, but I could only see shadow.
"What is it...?"
"It's about us..."
"Matilda, I..."
"No, let me finish. You're a nice man, and we've been going out for a while now, but I just don't think we're right for each other."
"What do you mean?"
"Cliff, I don't know how to say this, so I'll just say it. I've been seeing someone."
"What...?"
"His name is John Wineburg. We met at the country club."
"You waitress there at weekends."
"Yeah, we met there. His father is..."
"Is the lawyer Benjamin Wineburg, senior partner of Wineburg's. Yeah, I know."
"Cliff...Oh Cliff, I'm so sorry, but this is why I came here today."
I felt empty. We rowed back to the dock, then I helped her out of the boat. She gave me a look that said 'goodbye', but there was no smile. I saw her walk to the red Mustang.
The next day I returned to work as normal. Things were awkward with Matilda, especially when I discovered she was to marry Wineburg. On the way home, I stopped by the ABC on Sowell Street and bought a bottle of Scotch.
As I stepped through the apartment door, I realised I still had it in my pocket - the ring I had intended to offer Matilda was a small, brass off-cut, gold-plated, the type you see anywhere, but with a genuine diamond. It had been used thirty years before by my father to propose to my mother and my mother asked me to use it when proposing to Matilda. I knew that I would have to share the unhappy news with my mother sooner or later and decided I would call her there and then. It was at that moment that I noticed it. The small rectangular envelope lying unobtrusively on the mat. I picked it up and noticed the McDonnell White stamp immediately. I forgot my other problems and studied that envelope. A hairy feeling of excitement overcame me and, unable to resist the urge, I tore open the envelope and quickly unfolded the letter.
Embossed at the top was the logo and name, McDonnell White, giving all the bearing of an august, respectable publishing house. Underneath was a short and to the point letter that began 'Sir' and ended 'Faithfully yours'. It was a rejection letter. "Having perused your manuscript, we are sorry to inform you that this is not a proposal that would interest us."
.......................................
In this next extract, we find Clifford King has started a new life in Jones' Cove, a fictitious town in a different part of Maine. He is working as a creative writing teacher.
......................................
The first class of the autumn term convened on the 3rd. September, at quarter past seven in the evening, around my kitchen table. There were four students, counting Mother George. The others were an Irish immigrant accountant, Sean, a lady called Alison who ran the local antiques shop, and a college student called Adam. It was Adam who admitted to us that he was a major horror fanatic.
"Are you THE Clifford King?" Adam asked me as the others began a writing task I had set them.
"Is there another?" I replied, in slight puzzlement.
"Well, yeah, so you're Clifford King the horror writer?"
"Well no. I don't write horror. In fact, to be honest, I don't write much of...."
"That's quite a coincidence..." Adam chuckled. "I mean, to have two writers called Clifford King in the same state."
"Well, I'm not really a writer..."
"Were you born Clifford King?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did you have that name from birth? Have you always been called Clifford King?"
Alison chimed in: "You know, it is funny, I was thinking that very same thing. I read something by Clifford King once."
Sean joined in now: "Isn't that the writer from up at South Bristol? You know, the one's who always in the mountains somewhere writing, never gives interviews."
"What was that book of his I read now all those years ago? Oh yeah, The Hammer Under The Stairs...." There was laughter.
"Yeah, that's the one where the kid..."
"The kid finds a hammer under the stairs that gives evil, mystical powers to the holder", I jumped in.
"So you've read it?"
"Errrmmm.....No.....Well, I'm not sure...."
"You're sure you're not the real Clifford King?" Sean joked.
"Oh, he's the real Clifford King all right, just not THAT Clifford King." Mother George came to my rescue.
"So you were born with the name?"
"Huh...?"
"You really are a Clifford King. That's your birth name?"
"Oh yeah."
"Cool. What books have you written again....?"
"Oh well, I'm writing something at the moment. It's called The Vacant Flame."
"Cool. Is that horror?"
"No, like I said, I don't write horror."
"So what is it?"
"Well, it's hard to pigeon-hole. It's sort of like an experience piece."
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