Hi-ho, Silver, away! The writing process revealed...

My blog readership, outside of immediate family, currently stands at one.  This reader, who will hereinafter be known as the Lone Ranger, suggested that a topic for this journal be the writing process that resulted in a 340-page manuscript titled Lost in the Ivy (i.e., the story behind the story).  As the Lone Ranger knows, the story behind the story is a long story.  Lost in the Ivy was four years in the making.  There were many times that I thought I would never write the words The End in my novel.  Yet eventually, after many stops and starts, I did.  I don't think I would have reached that point if I didn't have faith in my original idea. 

As I noted in an earlier posting, Lost in the Ivy is set in Wrigleyville, the neighborhood that has sprouted around Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs baseball team.  This neighborhood has changed considerably since I lived there.  When I moved into Wrigleyville almost 10 years ago, in the waning days of the summer of 1995, it was not the Midwest version of Mardi Gras that it has become today when the Cubs are playing ball.  I recall walking up to the ticket booth at Wrigley Field for the last homestand, buying a ticket and walking right into the stadium.  Today that would never happen without the assistance of those folks who kindly sell tickets at three or four times the face-value on the streets to suckers like me.  As the popularity of the Cubs and Wrigley Field has grown, so has the neighborhood.  Half-million dollar condos have replaced the $500-a-month studio apartments where I once lived.  Hip restaurant and bar chains now litter the landscape.  Much of the charm of the Wrigleyville I knew -- and wrote about in my novel -- has sadly vanished.

When I moved to Wrigleyville, I was more than a little naive.  That's how I ended up renting a studio apartment which bordered Boys Town, Chicago's gay district.  Of course I didn't know it at the time but that apartment building on Bradley Place would eventually serve as the primary setting for my first novel.  I will leave it there for today's journal entry, but, rest assured, there is a lot more to follow in this story behind the story.