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.

Morning blog, clearing by midday

Things that seem perfectly clear to me, the writer, may appear a bit foggy to you, the reader.  The title of this blog, for instance, has meaning to me but probably has you scratching your head.   So this is where I turn up the air and try to clear some of the fog for you.

If you read the About Me section of this blog, you will learn that Lost in the Ivy is the title of my first novel.  Just this morning I mailed out a signed contract to have it published by PublishAmerica.  Part of the reason I started this blog was that I was looking for a way to promote my book.   This seemed like a logical launching pad and it was a way to keep anyone out there who might be interested in it posted on when and where they can expect to find it.  I also thought that other new authors or wannabe authors out there might be able to learn something from my own adventures and misadventures with writing a first novel and finding a publisher for it.

You might reasonably still be wondering from where the title Lost in the Ivy derived.  Well, of course, it came from someplace out of my rather small brain.   So this is where I suggest that you hold on tightly, as you are about to go into the inner workings and malfunctionings of my thought processes.  

Okay, here we go.   Lost in the Ivy is set primarily in Wrigleyville, the neighborhood surrounding Wrigley Field, the baseball home of the Chicago Cubs.  If you know major-league baseball, you probably know that Wrigley's outfield walls are covered with ivy.  About once or twice a year, a baseball gets stuck or lost in the ivy.  In such a case, the outfielder is supposed to throw up his arms as a signal to the umpire that the baseball can't be recovered.  If the umpire accepts the outfielder's position, it becomes an automatic ground-rule double.  This phenomenon was noted by ESPN.com columnist Rob Neyer last year in a column titled "Ballpark quirks at their best."

The main character in Lost in the Ivy, Charley Hubbs, is lost and trying to find himself -- something that becomes all the more complicated when he finds himself charged with murder.  So the title serves as a double-entendre -- relating to both the place and the person.

So, we're as clear as mud now, right?