If I am going to be adding one item about the novel a week for the next year, some of them are likely to be pretty obscure, and many of them will be of limited interest to most of you. It still is kind of strange and surreal, in a naval-gazey way, to dig back through 22 years of work on this project and to see how much has changed and (surprisingly) how much is intact from the very earliest versions.
Today we’re at 50 weeks out and such a big round number feels momentous, so I’m going to post something really vintage: this is the first time the word “urbantasm” ever popped up.
This script isn’t the beginning of the idea. I remember in summer 1995 I had tried stabbing out a play I called Agamemnon’s Numbers, in which the mythological Greek general had stomped around a post-industrial cityscape trying to “conquer” it (my memory is really hazy here; I can’t find any copies of that script, such as it was). It didn’t work out; I was just name dropping mythology without really knowing what it meant and I didn’t really have a plot either, but some of the concepts reemerged here.
This script isn’t a rough draft, either. I didn’t think of Urbantasm as a novel until sometime in summer 1996. I started drafting it in June or July and kept going until April 1997 when I stopped maybe 80% of the way through.
This particular script was sort of a liminal thing where I knew I wanted a romantic(ist) autopsy of Flint’s soul, but I was envisioning it more as an hourlong piece of histrionic theater with symbol-characters as opposed to the modern day Les Misérables which was the first coherent model for the story. But there are traces: Victor Hugo does make an appearance as a “philosopher” along with Billy Durant (?) and “Albert Einstein or Someone Else.” The story features a long walk through the city at night which (tiny spoiler) is still present in 2017 version. And the chief symbol-character, Wills Plasm, would quickly evolve into John Bridge who you’ll meet on page 1 next year. As for the title An Urbantasm, my brother was reading Phantasmagoria by Lewis Carroll that year and I thought “portmanteau is awesome!”
Yeah, this here is all rather raw, and I’m slightly embarrassed sharing it today, in its “subtle as a falling anvil” approach. Then again, seventeen-year old me could write some pretty good stage directions. It’s all good for a poignant, nostalgic smile today.
