Category: writing spaces

MU Chronology: to the warehouse

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

The above is the main Yankee Candle warehouse building, which opened up for business in April of 2001. My friend Bruce and I were some of the first people offering to test out the brand spankin’ new equipment before it all went live. It’s a huge building that was built to centralize the shipping, receiving, order fulfillment and storage departments all under one roof. We worked in shipping, which is in the top left corner of this picture (where all those trailers are parked in back), with eighteen bays if I recall. The entire right side of that building from this view is multi-level pallet storage, with the receiving docks in the rear as well. I worked in this building from April 2001 up until I left in March of 2005.

This is also the main inspiration for Moulding Warehouse in the Bridgetown Trilogy. I’d actually come up with the idea for that warehouse at our older building south of there on an inventory day during my brief second-shift days, but it was here that I’d solidified the idea and expanded upon it. I remember early on that I pulled a few building managers aside and asked about the specs, explaining my idea of turning the storage bays into a sort of multi-level cubicle hotel of sorts. They were rather amused by my creativity but confirmed that it could actually work as the framework was solid and buried deep into the concrete floor. [Note: the building’s name in the trilogy comes from XTC member Colin Moulding, one of my many Tuckerizations in this universe.]

While revisiting the MU chronology recently, I further realized that the date I started working in this building does in fact line up with when I wrote those scenes about the awakened converging upon Moulding Warehouse and Nehalé Usarai worrying about keeping everything under control. I remember taking my time on A Divison of Souls for fear of rushing it like I had with The Phoenix Effect, so while I was definitely working on it nearly every day from this point onwards, I was hitting probably around five hundred words to begin with. I’d slowly expand on that over the course of writing it, and by the time I started The Persistence of Memories I was aiming more towards a thousand. My favorite thing to do during slow moments of my shift was taking a bit of scrap paper and working out the next few scenes (often with one of those many boxes we shifted as a temporary desk), so that when my nightly writing sessions began I could start immediately.

And for a sense of its vastness, below is a shot of my department from the upper level of the shipping/receiving offices (itself an inspiration for the warehouse mezzanine scenes in the trilogy) from a video I found online sometime ago. Our job was to build pallets from the boxes that came down those chutes, wrap them up in plastic (the wrapper machines were underneath the chutes) and get them into the trailers (the bays are at the wall out of shot to the right). This seems to be filmed in the summer when it was relatively light, as this area would be filled to the brim and full of chaos during the Q4 holiday season. It would take us a good couple of minutes to walk from our department to the front of the building when we left for the day. This is why Moulding comes across as an incredibly large warehouse where several characters could either find privacy or gather together in large numbers with room to spare.

It was certainly an exhausting and very noisy job at times, especially during the holiday season, but at the same time it was an enjoyable one that kept me constantly moving instead of sedentary. I was blessed by the fact that it gave me all sorts of time to think about my writing with very little interruption, and a schedule that provided me with a broad length of personal time to work with. It’s an extremely productive benchmark that’s been tough to reach ever since, but these days I’ve been doing pretty good at getting close.

More on the MU chronology

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

As part of this ongoing Trilogy Remastering project, I’ve been trying to nail down some of the start dates of the books. I’ve long had a habit of timestamping my work (especially longhand, though I sometimes forget to do so when it’s straight to Word), so the accuracy is pretty good most of the time. I have the start and end dates of Books 2 and 3 confirmed. However, I was still using MS Write when I started writing A Division of Souls and those files don’t always provide what I need. It always bothered me in later years that I could never quite nail down when that first book was started, other than remembering that it took around a year and a half to write.

Recently, however, I think I got a bit of clarity on it. A rough listing so far:

8/7/1998 — The Phoenix Effect (longhand version) stopped
8/19/1998 — The Phoenix Effect (PC version) completed
8/25/1998 — Keepers of the Wards (first aborted TPE sequel) started
5/5/1999 — Keepers of the Wards stopped
Summer/Autumn 1999 — work on revision for The Phoenix Effect, submission to various agencies
12/9/1999 — The Veil (second aborted TPE sequel) started
2/22/2000 — The Veil stopped
4/23/2000 — The Mihari* (first aborted rewrite of The Phoenix Effect) started
6/??/2000 — A Division of Souls (second rewrite of TPE) started (originally titled The Mihari: The Division of Souls)
8/??/2000 — Plans to leave HMV, start looking for new job (early August)
8/12/2000 — Interview for job at Yankee Candle (Saturday open-house)
9/??/2000 — Official final day at HMV (possibly 1st or 8th)
9/11/2000 — Start job at YC
11/??/2000 — Switch from 2nd to 1st shift at YC (7am-3pm, shifted back one hour by early 2001)

That last entry is important. Because of that early end time, I quickly realized that I could utilize those afternoons to do my comic book and CD runs in the Amherst/Hadley area (a quick twenty minute trip down Route 116 from Deerfield on Wednesdays), come home and relax for a bit, have dinner with the family, then work on Division for a few hours in the evenings. That would become my constant writing schedule for the next few years until I moved out in March of 2005.

The above timeline sounds about right, as I’d had the idea to completely rewrite TPE from scratch during the spring and summer of 2000 during my last months at HMV. I was just loath to actually go through with it until I knew that alternate routes wouldn’t work, and I’d been dealing with a lot of day job stress at the time. I didn’t want to overburden myself if I didn’t have the spoons.

This plan, however, became a long-game plan to fully change how I wrote. I suppose these days you could use the word ‘vibe’ to describe what I’d been doing; I’d come up with interesting ideas but I was still focusing on the mood of the story rather than the prose or even the lyricism of it, and it was painfully obvious that it wasn’t working. I went into ADoS with the idea that my prose should have more heft and personality instead of the Hollywood bombast. I also went in knowing that this might take a while, but I was willing to put in the time and the work.

That obstacle of working second shift at YC did put a damper on things a bit, as I wasn’t always able to get any work done in the morning and early afternoon before work, which frustrated me. But when the offer to switch came up I immediately went for it. And for the next four years I worked on that long-game plan, writing the trilogy and getting better at my craft.

**

[* – Yes, The Mihari was the original title of the trilogy, a word cribbed from a Japanese pocket dictionary back in 1997 that means “to watch over”. It’s the original name of the Mendaihu, with the Shenaihu having the Japanese word misuteru instead, meaning ‘to abandon’. I knew it was shameless appropriation even then, but for now it was just an anime-inspired placeholder until I came up with something better. The terms Mendaihu and Shenaihu are relatively recent, created in 2011 when I started work on the initial revision for its eventual self-publishing.]

Thirty Years On: Life Changes

Jon ChaissonLeave a comment

While I’ve been finishing up the current revision of The Persistence of Memories, I started looking at the list of what I call the Mendaihu Universe Legacy Soundtracks. Out of the thousands of albums I’d listened to over the years I wrote what would become the Bridgetown Trilogy, these are the titles I equate to my writing sessions, whether they were in the family basement, the Shoebox apartment in Back Bay, or the sweltering summer in Allston. It’s been a fun reminiscence looking at this list and revisiting some of my favorites over the years.

And while I was at it, I pulled out a spreadsheet I’d made some time ago of a writing chronology. I’d gone through my poetry chapbooks, personal journals, trunked ideas and outtakes, pretty much every creative thing I knew I still had on hand. I entered it all in and sorted it by date just to see what I was working on when. It’s an interesting read on a personal level, as it reminds me when certain life events happened, what moods I was in, when I came up with certain ideas, and so on.

What I found while going through all this is how much my life changed in September of 1996.

I’d had a handful of ‘here until further notice so I can save up/pay bills/get out of debt’ jobs since moving home a year earlier. I left the radio station that June and started a temp job at my mom’s place of work soon after. I’m pretty sure it was late August when she pointed out the ad for HMV, and by mid-September I had the job, starting on the 23rd.

Two things happened that month, one right after the other. One, I really needed to get my own car at that point. I couldn’t continue to borrow someone else’s, so I managed to score a 1992 sky-blue Chevy Cavalier for two grand and only a few thousand miles on it. It pretty much looked like the one below, and I’d drive it into the ground over the next four years on all those commutes and road trips around New England. I called it the Mach 5, of course. I knew that any job I tried out for would not be in the immediate area, and this gave me so much more freedom. I’d buy a few local road atlases to stuff behind the front seats to get me where I needed to go. I used to park it in the grove out front, back when we had multiple cars in the driveway.

And two, I’d finally decided that it was time for me to move my PC down to the basement. I knew it was sometime in late summer that I’d decided on it, and I’d chosen to do it for a few reasons. The thing was a good few years old and had a rather loud fan, and given my penchant for staying up later than the others in the house, I didn’t want to keep them awake. I also wanted what would essentially be a work area with minimal distraction, and a place I could specifically label as my own personal space.

And we certainly had the room down there, the spot in the top picture formerly only housing a few chairs among other things near the wall phone. I utilized a desk (and a boombox, the one you see there) that had been my uncle’s, a director’s chair I’d had during my Boston years, and my dad provided the short filing cabinet. Made a few trips over to Walmart to pick up various desk organizers, 3″ disks and other stationery. My trusty milk crates from my college years got a new life underneath in the footwell area where I stashed three-ring binders of printouts. Snacks were hidden away in those open shelves, and 12-can boxes of Mountain Dew would soon make an appearance as well.

Mind you, I wasn’t down there with any sense of frequency, at least not yet. I think that wouldn’t happen until summer of 1997 when I chose to start transcribing the longhand work I’d started with The Phoenix Effect. That novel project had started in March of that year and by the summer I’d realized that it would make a lot more sense if I revised as I transcribed in order to make it better instead of completing each draft one after the other. And it probably wasn’t until summer 1998 that I finally did start going down there on a frequent basis, once I finished TPE and started in on the major revision work, multiple trunked attempts at sequels and related stories, and eventually what would become A Division of Souls.

But it all started there, thirty years ago in September of 1996, when I made those two life changing decisions.

[Side note: It wasn’t always called the Belfry, even though I refer to it as such these days. I don’t recall the exact date at the moment (surprisingly, it’s not on that chronology spreadsheet), but I’m pretty sure it was the summer of either 2000 or 2001 when two bats entered the basement through an open door and hilarity ensued. Thus the reason why my writing nook in the cellar of my family’s house was nicknamed The Belfry thereafter.]