Hells Angels, NAC

Linear progression for the time being in San Francisco. The diner scene is now written. The characters of both Krug and Johnson are clear to me now, and I am enjoying writing each of them. The strand with Lewis as JG's chaperone was the last non-linear development and will be good to come back to when the time is right. Similarly, scenes featuring Emerson, Anderson and Lake have substance and are available for work when a change of writing scenery is required. I am aware at this stage that there are now several important strands under way, and I anticipate returning to them with relish.

Today I have advanced the idea of the 'Stills…' exhibition, a plan to make a photographic exhibition of scenes from this novel in progress. Yesterday, I even cast both JG (Tom Nelson) and Rizzo (Paul Thompson). I need to shoot several set-ups over the summer for the San Francisco scenes.

Here follows the bulk of the email I sent to the director of Arts Centre:

You may remember me mentioning an idea I am developing for an exhibition. You seemed interested and talked about the possibility of the NAC staging it and maybe even producing a catalogue. I said I'd drop you a line about it when I had some sort of plan for it. This is that line.

I'm not sure about the title, but the concept of exhibition is 'Stills from an unmade film of a novel in progress…' I quite like the idea of calling it 'Stills', but we'll see.

The idea is crystallised in that title; I am casting people to 'play' characters from my second novel which I plan to have written by the end of 2008. I propose to make still images inspired by key scenes from the book and exhibit them alongside drawings (storyboard) and possibly to include other text and images that are generated along the way (excerpts of correspondence between me and an airline concerning the use of an aeroplane to use as a location, for example).

I am interested in how the process of making these images and visualising them impacts on the process of writing the novel, and vice-versa. I am also very interested in the idea of there existing a kind companion piece to the novel in the shape of the catalogue, which I see as having a narrative of its own and being a work of fiction in itself. My writing partly concerns itself with people's perceptions of reality, and how it can be manipulated by outside agents, or adapted individually in order to suit circumstance, or as a mass hallucination experienced spontaneously by an entire population, and the process I'm proposing mirrors these ideas; creating a reality from a fiction (making real things happen as a result of ideas in a novel), creating another fiction from an existing fiction (the idea of a film being made, a catalogue with its own narrative), and then presenting to the public in a forum like an exhibition where the images and ideas are let loose, so to speak. Is it a film? Or isn't it? Is it a novel? Is this the story on the walls here? Is the catalogue the novel? And so on.

Let me know your thoughts

Mark

Word count: 49,590 (doesn't include other segments written in new files)