Jeff Kramer

JK WORD MASTER.docx

First 5 pages Kramer.docx

7 assignments for Jeff Kramer (March 2024 conference.) Working title of book-in-progress has been changed to Mud Season, but Cementhead is still in play : First Assignment: Mud Season/Cementhead Story Statement: Driven to reinvent himself and avenge his detractors, laid-off journalist Woody Hackworth plunges into writing an online novel whose premise provokes growing disapproval from his wife and wealthy in-laws. Second Assignment: Woody Hackworth’s primary antagonist is a fictional character, one of Woody’s invention. His name is Al Holmes. He’s the evil father in-law in a novel Woody is serializing online. Al runs a corrupt sand-and-gravel business with one of the largest fleets of cement mixer trucks in Upstate, New York. His grotesque business practices and willingness to resort to violence drive the plot of Woody’’s novel and of the exterior book, where Woody must reckon with the real-life consequences of his dark literary portrayals. Ultimately, then, Woody is unwittingly his own antagonist because his creative impulses are sabotaging his most important relationships. He’s blinded by hubris, seduced by fame and slow to accept the damage his book is doing to the people who love him most. Somehow all this is funny. Third Assignment: Breakout title Mud Season Cementhead ? “Mud Season” is the more writerly title. It has intrigue and carries triple meaning: Mud Season is the bridge season in Upstate New York between Winter and Spring. It’s a muddy time of year. Mud is also the industry euphemism for wet concrete, which figures heavily, no pun intended, into the novel. Finally, the main character, Woody, has trapped himself in a muddy melodrama “Cementhead” was my previous favorite and still in the running. It addresses the stubbornness and cluelessness of the main character and, more literally, to the subject he’s writing about. ] 4. Fourth Assignment: Comparable titles Erasure by Percival Everett, while not a new novel (2001), is the subject of a new movie by Orion Pictures. It’s fabulous, btw. Erasure is the story of an African-American novelist, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who keeps being told his writing isn’t Black enough. As an act of rebellion he writes an over-the-top novel about the “Black Experience” that, much to his chagrin, becomes a hit. Accordingly, the novelist’s value’s come into conflict with his newfound success, often in a humorous way. My novel has a similar frame. Greater-than-expected success for unintended reasons forces an inner reckoning on my protagonist/ novelist, Woody Hackworth. Like Erasure, Mud Season/Cementhead handles the conflict with humor as a means of making meaningful commentary on a variety of topics. One point of departure: The success of Monk’s novel has implications for him professionally, but it does not directly create family discord the way my book does. Monk’s family discord is almost incidental to his novel. Magpie Murders (2017) by Andy Horowitz uses the novel-in-a-novel trope with great fluidity. Editor Susan Reyland begins reading the manuscript of a bestselling mystery writer, Alan Conway, whom she subsequently learns is dead from a mysterious fall. Also perplexing: The final chapter of his novel is missing. This sets up a double mystery — Reyland’s search for answers intertwining with Conway’s fictional detective trying to solve a murder. Horowitz adapted the book into a 2022 mini-series. My book, Mud Season/Cementhead, intertwines two newspaper reporters. The “real” one, Woody Hackworth, was recently fired and has turned to writing fiction as an outlet. His alter ego, Cus Stanton, is investigating environmental crimes. Woody intentionally places Cus in mortal peril while unintentionally placing himself in domestic dystopia. As with Magpie Murders, the two stories exist in relation to one another and are woven into a unified whole. Death in a Strange Country (2017) — An environmental mystery rooted in toxic waste. Less current: Confederacy of Dunces: Like Ignatius, my protagonist, Woody Hackworth, is a writer who suffers from self-delusion, grandiosity and stubbornness. He’s his own worst enemy, yet we root for him as many of his demons ring familiar. Wonderboys: A comedic novel about a novelist struggling to finish and publish a book. The challenges of Michael Chabon’s writer character, Grady, are not direct consequences of the plot of his unfinished manuscript, as they are in my book, but the voice of the narrator — a writer struggling to achieve amidst personal turmoil — create points of commonality. Breakfast of Champions: An aging writer finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. In Mud Season/Cementhead, Woody’s horror is that most of his readers suspect he’s writing about his family when he isn’t. 5. Logline A laid off newspaper columnist seeking redemption finds unexpected success serializing his toxic waste mystery thriller online, but must deal with family backlash because but many readers mistakenly believing he’s outing his in-laws as criminals. Family pressure for the protagonist to abort the novel-in-progress rises to unbearable and hilarious levels. Assignment 6: Conflict sketches. Woody experiences conflict and anxiety in ever-expanding measures whenever he encounters his wife and her family once they become aware of the content of his novel. Indeed he’s anxious and conflicted even before that point, as he tries to hide the particulars of his project during a family barbecue. Seemingly benign family gatherings are anything but for Woody. They are where he must confront the consequences of his work. Guilt, anger, defiance, self-doubt and even fear stalk Woody at every turn — and it’s mostly his own making. Moments of ultra-high drama occur when his father in-law hands him a cease-and-desist order during a boat ride and when his brother in-law and wife attempt an intervention at the family business to get him to stop writing his book. A secondary conflict is when Woody’s unfinished book is placed under severe scrutiny during a meeting at a New York literary agency. Another conflict is with his daughter who is being taunted about the book at school. The interior novel has many scenes of conflict — some quite violent. Perhaps the most memorable one is during a boat ride when the heroic main character, an investigative reporter, watches his father in-law’s hired goon mutilate a fish as a threat: Stop investigating the family business … or else. Assignment 7: Icarus, a medium-sized Upstate, New York city that might bear a resemblance to Syracuse provides the setting for Mud Season/Cementhead and the embedded novel “Fear as Mud.” There’s a gritty, forlorn quality to fictional Icarus. The town is a world in and of itself, largely ignored by tourists, ambitious young people and celebrities. All of that clashes with the main character’s lofty ambitions. Woody feels stuck, physically and emotionally. Extreme weather, geographic isolation and limited career mobility place the character in a box — a guided one. Family money softens the blow of unemployment but intensifies his awareness of his dependence. The main character’s need for external validation arises in part from believing he is “better” than his geographic circumstances. Conversely, the interior novel, the one Woody is writing, plays off the beauty and grandeur of the region. Woody needs his protagonist, Cus, Stanton to have a cause worth fighting for, and that cause is nature. There’s intrinsic tension between a grimy pragmatic-minded city with industrial roots that happens to sit amidst abundant natural splendor. Polluters need something valuable to pollute. The verdant surroundings of fictional Tiberius in the embedded novel provide the foil.