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Akard
Drearstone |
Synopsis | Background | MS. Info | Sample Chapters | Contents
Writing InventoryThe novel, Akard Drearstone, and all writing on this page copyright 2005 by Michael D. Smith
Jan Placemat, a twelve year-old girl at the Akard Drearstone commune north of Austin, Texas, watches Akard and his fellow musicians trip on LSD before their first public concert. Jan, in love with the twenty-seven year-old bass guitarist Jim Piston, escorts the freaking Jim to the concert on the commune's parking lot, where, to everyone's shock, thousands of Drearstone Group fans have congregated.
During a break at the concert, the musicians discover that Dallas businessmen have bought Freeway Accident Records along with the Drearstone Group's manager, Harray Andreality, onetime member of the commune. Commune member Bill Punish is invited to play guitar on "Overturned Runway," but narcs raid the concert and kidnap him.
At the Overturned Runway Bar, named in honor of their song, the musicians begin to realize how famous they're becoming. Michelle Swamp, journalist and fiancée of Harray Andreality, explains the principles of her new philosophy, Exponentialism.
Declaring bassist Piston to be the core genius of the group, Michelle interviews Jim for Worthless Weekend Sunday Magazine and seduces him during the interview.
Harray and Michelle fight about Buddhism on their wedding night. Enroute to the reception at the commune, Harray plunges into metaphysical horror. To soothe him, Jan takes him to see her horse at the barn--but they discover Bill Punish's body packed in ice.
Harray's letter of resignation from Freeway Accident Records evolves into a lengthy suicide note as he describes the dissolution of his short marriage, the collapse of the Drearstone Group, the arrest of his boss on murder charges, and the killing perpetuated by the other band he manages, Emory Bowl's swinish Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.
As Jan's parents ignore her self-destructive stones, the Drearstone Group listlessly records songs at her father's motorcycle repair shop. A dull take of "Overturned Runway" culminates in Jim pulling a gun on Akard--supposedly as a joke. But Jan realizes Jim is a killer, and can't understand why she's still in love with him.
Jim Piston's secret novel describes a post-World War III Texas in which he's enslaved at a commune dedicated to making a plutonium bomb. Crudely using friends and enemies as characters in his story, Jim describes how he sails a crashed Air Force flying saucer on a desperate ocean trip to South Carolina, where he repairs the saucer with Akard Drearstone but crashes it in remote Alaska, later dying in an inexplicable swordfight with Akard.
At an all-day beach concert, Jan does LSD for the first time but flips out. As she's loaded into an ambulance, she faints to see a bloodied, unconscious Jim Piston shoved into the vehicle with her.
Keyboardist Harley Krishna writes his account of the beach concert, describing how Jim Piston shot drummer Pete Sponge in the head.
Reporter Kenneth Stuka covers the trial of Jim Piston for Ungodly Procreative New Jersey Suburbs Music Magazine. As Piston testifies, Harley Krishna enters the courtroom with a puma.
Six years later the eighteen year-old Jan returns home from her first semester at college. She fends off an addled Drearstone Group fan on the bus journey as she tries to avoid thinking about Jim Piston stalking her in Houston. Ex-convict Piston materializes in West Texas at Akard's new commune to brandish a gun one more time. But it's Jan who will take his place as bass guitarist in a revitalized Akard Drearstone Group.
My first two novels, Nova Scotia and The Fifty-First State of Consciousness, were practice novels. Akard Drearstone was my real first novel and my attachment to it has been deep. Akard was created in several different eras:
- Draft One, February 1976 to March 1978. I'd planned to express everything I could even consider expressing, and was astonished at what flowed out of me: dozens of characters, bizarre unfolding plots and subplots. Looking back on Draft One years later, I realized its 1,587 pages contained one good novel, one bad novel, and three mediocre novels.
- Draft Two, May 1978 to October 1980, was an era of endless revisions and a growing awareness of the novel's obesity and other shortcomings, as well as learning a lot of new techniques for correcting these faults. Also cropping up were problems with attachment to the Holy Words of Draft One, writer's ego trip, ambition, publishing paranoia, etc. The happy astonishment of Draft One gave way to a determined, ongoing worry about Draft Two.
- I typed 300 pages of ms. to September 1981, at which time I realized I was tired of this novel, that it no longer expressed my current concerns, and that the physical typing was taking too much of my writing time. I had two other novels going by then and so could afford to realize that Akard Drearstone wasn't everything.
- New Akard 1979. In 1984, realizing I had no backup copy of the 300 ms. pages and the remaining chapters, I made a photocopy of twenty of the chapters (out of the original thirty-one) and called these 760 pages the finished novel, titled New Akard 1979. (In 1976 I had set the plot in the far "future" of 1979...) I was satisfied with this version, which because of the cut chapters had a more mature tone than Draft Two, and I was proud that I'd lopped off 50% of the original novel and strengthened the rest considerably.
- The 1992-1994 revision. Years later, after several other novels, I realized there was some unfinished business with Akard. After the disastrous Linstar play of 1992, I needed to do something fun. Looking at New Akard 1979 afresh, I rewrote it with a recent paradigm of trying to put myself inside the mind of a twelve year-old girl as the main character--as a test of "Shakespearian fairness" to characters. The finished 1994 Akard Drearstone was a good synthesis of all the personal "Akard myths" over two decades.
- The 2004-2005 revision. But the end of Chapter 1 bothered me for years, and I always felt that if I could just go in and revise that one thing, the novel would be perfect. In the 1994 version, the main character, twelve year-old Jan, witnesses Akard and his girlfriend having sex. The point was, of course, to drag the innocent girl through the irresponsible, drug-addled lives of the main characters, but a) it should build up more gradually--and tastefully--and b) it should show her struggling to free herself from the insanity to later become a musician in her own right. So I modified Chapter 1 to have drummer Pete Sponge lead Jan away from Akard and girlfriend before much happens. But opening up that chapter to revision got me looking at the rest of the novel, and I saw a lot of unnecessary verbiage as well as a few bathetic scenes. Before I knew what I was doing I'd committed to a through revision. In eight weeks I completed a forced march through the fifteen chapters, cutting a 722 page ms. down to 574 pages. Overall I kept the 1994 synthesis, leaving the plot the same but making some notable changes as well as editing some sloppy prose.
The central vision for Akard was my secret desire after graduating from Rice to live in an artistic commune. Since I couldn't do that (and probably would've hated it anyway), the next best thing was to write about it. Akard emerged full-scale in one day in August 1975 as I was playing with scraps of pink paper at work to construct a satire record album cover. Two single-spaced pages of notes I typed out a few days later charted the course of the first draft. From August 1975 to February 1976 I heavily inventoried dreams, recent ideas, our move to Dallas, and my bleak employment in an insurance company, to "throw everything" into a what I knew would be a massive work unlike anything I'd done before. It may be that the stretching involved in Akard, the disbelief that so much expression could flow out, is the reason I've been so attached to it. And of course it was Akard's tone and methods that began the evolution towards the rest of my novels.
I've had the idea of someday creating an Additional and Alternate Akard. There are so many subplots, chapters, characters, and alternate versions of each that I could have an additional 700 pages of Akard-related material. Normally I forget second drafts and mid-drafts, but in 1999 I went back and reread it all, finding high energy in these alternate versions despite all the contradictions involved.
Written
1976-1981 (Version 1), 1984 (Version 2) 1992-1994 (Version 3), 2004-2005 (Version 4)
Chapters
15
MS.
574 pages (Times New Roman 12, double-spaced)
Words
153,000
Currently input in
Word 2000
Previously published
No parts yet published
1. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse I Commune life is introduced along with the main character, twelve year-old Jan Placemat. 3. Overturned Runway Band members, drunk at a bar, realize they're becoming famous. 5. Dostoyevsky Commune I Harray and Michelle's wedding night, Part I, during which Harray experiences Buddhist Nothingness. 11. The Bishops Jan has a bad psychedelic trip at the eight-hour Underground Tunnel in the Air concert. 13. The Piston Raid The trial of Jim Piston as covered by Ungodly Procreative New Jersey Suburbs Music Magazine.
1. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse I
2. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse II
3. Overturned Runway
4. The Psychobeauty
5. Dostoyevsky Commune I
6. Dostoyevsky Commune II
7. Masturbation in Denmark
8. Bloodtunnels I
9. Bloodtunnels II
10. The Holy Dark Ages
11. The Bishops
12. A, B, C, D, E
13. The Piston Raid
14. Akard Drearstone
15. Epilog
Writing Inventory
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03/28/08