Synopsis |
Background | MS.
Info | Contents
Writing Inventory
The novel, Akard Drearstone, and all
writing on this page copyright 2011 by Michael D. Smith
Synopsis
Jan Pace, 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
informal commune concert in May 1975. 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, the musicians discover that Dallas businessmen have bought Freeway Accident Records along with the Drearstone Group’s manager, Harray Andreall, onetime member of the commune. Commune member Bill Dunn 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 Morgan, journalist and fiancée of Harray Andreall, 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 Dunn’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.
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 aim a gun at Akard one more time. But it’s Jan who will take his place as bass guitarist in a revitalized Akard Drearstone Group.
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Background
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 a disastrous play called Linstar in 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 2010 tune up. The 2010 version strengthened the work
and shortened it to about 137,000 words. The largest cut came when I realized
that Jim Piston's secret novel (115 pages at full length in the 1994
manuscript, 62 pages as "novel fragments" in the 2005 version),
really wasn't a necessary part of the novel.
- The 2011 Revision. In addition to cutting any lingering references
to Jim's novel, which were simply confusing, I finally weaned myself from
a longstanding attachment to my 1970's Dickensian character names (e.g.,
Ted Placemat, Harray Andreality, and a dozen others), though Pete Sponge
was recognized as a stage name along with Harley Krishna. I also trimmed
the novel by about 4,000 words and I now believe that all the remaining
ones are important and keep the story moving along. Finally finishing Akard was an amazing
experience. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t truly
done until this last version. And scanning the 1976-78 Akard Draft 1
helped me close the “real” Akard. As mentioned
above, if the Ur-Akard was one good novel, one bad one, and three mediocre
ones, what I have left is the one good novel. Almost literally so. Its 132,758 words
are 20.006677% of the
scanned rough draft’s 661,581.
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.
Though I probably won't ever do this, 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 there is a lot of good energy in these alternate versions despite all the contradictions involved.
In May-July 2011, I finally realized a long-standing desire to scan in the
1976-1978 rough draft of Akard Drearstone. While Draft 1 still needs a
final proofing, it's basically a readable digital copy. The
7/19/11 blog entry covers this in much more detail. And again,
it seems I needed to do this in order to come back to the final novel and
perfect it.
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MS.
Info
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Written:
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1976-1981 (Version 1), 1984 (Version 2) 1992-1994
(Version
3), 2004-2005 (Version 4), 2010 (Version 5), 2011 (Version 6)
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|
Chapters:
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66
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MS.:
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542 pages (Times New Roman 12, double-spaced)
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|
Words:
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132,758
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Currently
input in:
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Word 2000
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Previously
published:
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No
parts yet published
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Contents
1. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
2. The Akard Drearstone Group Presents: A Commune Concert
3. Down by the Litter Box
4. Katy Regan Journa
5. Jim’s Room
6. Regarding the Cinder Block Incident
7. The Beer King
8. The Anti-Forest
9. Barbarians Without Consequence
10. Rumors of Gathering Insanity
11. The Unsullied Mind
12. A Herd of Blunt Animals
13. Aftermath on the Parking Lot
14. Overturned Runway
15. Isn’t She Great?
16. Possibly Underground Tunnel in the Air?
17. Jimmy Blackmere
18. The Psychobeauty
19. Mindfulness
20. The Group Discusses His Death
21. Genius and Metaphysical Horror
22. His Advice on Dope and Women
23. Flowing in All Directions, or, Which is My True Self?
24. The Two Percent
25. Out the Window
26. Dostoyevsky Commune
27. The Wizard Dyson Annersnex
28. Welcome to the Commune
29. Masturbation in Denmark, July 23
30. Masturbation in Denmark, July 29-July 31
31. Masturbation in Denmark, August 3-August 4
32. Bleemblo Motorcycle Repair
33. The Waterfall of Creation
34. First Scene of the Videotape
35. Blood Tunnels
36. Anti-Consciousness
37. Jim Screws Up a Take
38. Can’t You Take a Joke?
39. The Buried Dream
40. That Other Infinite Spaceships May Exist That are Evil
41. The Exponential Imperative
42. The Bishops
43. A Map of this Entire Sector of the Universe
44. I Never Realized Weeds Were So Beautiful
45. Paramedics
46. The Anti-Jim Piston Conspiracy
47. A Full Description of the Insanity of the Underground Tunnel in the Air Concert on Saturday, August 30, 1975
48. Demented BS at Lunch
49. I Find a Bowl
50. I Pay Homage to the Concept of Pete Sponge
51. The Musicians Crap Around
52. A, B, C, D, E
53. My Astral Projection
54. The Air Conditioner
55. The Failure of Akard Drearstone
56. Day One: Harris County Courthouse
57. Interlude: Investigations Later That Night
58. Day Two: A, B, C, D, E
59. Day Three: Jim Piston's Day Before the Lord
60. Akard Drearstone
61. Death of a Motorcycle
62. Eighteen
63. How We Lost Track of Our Friend
64. Across the Commune
65. At the Fence
66. Drearstone Corporation
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Writing Inventory
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11/24/11