CHERRY LANE - The Novella
Chapter by chapter, week to week...
THE WRITING PROCESS BEHIND CHERRY LANE
One night I had a very vivid and violent dream. When I woke the visions of this dream were still dancing before my eyes. It was a haunting experience and I felt a painful anxiety crawling under my skin, making me physically wretched.
It was when I was living in a dilapidated hotel in Burbank with my girlfriend of the time. It was a squalid existence, sharing a bathroom and a kitchen with the other, transient occupants. The only thing to do in that 1 room apartment was to fuck or write or drink.
I was pitiful with the wine then and drinking didn't take away the illness that was plaguing me from this dream. It had been just a few months since I finished my first novel, Monkey Me, and I was feeling emotionally and creatively spent. And then this dream slapped me back to life that hot summer morning.
It poured out onto the pages I scribbled and became the novella Cherry Lane.
Cherry Lane was a different process of writing than I had experienced with Monkey Me.
Monkey Me was a sober affair, a meticulous, calculated and painful process, every word part of an equation that had to equal up to a specific sum. I was frightened every moment I wrote it, frightened that my equation would fall apart and my proof would never materialize, but it didn't fall apart, and it all came together in the end exactly as it needed to. I look at the books these pop fiction writers pump out, how easy and painless that must feel, producing a simple to digest, emotionally void piece of writing.
Anyway, Cherry Lane was different than Monkey Me. I would wake up and write until I went to sleep. When I was hungry I went to a corner restaurant to eat and write, always the same restaurant. Large amounts of red wine smoothed the edges of my story and it poured out effortlessly. I would write then edit, then destroy, write then edit then destroy, what was a stack of pages was widdled down to a tight and concise package.
Then, one day it stopped, surprisingly and completely, as if a gushing hydrant had been promptly switched off. I could still see the story unfolding in front of my eyes though, all the way to an ending that was almost there, but I couldn't bring myself to string the words together to form a sentence. I was disappointed and when I couldn't bear agonizing over it any longer, when I couldn't drink too much or too little to jump start the process again, I shoved it away and forgot about it.
Almost three years went by with little or no thought of Cherry Lane until one day, as I sat in a "mystified" state alone in my apartment in Prague, the story unleashed itself onto me as if a movie was being played before my very eyes. I sat there for almost two hours as the scenes and characters unfolded once again, exactly as they had before. I knew that the time to finish it was soon coming.
Six weeks later Christmas came and I was off from my duties with the film company I was working for. I sat down at my word processor and banged out Cherry Lane in 5 days, but it wasn't the novella, it was the screenplay. I showed it around, got the thumbs up that I knew I would get from my cronies and other industry players but something wasn't right, the ending was wrong. I filed it away again, this time for about a year and a half, and accidentally rediscovered it for a third time while looking through some old files. I read it and changed the ending then and there. It was finally finished, but it was just a screenplay and still an unfinished novella. "But," I told myself, "at least I have my ending."
That was just a few months ago and there have been many other writings in between my beloved Cherry Lane. But now I present it for the first time, in the novella form, read only by me. Not a publisher, agent or friend has even had a glimpse of it.
I am pleased to be releasing a chapter a week as I reread it, edit it and write the final two chapters, maybe three, we shall see...
SPECIAL NOTE:
In negotiations... Due to Zach LeBeau being in negotiations with publishing houses and/or production companies regarding his novel and screenplay, we must restrict access to Cherry Lane at this time.
Thank you for your support and we are sorry for any inconvenience.
