The long, convoluted history of Frāctus

I’ve been working on Frāctus for over five years. When asked about what it felt like to spend so much time on a project, I’d say, “Unbearably hard. Painful. Omnipresent. Though at times, breathtaking and wonderful. It’s like I’ve spent the past five years in labor, and now I’m about to give birth to something.” Deep inside, I thought:

Or maybe I was just constipated for five years and I’m about to take a massive shit.

Ask me again in a few months.

Frāctus has an interesting origin story. Many years ago, while attending film school, I wrote a feature-length screenplay titled Lying, Cheating, Drunken Bastards. The story was set in a bar called Spanky’s Tavern and spanned one crazy weekend. Structured as a series of vignettes, each part featured a unique point-of-view character from a large cast of misfits, all of whom had a connection to each other or Spanky’s. Their paths inevitably intersect—or collide—so each character assumes a side, background, or supporting role in each other’s stories. In essence, we see the same story repeated from different perspectives, filtered through the subjective lens of character point of view.

There were a few things that excited me about that framework:

1. The intersecting paths created a fun opportunity to play with irony. Each story unfolds linearly, so the dramatic irony intensifies as the story progresses. Since the reader knows the fate of the characters before they do (or so they think!), this can create tension and suspense.  
2. Since the story is told from different perspectives and degrees of subjectivity, this allowed me to subvert reader expectations while simultaneously conveying something interesting about how we all perceive and experience the world differently—the Rashomon (1950) effect.
3. The setting, an urban red-light district, was fun to write about, and a world I knew intimately well. I worked as a bartender for many years. I’ve seen some shit. In the years since, I’ve reflected on that time in my life and realized I had a lot to say about it. Exploring those memories jarred loose a few residual fragments of trauma, too, and what better outlet to dump them than fiction?        

One summer, when I was an aimless twenty-something, I saw an ad for a bartender position at a bowling alley. I don’t recall why, but it piqued my interest, so I applied and was surprised when I was invited in for an interview. I had no idea what to expect or how to prepare for it. I had zero experience, knew nothing of alcohol, and even less about bowling. In terms of personality, if you were to draw up a prototype for the archetypal bartender, I would be the complete opposite: soft-spoken, introverted, and highly sensitive.

When I arrived for the interview, to my surprise, I discovered it was a live tryout and I was one of three others competing for the same position. What’s worse was that it was a weekday night in the offseason, so for most of the night, the bartender prospects outnumbered the customers. Midway through, a small group of misfits dropped in and made it clear they were on a personal mission to heckle me and the other prospects.

It turned out I had a skill in my back pocket that proved helpful: ballbusting. To be a skilled ballbuster, one must be a good sport about it. In other words, be able to dish it out and take it. What started as verbal sparring evolved into a witty tennis match, and that group and I spent the rest of the evening entertaining each other, to the chagrin of the other prospects. I got the job, and that group came in to visit every weekend for the next few years. 

When I told my girlfriend at the time that I got the job, she laughed in my face. Not in a malicious way; to her, the idea was preposterous. She wasn’t wrong!

“There would be no way you are going to survive for long,” she said, and she was right. I didn’t survive. I thrived.

There were many times my introversion and sensitivity made things difficult. The sensory overload alone was rough, and I found I was quickly drained of energy on certain nights when it was busy, but not crazy busy. The crazy nights were easier because there was so much going on that I didn’t have to expend energy on conversation. When I would stare down a crowded bar of thirsty patrons, sometimes packed four, five, or more deep, and the adrenaline hit, and the night flew by.

There were many things I liked about that time in my life. I enjoyed the mixology aspect; it was a new creative outlet to explore. I also liked the physical aspect of it. Running in circles for hours at a time was an excellent form of cardio. Maybe it was the challenge that drove me, or how it forced me to come out of my shell. I grew up in a time when being introverted was seen as a form of shyness or as a deficiency to overcome. It’s neither of those things, but that’s a topic for another day. I think I simply adapted and found a way to feed off the energy of the bar crowd. Most of the time. On some nights, the vibe was off, and the atmosphere was suffocating.

I spent the next ten years or so working from a humble bowling alley bar to hip martini bars and restaurants, and eventually, I worked at an ultra-popular brewery on Cleveland’s Bourbon Street equivalent—West 25th Street. Although I was able to make it work, there was something about that life that wore me down. Maybe it was the time I was picked up and slammed against a wall, nearly stabbed by a box cutter. Or the many fights and brawls I saw or had to break up. It could have been the pitcher of beer I served a guy during a concert. It was a local Oktoberfest. I remember that because after he finished, he went to another bar, and on his way home from there, he drove his car into a utility pole. It knocked out the power, moments before last call. He didn’t survive.

Sadly, I have many stories like that. Few with happy endings. I also saw a broad spectrum of humanity. Some of it was nice, lovely even, but there was also a dark aspect that overshadowed the good.

Bringing it back around, my experiences in that world were crowding my mind. They needed an outlet, so I started writing what would later become Lying, Cheating, Drunken Bastards (LCDB). As the story developed, I used the setting to explore power dynamics and social hierarchies. The bar at the center of it, Spanky’s Tavern, became a microcosm of society at large. The bartenders became symbols of the bourgeoisie, while the dishwashers and barbacks represented the proletariat. The managers and owners were the oligarchy. And each other bar, with its own patrons, vibe, and style, became a metaphor for different cultures. The relationships between the various bars became political theater.

At one point, I even had a story that served as a thinly-veiled allegory of the Gaza Strip conflict. It featured two neighboring strip clubs: one named SINagogue, the other, Gaza STRIP. The owners were old friends and business partners who, after a falling out, became deadlocked in an endless feud over property lines and bad blood. Mind you, that story was written many years ago, in a different time. It had a happy ending, based on research into proposed real-world solutions for peaceful resolutions to the conflict. Recent events led me to scrap it, for obvious reasons.

Honestly, Lying, Cheating, Drunken Bastards (LCDB) was a bad script. I was in the early stages of honing my craft. In truth, I’m still honing it. I firmly believe that writing is a lifelong pursuit. LCDB was genuinely funny and had a good foundation, but it lacked in several areas. I struggled mightily to infuse emotional honesty into my early writing. The stories were absurd and, at times, cerebral, but lacked the emotional heart they needed. My characters were also very one-dimensional. Case in point: one of the vignettes called The Roommates.

The Roommates was a story about David and Nathan, two straight guys, Spanky’s regulars, best friends, and roommates. The conflict in the story centered on David’s decision not to renew the lease on his apartment and the subsequent “break-up” with his roommate, Nathan. The story played like a romantic comedy—a bromantic comedy, if you will—that satirized the challenges young men have in navigating the emotional complexities of relationships, especially with other men. I adapted the vignette to a short film and produced it, with the help of a small army of fellow film students. It was a tremendous undertaking, cost a fortune, and the end result was a deeply flawed film that had flashes of cool, but it simply didn’t work.

Despite the flaws, making The Roommates was an incredible experience that I will never forget. Many talented people donated their time, energy, and resources to make it happen. When the end result failed to live up to the hype, I was crushed. I was racked with guilt for years, feeling like I let everyone down. As I got older, I saw it as an invaluable learning experience. A postmortem revealed numerous issues, too many to list, most of which were irrelevant to the topic at hand. However, one criticism stood out and served as the chief inspiration for the Frāctus universe: the portrayal of female characters. Specifically, it was the one-dimensionality of the female characters. At the time, I was confused. After all, The Roommates was about male relationships. Besides, it was a short film, there was simply no room for—

In those days, I had a bad habit of bouncing from one project to another, never finishing anything. Years of therapy revealed that to be due, in part, to a bad case of maladaptive perfectionism. It was also around that time that an opportunity fell into my lap. I moved to New Orleans to work in the film industry. Stuff happened—lots of stuff—but my writing took a back seat in service of my lofty goal to get the hours in to enter the DGA (Directors Guild of America). Long story short, that blew up in my face. Hurricane Isaac was the final blow that sent me back to Ohio with my tail between my legs.

During the sixteen-hour drive home, I secured a bartending gig, found temporary living arrangements, and brainstormed what the hell I was going to do with no money, heaps of student loan debt, and a bachelor’s degree with majors in film and psychology. Although enriching, in terms of getting a job, there is little one can do with such a thing. By the time I drove through Tennessee, I had decided what I needed to do: return to school to defer the loan payments and pursue a master’s degree in the most practical field possible. That’s how I ended up with an MBA. And I met my wife, so it all worked out in the end. When we started dating, she asked me about my goals. I said I was going to keep fighting to be a film director, or plan B, I was going to pour everything into a career in marketing, and be filthy rich.

Neither of those things came to be.

I started my own business, providing video and photo services to small and mid-sized companies, but it never took off. That was 100% my fault. The work was fine, and it provided tiny doses of creative expression, which kept me going and kept me sane (for the most part). However, I got bogged down in the production side and never mastered the art of acquiring new business.

I never forgot about LCDB, but a project like that becomes harder to pick back up the longer you’re away from it. In the years since I last worked on it, I matured, both as a person and as a writer. Despite its flaws, I recognized that LCDB had potential. And at some point, I don’t remember exactly when, I decided to write a novel. I started just before COVID hit, when my faltering video and photo business completely flat-lined. All the little ways I used to express creativity failed to provide the same fix they used to. Isolated from the rest of the world, needing an outlet, I dug in, and the next thing I knew, I was completely absorbed in writing.

I took that old criticism to heart, about the undeveloped female characters. I decided to focus on Elizabeth, the most one-dimensional female character from The Roommates, and create a new story around her. At the time, I was doing a more literal adaptation of LCDB, writing a collection of short stories to replace the vignettes from the original script. But there was a problem. Each vignette kept growing. They also multiplied. Instead of four POV characters, I had nine. Before long, each individual story was novella length, and I realized that I had no choice but to split the one book into a trilogy. Each book would contain three stories. I liked the symmetry of it. The original meta structure was in place, where each story had a unique point-of-view character, each with their own perspective on shared events.

Now with nine stories, the larger cast made it possible to go wild. I stuck to my original plan of starting with Elizabeth, who in The Roommates was no more than arm candy. I gave her an identity and a voice. I dug deep and began to see the world through her eyes. It was a profound experience, liberating, and I discovered that I enjoyed writing female characters. Next, I tackled the other female character from The Roommates: Lila. Her story was deeply entangled with Elizabeth’s, among others. Hers became the middle of the three stories in the book. Time will tell if I did her and Elizabeth justice, but you’ll have to wait, because there was another problem: the book had become too big. Again.

So, I split it. Again.  

The first story I wrote, Elizabeth’s story, tentatively titled A Shadow in the Darkness, the first book I finished, is now the third book in the series. Confused yet? Because I sure am. Joking aside, splitting it gave me some breathing room, and ultimately, the book came in at just shy of 90,000 words —a manageable size.

In one of the early chapters, Elizabeth takes a ride-share to a party. She’s dealing with some personal bullshit involving Lila (which I wont spoil), and to make matters worse, her driver, a young man named Zé, keeps ogling her in his rear-view mirror. To Elizabeth, he’s just another creep, another invasive male gaze. How and why she reacts to Zé is a significant turning point that affects the lives of her, Lila, and Zé.

Next, I tackled Lila’s story, Quit Date (working title), and wrote a couple drafts of what would become book two in the trilogy. But wait—dear author, didn’t you say there are nine books? I did. But I structured them in such a way that I could, in good conscience, walk away from the series after publishing book 3 if it didn’t find an audience. The first three books are all tightly interwoven. The end of A Shadow in the Darkness ties them up neatly enough where I could sleep at night and not feel guilty about pissing off the seven people* that will love this book. I love fiction, and there is no worse crime than a creator cancelling a series before it’s complete. And if—big if—the series does find an audience, I could continue on and hopefully reach the finish line. Why? Besides being an indicator of some degree of success, I have a special surprise in store to wrap up the entire series.  

I’m getting ahead of myself. I mentioned that Elizabeth’s story is book 3, Lila’s is book 2, which leaves Zé’s story, Frāctus, as book 1. So, how does one stupid scene turn into an entire book? Beats me. There was a point when I was in control, shaping the narrative and bending it to my will. The next thing I knew, it turned into a freeform jazz session, and I was just on for the ride, trying desperately to hang on. Somehow, a story that began as a simple five-mile drive evolved into a 160,000-word novel. I promise there is no fluff. No filler. I reached the point where I realized that I couldn’t cut anything further from the story without it collapsing. So I said, “Okay. Frāctus is going to be a long-ish book.”   

In closing, I have three books in the can. One, Frāctus, is currently in the final editorial stage. The next two are rough around the edges, but not far off. Those three novels will see the light of day, regardless of what happens.

As for the rest? I hope I’m given the opportunity to see them through. If you’ve made it this far, maybe my chances got a little better. Perhaps you are one of the seven people* who will love this book as much as I do.  

*I knew the odds were against me.

• An unknown author with a 160,000-word debut
• With no platform
• Self-publishing experimental literary metafiction
• That is nearly impossible to describe and even harder to pitch
• As a series?

This is the blueprint for inevitable failure. Like I said, at some point, this story went from a carefully constructed narrative to an outpouring of my subconscious. When the dust settled, I realized that Frāctus is the kind of book that I would love to read. What more could I do? I don’t know if I wrote a good book that a lot of people will like. But I feel in my heart that this book will be loved by a small niche audience of at least seven people. Hopefully more! I got six cats to feed. One of which, our latest rescue, is on a $200-a-month hypoallergenic diet!