"Iggy" Novel Coming This Winter!

Iggy was bored so he moved to New York.  Before there was Felicity -- the lead character of my "Bliss, Bliss, Bliss" novel -- there was Iggy.  In fact, if there hadn't been an Iggy, there would have never been a Felicity.

When my best childhood friend, Ania, and I were teenagers, we loved taking the subway on Saturday afternoons to Greenwich Village in Manhattan. We saw people with dyed black or blue hair, mohawks, and black leather clothes with silver studs and safety pins on them when we went to the Village.  We shopped at the stores "Flip" and "Butterfly," which sold black leggings and punk clothing.  Butterfly also had jewelry and postcards.  It was a Bauhaus postcard that gave me the idea for Iggy's look.  That dyed black, punk hairstyle spiked up high, and black eyeliner always stayed in my mind.  That was a real punk.

Years later, while living in Canada, I enrolled in a Women's Writer's Workshop at the local college and wrote several short stories with female lead characters, but I never liked them.  They didn't speak for me, and I couldn't find a female voice I could relate to.  One night, while flipping the TV channels, I stumbled upon a 1970's movie starring Jon Voight called "The Odessa File."  Something about the mood of the scene captivated me.  It is about an American man living in Germany with his German go-go dancer girlfriend.  He spends many hours one evening reading a manuscript when his girlfriend suddenly enters the living room and says she's trying to get a taxi for work.  He says, "Don't I always take you?"  They both seem aloof and moody, and the scene just drew me in.  Suddenly, Iggy was born.

I immediately wrote a short story called "Iggy's Dailies."  It was about a moody male character who I put into a scene similar to that evening in Germany in "The Odessa File" movie, but I made him live in Greenwich Village, NYC. I remembered that Bauhaus postcard I'd seen in the punk shop those years ago. I made him look like that.  There was still the problem of what to name him.  I had such a hard time coming up with one, so I told myself that I was just going to look down at the magazines on my coffee table, and I'd choose the first name I looked at.  The first thing my eyes caught focus of was a tiny picture of Iggy Pop.  Iggy.  I couldn't come up with any other names, so I decided to just call him Iggy.

I brought "Iggy's Dailies" into my Women's Writer's Workshop.  They didn't like the title and told me it was not a "slice of life" story, as I'd called it. At the time, I took their word for it, but looking back, I think Iggy is a slice of life story.  It is a sample of Iggy's life.  It's him hanging around in his living room, reading his manuscript.  It's Iggy. Simply Iggy.  It's a depiction of Iggy's everyday reality.  The only difference between my novel and a typical "slice of life" story is that I developed Iggy's character.  He's not just a bit part in a story that's front and center. 

I took Iggy with me to my Novel Writing course and began writing Iggy in chapter form. Next semester, I took a Screenwriting class and adapted the first 10 pages of my Iggy novel-in-progress as a screenplay.  Our final assignment was to choose a few people from our class to act out the dialog in the screenplay.  I chose someone named Joel to play Iggy. He was an actual actor who I'd seen in a Canadian beer commercial where he said "Hi, I'm Joel, and this is my beer commercial."  He played Iggy and told me afterward that he really enjoyed it.  I got encouraged.

When I moved back to New York City, I submitted a few chapters to "Antimatters Magazine," a magazine that published articles about the musicians who performed at a very popular East Village Antifolk Music Club called "Sidewalk Café."  Iggy seemed to be a good fit for the magazine because he lived in Greenwich Village, and he had a musician's look and hairstyle. "Antimatters" published excerpts of Iggy in four of their issues. 

Now, I'm preparing to publish Iggy in complete form as an E-Book and limited paperback.  I will be pinning to his "My E-Book Iggy Gorgess" Board on Pinterest, tweeting about him and running contests on my Facebook Author Page, and I've got a first line for his introduction into the social media world too:  Iggy wanted to meet you all, so he decided to join Facebook.

I Am NOT Felicity

The problem with publishing a novel in first-person narrative is that everyone thinks your lead character is YOU.  Felicity is the lead character of my book, Bliss, Bliss, Bliss, and she is a singer-songwriter who lives in Ocean City.  True, I have studied singing, and I have written several songs, but the seed of my story about Felicity was actually planted after a conversation I had with my best college buddy, Lauren.

Lauren is also a singer-songwriter, and she often sings in the types of piano bars that Felicity performs in.  One day, Lauren was lamenting about how she has no problem earning a living playing music during the summer in her resort town near the ocean, but by the end of the summer, all the tourists go home, and she finds it hard to earn her living during the winter doing only music.  She says her town gets really empty, and it is depressing.  That gave me an idea:  What if you put an already-depressed woman inside of a deserted town like that to struggle financially and face yet another cold and lonely winter?  Does this mean my friend, Lauren, is Felicity?  No.  It means that I took her situation, created a character, mixed some of my own personality traits in, then pretty much let her loose inside a story where she'd have to face her own experiences, relationships and dilemmas that I myself have never had to deal with, and I let HER make the decisions. 

Some of the decisions Felicity has made, I do not like.  During the writing of my novel, I remember telling my friend, Tara, over lunch one day that I REALLY didn't like what my character, Felicity, did that day before.  She was wrong to do it, and she wasn't supposed to do it, but hey, Felicity is not me, and if she decides to do something, just because I myself would not do it, doesn't mean that I should step in and be the moral majority and interfere.  I am NOT Felicity, and I have to let her make her own mistakes on her own journey of self-discovery.  I have never had the relationships she has with the three main male characters in my book.  I have never carried a torch for someone who already has a girlfriend, I've never dated a yuppie, and I've never hung out with a former rock star!  But it's fun to watch Felicity do these things, and I don't even have to pick up the pieces when her life begins to fall apart.

As I've said before, I did give Felicity some of my character traits.  Mostly, it comes out in the dialog.  A lot of her viewpoints are my viewpoints, I will admit to that. She can be a little neurotic sometimes, and so can I. One thing I am NOT neurotic about that Felicity is concerns her issues with food: "Eating could be such a nuisance sometimes," she says. She constantly worries about being too thin and the fact that she never knows what to eat and never feels like stopping to eat it.  I get a real kick out of those sections.  The first thing I usually think about when I wake up in the morning is what delicious food I can have that day! Sometimes, it goes something like this:  I'm going shopping today, I can't wait to buy my block of cheddar cheese or Today I get to eat that big plate of vegetable lasagna at that restaurant near work!  In this way, Felicity is my opposite!

The father issues Felicity has are actually based in truth.  I too lost my father as a teenager.  Felicity's two female friends, Edie and Coco, also have father issues.  Coco lost her father as a child, and Edie's father abandoned the family when she was a child too. Edie and Coco are actually based on two women I have been friends with.  I don't know if anyone reading the book could guess who they are.  It's not something I choose to reveal, but hey, if you happen to read the book and can guess it, I will admit whether your guess is correct or not.

Bottom line is that Felicity is a work of fiction. She is not me, but she has some of my traits and knows what it is like to lose her father.  She works in the same capacity as my friend, Lauren.  She has two best friends who are extremely similar to two friends I have had.  But I am NOT Felicity, and yes, I still do love her!