“I’m sittin’ in first class and they can all kiss my ass, ‘cuase I’m goin’ back baby, back outta world.”
Terry Allen & The Panhandle Mystery Band – Back Out Of The World – 1987 album – Amerasia
In Tripio, Jay is writing his first novel. It is a road book. One of Jay’s literary heroes in Tripio is Jack “That’s not writing, that’s typing” Kerouac. It is in character for Jay to have attempted his first novel based on the two month road trip he had taken as part of his aimless post college graduation life. Tripio starts as Jay is nearing the end of writing that novel. He is not exactly struggling with the ending of it. After all, it is finite. The book will end with end of journal he kept on the road trip. Jay is more concerned by the fact that he is afraid he doesn’t even know what his book is about.
In real life, that was also true. Today, I describe “Back Outta the World” as a road trip in which the main character’s mind and body are on two different trips and meet at the end. I only came to that conclusion as I reworked Back outta the World(BotW) prior to starting Tripio. I arrived at that conclusion approximately 20 years after I finished physically writing BotW. You will have to buy and read Tripio to find that section describing how I felt upon finishing BotW. I will tell you that it is one of the few parts of Tripio that remains word for word in the novel, as it was recorded in my SotM on that day in my Chicago apartment those many years ago.
If I am promoting and publishing Tripio as a Starbucks novel, reflecting on it daily now as the story of my early adult life, then I am writing about my writing twice over. In other words there could be no Tripio without BotW. Yet, I was hesitant at first to even name BotW in Tripio. Early in the writing of Tripio, I referred to BotW as “my writing” or “the novel”. Then, as I began to feel confident and came to see potential in the publishing of Tripio, I made it a point to name and embed BotW into Tripio. In fact, I had to. In order for Tripio to “work” (you be the judge), BotW had to be a powerful, named presence in Jay’s mind. It had to be identified so that it could carry it’s third of the book.
I believe it worked. Again, you be the judge. Either way I am continuing to work on the final revision of BotW. Both novels and nearly all fiction can be called “Emotionally autobiographical.” It is proving to be true in my case at least. I am experiencing, processing, writing and realizing each novel in distinct, separate ways. Tripio was a very personal memoir-like work. In fact, I am not sure that today, late 2020, I would be able to include some passages that went into Tripio as I was writing it several years ago. Yet they had to be there to make the book work. Hint: I’m talking about the sex scenes. In real life, I experienced BotW before Tripio. But I jumped off the cliff before seeing the bridge in writing and publishing Tripio. That done, I know now I will complete and publish BotW some 25 years after first typing, yes typing, it’s first draft. That would be the least Tripio could do for BotW since Tripio would not have come to be without it, even if preceded it in real life.
“May I help who’s next?”
