The Story Behind Eternal Graffiti
Many years ago, I had a vivid image come to mind of a building on fire on top of a hill in rural Northern California. The building is a barracks, part of a larger prison for teenagers. A 15-year-old inmate watches from the bottom of the hill. It is magnificent, this inferno, biblical in its power and proportion. It lights up the night sky, a high wind creating spectacular configurations of wanton destruction. The kid is living the moment fully, awestruck at the rightness and justice of it. The devastation is long overdue, and any minute it’s going to offer him a rare opportunity to escape.
I wrote that note down and kept it in my files. Every now and then I’d come across it while I was snooping around for ideas, but it never took off until I saw the movie Shame, and somehow out of that gritty, intense film my protagonist Owen Kilroy was born. I think it was the brutal honesty of the film that inspired this character to come to life. I didn’t understand the connection to the fire image until a long time after that. Then it was a matter of sitting down for ages and writing it, discovering who he was, who the other characters were and what it was all about. I spent years writing it, off and on. The last three years before submitting it I did nothing but “finish” it about twenty times.
I never work from an outline so there were a lot of blind alleys in the process, a lot of scenes that I thought were essential that weren’t. Thanks to my independent editor Marlene Adelstein, I cut 16,000 words before submitting it anywhere. That’s roughly 65 pages, and some of that may end up in another book, although not the one I’m currently writing.
I submitted it to agents and indie publishers, entered it in contests, getting almost nothing but silence in return. Finally, after two years of futility, I submitted it to Lou Aronica at the Story Plant. He read it and signed me to a contract.
In just about every art form, whether it’s literature, music, sculpting, or painting watercolors, you just need one person to believe in you to get things off the ground. Lou turned out to be that person, and I am thrilled.
“I don’t know if this is a confession or a purge, a scream or a lullaby,” begins twenty-seven-year-old Owen Kilroy’s journal, in which he writes about the remarkable women—friends and lovers—who’ve come and gone and who have shaped his life, as well as the many varieties of heartbreak he’s experienced.
Owen revisits himself as a seventeen-year-old guitar player, songwriter, and drug dealer in a small, fictional California desert town. He relives being arrested, violently, by half the town’s police force and sent to juvenile prison. He faces the pain of being disowned by his mother and having his father disappear. And he re-experiences inadvertently killing his girlfriend by providing her with drugs.
After escaping from juvenile prison, ending up broke, desperate, and homeless in Venice Beach, he eventually meets Kiera, a nineteen-year-old Irish student at UCLA. She is the great love of his life, a love that he knows would cripple him if he were to lose her. Now, ten years later, Owen discovers that writing about her and all that came before isn’t enough. If he is to move on, he realizes he must go back to California and face his ghosts directly.
“Marlton’s prose mixes lyricism with grit, which often results in evocative images. The author has an eye for nuance and detail, and he manages to evoke the era and the youth culture of the time.” ― Kirkus Reviews
Book Information
Release Date: September 6, 2022
Publisher: The Story Plant
Soft Cover: ISBN: 978-1611883329; 352 pages; $16.95; eBook $7.99
Amazon: https://amzn.to/3brycU7
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Peter Marlton is a pseudonym for Pete MacDonald, both as a fiction writer and as a musician and songwriter. He was born in San Francisco and has lived in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and in three European countries. He’s published short stories, a novella, and essays in various literary magazines and The New York Times.
His latest book is the adult literary fiction, Eternal Graffiti.
You can visit his website at www.petermarlton.com or connect with him on Twitter.
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