After posting the last installment of The Nature Preserve, I poured myself an enormous bourbon. Then another. I couldn't find my phone and fell asleep on the couch.
In the days that followed this liquor-induced stupor, I felt a little like Gulliver must have felt after coming home from one of his long voyages. (Lilliput? Laputa? Glubbdubdrib?) I was disorientated. I felt discouraged. And it was difficult to know exactly what to do with myself. The incessant twice-weekly deadlines had come to an end for one thing. I no longer needed to draw pictures of emaciated naked stragglers lurching into pollution-enhanced sunsets. Swan’s life, always on the brink, was no longer in my hands.
Maybe it’s always this way with finishing a novel. I'd written plenty of other stories with hopelessly striving protagonists but I’d never felt quite so beholden to a character. I should’ve been glad to be done with him, why so dispirited?
Part of the problem, I assume, was that I’d been wrapped up in Swan’s story for a lot longer than the six-month existence of my substack. I’d been dealing, off and on, with this poor hikikomori since a certain Sunday in 2011. That was when Swan and I embarked on the long-term relationship I never could have expected.
In those days I spent my Sunday mornings attending a workshop run by a lady—an amazing lady, a fellow fiction writer and friend—whose name was Louise Atcheson. This was during a time when I drove a cab on Friday and Saturday nights, usually until around 3 in the morning, and Louise’s meetings began halfway across town at 8 AM I think, or maybe even earlier, and I’d arrive at her house after what was, in essence, a four-hour nap; bleary-eyed, semi-conscious and heavily caffeinated.
Louise’s workshop featured 30-minute freewriting sessions from prompts. (Her day job was as a psychologist.) There’d usually be four or five of us in attendance. All the regulars were women except myself. (Thinking of it now, and considering my y-chromosome handicap,1 it was an honor to have been invited.) The prompts were an oddball collection of clipped headlines and photos Louise left scattered on her coffee table. The writer’s task was to grab one of these hopefully inspiring scraps of paper and repair to some corner of her home—bathroom, kitchen, under the dining table, whatever—and scribble away until a little timer on the mantle sounded. That was the signal to regroup in the living room and read our work aloud. After that, we’d do it again and again, for three or four more rounds.
Partly because I wasn’t fully awake, this came easy to me. Whether I used the prompt or just started with some random thought, I had no trouble concocting some kind of story in half an hour. I felt rushed, but blissfully unconstrained by any requirement to make sense.
Louise loved the stuff I wrote in her workshop. Her operative adjective was “wild.” “That was wild!” she’d say. “That’s one of the best things you’ve done.” And privately she’d tell me, “You should develop some of the stuff you wrote here.”
And I would always argue: “It’s nothing. It’s just nonsense. I was only half awake, Louise!”
What I wanted to write in those years was what I called “urban realism,” and I’m not even sure if that’s a category. I was writing stuff based on my experiences as a taxi driver mainly, or based on conversations I’d overheard during the years I drove a cab. I wanted to be a new-era Raymond Carver or a Henry Miller or a Moravia. My subject was American working class city life, and I managed to publish a few of those pieces here and there and awaited the inevitable glorious response. What resulted, of course, was near complete disinterest, and a couple hundred dollars in Amazon royalties for one short story collection. Still, I kept writing tales about fictional taxi drivers.
Around 2014, I was going to a workshop where a number of science fiction guys were in attendance. The trouble with a lot of science fiction, it always seemed to me, was the obsession with technology at the expense of character. Sci-fi protagonists tend to be one-dimensional lab rats bred for testing some disastrously misguided technological experiment, and I thought I could do it in a way that gave a protagonist a bit more depth. I’d already decided I needed to get out of my usual shtick about working class life, and writing a character-driven sci-fi seemed like one possible option. I started searching through my notebooks from Louise’s meetings.
One of the pieces I found there, and vaguely remembered having written, described a conversation between a man suffering from anxiety and his shrink. The psychiatrist prescribed therapeutic walks in a city-funded therapy garden made entirely of artificial materials. This 40-acre garden was called the Nature Preserve and to reach it, the “stress-afflicted” patient had to pass though the most dangerous, lawless neighborhood of their decaying city. The germ of my future novel was all there. It was Sci-fi Lite. It was satirical. It was dystopian. It was absurd and (to my mind anyway) funny. And—added bonus—the Nature Preserve was inhabited by gnomes.
So it all began as an experiment, something different for my workshop, and I started expanding on the story fragment that had come out of my dream-state scribbling. As it developed, the therapy garden remained exactly as I’d imagined it in the first place. The protagonist’s name became Swan because there was a Thomas Swan Sign Company truck parked in front of my house one morning. The Gnomes changed into Mouse People and later Fairies, and the fairies became more and more linked in my mind with the Mouse Folk of Franz Kafka’s very last short story. I named one of these fairies, Ottala (who took on a completely unexpected role in the novel) because she was Kafka’s favorite sister, and spun the plot generally as a coming of age story, but also a picaresque fable, a conflict between manufactured reality and divine nature, a satire on our current tech-centered, AI-infected upside-down civilization. I developed whichever scene seemed the most interesting at the moment and laughed out loud while I wrote them during the early mornings before I went to the various advertising agencies where I worked as a graphic artist. I wrote most of the chapters out of sequence. I workshopped scenes from the end of the book before I even knew how Swan could ever get there. The postscript was finished before the middle chapters had been started and, around the middle of 2020, when I finally felt everything was about as complete as it was likely to become, the pandemic showed up.2
My day job was canceled. I was eligible for unemployment and instead of doing something useful or writing something new, which is now what I think I should have done, I spent nearly an entire year trying to sell The Nature Preserve and, 50 submissions and query letters later, finally threw in the towel.
Spoiler alert: Don’t read the following if you haven’t yet read the novel.
Dear Agent,
I am seeking a publisher for my 100K-word novel, The Nature Preserve. The book is literary fantasy as well as science fiction (this precise option was not available in your submission form). It is a dark comedy that bears on the subjects of technology and the decline of the natural world.
At first the narrative pretends to plunge us into a sci-fi future but soon a vision of the Right Now comes into focus: reality is turning into virtual reality, nature is at an end, artificial environments can reconfigure themselves to reflect our own inner wants and feelings; auto-taxis offer meaningless chit chat, elevators give woke admonitions. The living world has shrunk to a single desolate city with its hundred or so estranged residents ensconced in four underground AI-controlled condos.
When we meet our hero, the shy and ever-daydreaming Swan, he’s being driven from his cozy VR playland and pushed into the messy terrain of actual life. Through his eyes, others soon appear: Swan’s bewitching neighbor, Ebony, who hides her face behind a 360°pageboy bob, will turn into the object of his endless fantasies. Elevator 3 (the chatty one) pries into his thoughts and crushes his every attempt at romance. Dr Escobar, psychiatrist and life coach, wants Swan to get real, toughen up, learn to fight, make friends among the refugees, and help her assemble a hunter-gatherer tribe in the barren Outside Lands. Powerful and seductive Madame Viva Ananda hosts a weekly extinct power-animal seance, while the world’s last barber, Delafan Delar, believes Swan’s new haircut is a work of art and a catalyst for extraordinary happenings. And on one of his psychiatrist-ordered visits to the Nature Preserve, Swan encounters Ottala, a four-and-a-half-inch-tall Fairy dancer and brave conceptual artist, who becomes his unattainable heartthrob and muse. Is she real, or another of Swan’s hallucinations?
The reader soon realizes there’s more here than a dystopian catastrophe of science and nature. We’re in a mythic space more than a sci-fi one, and the story will flow out of what happens to Swan in and as a result of his visits to the Nature Preserve.
You will find a story synopsis with this submission as well as my bio. I would also like to note that I’m currently working on illustrations for this book and I would be happy to share them with you. Please contact me if you are interested. I very much appreciate you taking time to consider my work.
Sincerely,
Blah de blah de blah…
So, there you have it. This is how The Nature Preserve came to be written, and why it finally became a Substack.
Louise Atcheson died of cancer in 2012, her house was sold, and I can find very little about her on the internet. I never got back together with any of her old group either. I didn’t know anyone’s last name and I didn’t have anybody’s number. Louise seems destined to remain a mysterious, transitory (and transformational) figure in my life and, like I said in the one other essay I composed to accompany this novel, if it had been a paper book I’d have wanted to make a dedication: To Louise Atcheson who set me on this course.
See The Nature Preserve, 18: Hunting for Edible Plants
I know what you’re thinking: nine years, right? In my defense, I had multiple full-time jobs during the years I worked on this novel.
Things I Always Wanted to Tell You About The Nature Preserve
Dear Mr. Bix, Thank you for a summary of your writing experience. I worried it was going to be a "how I made the sausage" exercise. Fortunately, it wasn't. Just like the novel, I really enjoyed it. It was especially important to learn about your mentor, Louise Atcheson and her workshop.
I don't think you are done with this character or story. However, you won't know until you've gone on to complete other projects and take a look back. You don't have to worry about resorting to deus ex machina. You have already mastered it. The scene with Ottala's emergence from her Gut Wedding experiment would leave the ancient Greek playwriters in awe. Nothing could be more "preposterous". Unfortunately, the ending to The Nature Preserve is not preposterous, it might even be probable.
I read a lot, but mostly non-fiction. This is the first fiction novel I've read completely in decades. You can feel a measure of success based on this alone. The illustrations kept my attention, and the weekly installment plan kept me in suspense.
It is difficult to measure one's success in the Arts whether it be writing, music, graphics or even architecture. Sometimes a great work is too far ahead of its time. Sometimes it leads to a piece of work that truly nails it. I say carry on and do good works, Mr. Bix!
Sincerely, Mark D
Well, I just spent way too much time on Thomas Swan Sign Company's website, thank you very much! The literary agent world must be populated by old white guys with Coke-bottleI-lenses and zero imagination. More importantly, I don't know which journey is more epic, Swan's or your writing of this novel. The notion of creating a story of this scope from a 30-minute freewriting session is staggering. I wonder if you still have the headline from your Louise Atcheson session that prompted it. Thanks for this postscript. It's very illuminating. Now, pick up that pen and get busy!