Why I Wrote Roller Disco Saturday Night

Here’s why I wrote a book called Roller Disco Saturday Night:

There’s a longstanding tradition in fiction of modernizing classic works of literature. Steinbeck did it with the story of Cain and Abel with his East of Eden. Annie Proulx brought King Lear up to date with A Thousand Acres. Heck, Stephen King started his career by bringing Cinderella into the horrifying 70s with Carrie. It’s a noble pursuit – the best stories never go away, they’re just retold in different, sometimes more interesting ways.

But one of the things that always struck me was that all those modern works were taking on good, established pieces of lit. From where I stood, no one said, “Hey, let’s take something obviously crappy and try to make some gold out of it.” That’s where I came in. More importantly, that’s where Grease 2 came in.

In my novel Maybe You’re Right, I go on and on ad infinitum about this one scene in Grease 2 where the movie seems to stop and realize it can be good. Michelle Pfeiffer and Maxwell Caulfield are in a diner, just having a conversation. It’s a well-shot scene: everything looks bright and beautiful. There are double entendres, but they’re not gross and obvious, like in most of the film. They have chemistry for the first time in the movie, which is sad for a film for which a whole subplot is chemistry. It’s well-written, well-acted, well--lit. Everything about this scene belongs in a better movie, because right after it, the movie goes straight back to crap.

I realized that I could write that scene – or something similar to it – into a better piece of fiction. I started thinking about both Grease and Grease 2, and that whole 1970s and 1980s obsession with the 1950s, and how I might be able to use that. Then I started thinking about my own 1980s experience – about my obsession with the smart-kid sitcom Head of the Class, and the show You Can’t Do That On Television, and how I had weird crushes on Alan Alda and Steve Gutenberg when I was young. I thought about my first real sexual experience, and reading the book Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, about a struggling family who suddenly becomes rich. And I thought about all those nights spent at the Silver City Skating Rink in Taunton, Massachusetts, skating that big oval to Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and “Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me.”

All of that into the book, which started off life as a National Novel Writing Month project. It’s one of those books whose title came to me before I started writing it (it actually came to me years earlier, during an improv show in which we were supposed to call out the name of a fake movie and they would create scenes around it. I shouted out “Roller Disco Saturday Night!” every week and they never picked it. I think I was trying to rectify that, too). The book started strong, got tough in the middle, and then got way darker than I’d intended in the final stretch. It’s a glorious, ambitious mess, and needs a whole lot of love before I can get it right for publishing.

My publisher, Cemetery Dance, has offered to publish my work – even the non-horror stuff – as an ebook, but the problem with fiction is that it’s chancier than nonfiction (at least the nonfiction that I write), and I don’t get any up-front money for something like this. And there’s nothing wrong with it being a labor of love. I’ve written 18 novels, directed numerous shows, acted in shows, and remain producer for a night of sketch comedy – and they’re all labors of love. In general, I don’t see a cent out of that. (Contrarily, I work a day job where I move numbers around on charts and I do get paid for that. Not well, but I do get paid. The world is a mystifying place.)

I’m trying to raise capital so I can take time off from one of my many, many jobs and work on getting Roller Disco Saturday Night up to fighting shape. It’s a book of memories – some good, some bad – and I’d like to do right by my past. I’d also like to make sure it’s compelling and entertaining for anyone who isn’t me and hasn’t lived my life. And I’d like to do it by October.

Last year, you guys helped me get my first novel, I’m On Fire, published. This year, if you can help at all, I’d really appreciate it.Writing is my life, and publishing is a big part of that. I have a large, busy existence, and getting the time and tools to make Roller Disco a viable reality would be the best possible platform from which to leap. I'm already off to a kick-ass start! Let's keep that rolling!

Thank you all, you are awesome.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/521727074/roller-disco-saturday-night