Rex Pickett reports from his New Zealand road trip, where he is writing his fourth 'Sideways' novel after a 10-year hiatus. He has just arrived...on Friday the 13th.
It's Friday the 13th here in Auckland, New Zealand, but I'm viewing 13 as my lucky number these days. Fortunately, my writer friend Marco Mannone drove me from my rental in Del Mar, San Diego, and was conversationally brilliant company as he navigated me into LAX with no problems. It was a long day, a brutally long flight. I gave up my apartment, and once again I'm a child of the wind, with only my laptop and luggage in tow.
I'm writing this from a hotel room in Auckland. I've never been to the South Pacific. As I said, it was a long flight and I arrived in the wee dawn hours. I'm here in New Zealand to research and write Sideways NZ. Even though it's the fourth of the Sideways books, there hasn't been one in ten years and I'm viewing it as a standalone sequel because this time I have high hopes there will be what Sideways fans have clamoured for for years: a movie sequel. Now I have to deliver. The pressure is on.
I was met at the airport by the gentlemen who proposed the idea of my coming to Aotearoa (literally ‘the land of the long white cloud’, New Zealand’s Maori name) to bring my iconic characters Miles and Jack here; it is spectacular wine country after all. A close friend, Kate, had the brilliant idea of Miles and Jack in a campervan journeying from the north of the North Island to the south of the South Island and ending, somehow, on Resolution Island, a remote wilderness preserve. That's all. Everyone I ran the idea past immediately broke out into laughter, so I let it run riot in my imagination from there.
As a writer, I will not begin a book without an ending, nor an opening. But that ending is crucial. In this blog I'm going to share with you my ideation and development process. All I have is a shocking, but not tragic, opening where Miles (Paul Giamatti in the movie and my alter ego), learns some eye-popping news. He is then off to New Zealand to do a book tour. What he imagines as a rock star bus and five-star hotels turns out to a be a campervan, courtesy of a bait-and-switch parsimonious publisher, with Jack, his directing career slightly on the rebound, as his co-pilot, his best friend. It's 15 years later. The pair have matured, but they're sitting on a lot of remorse, licking wounds of divorce and failure and more. But they are best friends and no one knows each other better. Their bond transcends time. But I have to find the peristaltic middle, and the only way to find it is to take that 1,200 mile trip.
I know many people think I live a charmed life, but many wouldn't want to live the life I've lived in order to live the ostensibly charmed life I'm currently living. True, other than journalists, not many novelists are paid (Blackstone Publishing has already generously forged a deal with me for this book) to travel far and wide to research and write a novel. But, it is work. Writers are like thieves; we're always working. Speaking of which, I have an interview in fifteen minutes.
Rex Pickett will report periodically from New Zealand. Tune back in to follow his adventures under our Sideways tag.
