Sid's Place novel by Coyote

We got evicted. My heart sunk. 'What can I do? What can I finish? What can I complete?...'

'Sid's Place!'

I wrote the book in the seventies.

During my early writing years, I was early in the formation of my morality and ethics. Mostly, I was redefining what I already believed in. I had to transform James Bond and Robin Hood into my modern hero image of myself.

Sid's Place, is a book that took me on a journey. I did not know where it would go, or how it would end. I began the book with my own experiences of being in the drug blackmarket. Other scenarios were gathered from the personal experiences of Vietnam Vets and Draft Dodgers in Canada during the early seventies while the Vietnam war was still blazing.

I got books and researched some of the other parts of the story I had no immediate connections to...and then, plugging in people I met and knew to flesh out the missing pieces of my storyline with some assorted LSD trips and druggie friends...the story took off.

I got scared. My poet girlfriend, Jennifer Olds, left me for a rich guy with a farm, and the evil villain of my novel, Sid's Place, scared the living shit out of me. He really scared me so bad, I couldn't write past the halfway mark of the book.

I got a new girlfriend. She was a television director, and an actress. I can't even remember her name. I think I saw her on a science fiction tv series recently...she deserves credit for helping me out.

My television director girlfriend taught me that I feared the evil villain Sid, because Sid was inside of me.

She told me to embrace Sid and see the world through his eyes.

Oh my God! It was like one of those movies where someone can see a murder being committed through the eyes of the killer...

I dislike horror and drama so I could only go short bursts of this reality. When I look at what I wrote, and remember what I saw, I am amazed. What I wrote is less than 10% of what I saw, and what I saw was less than 10% of what actually happened...

Whew. I am exhausted. Really. That just totally wore me out writing that because of the emotional weight I was falling into -- just remembering being Sid...

I finished the book in 1984.

I got an editor from Bantam books who edited the novel with me.

My editor left Bantam and no one would publish a book with a drug runner for a hero during the Reagan Years.

Oops. There are real lyrics, from real songs, from 1969 to 1972 in the book. Get permission? I'll just write my own.

Finally. 2008. Finished. I typeset the book in Quark XPress 7 and publish the PDF on the internet. Published by Shaolin Communications.

And--I rewrote the lyrics of existing songs with my own lyrics. The song, "Gloria," by THEM, became the song lyrics, "Marina."

I also enjoyed substituting my lyrics for the Jim Morrison and The Doors lyrics of...

Download now from Shaolin Records.

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