About The Lion Sleeps Tonight

I belonged to a writers group when I lived in Oregon.  One of the first things I submitted to them was a version of this story.  There were no useful or helpful comments from the group, which I would gradually come to realize was typical of them.

The main character naturally doesn't go around thinking about who he is, and where he comes from, any more than the rest of us do.  I think Paul McCartney said it best, when he told an interviewer, "I don't get out of bed in the morning and look in the mirror and say, 'Good morning, ex-Beatle Paul.  How are you today, ex-Beatle Paul.'  I'm just me, you know."  Or something very close to that, anyway.

But "writing for publication" requires that you immediately tell the reader what's going on, because the reader is assumed to have the attention span of a six-year old and no interest in trying to figure anything out.  Oh yes, a car chase or a gun fight is mandatory, too.

So most of the comments were things like "I got bored waiting to find out who he was," with a sprinkling of things like "he wouldn't last five minutes in a bar fight," and "sex with a knife wound! What a man!" that showed they hadn't understood the parts about strength and stamina, or even knew that not all sex acts require the man on top, pumping away as hard as he can.  And these were writers, some of them, and would-be writers, the rest of them!

Anyway, I put it aside for a few years.  When I set up my web site, I knew that "Lion" would be on it someday, but there's so much else I have to do, and ...

On February 10, the hard disk of my computer developed bad sectors, and I took the whole thing in to a little shop to get it fixed.  That meant no computer for a week; what would I do in the meantime?

What I did was write "Lion" from scratch, without any reference to the first version, which was backed up but inaccessible.  By the time I got my computer back, on the 18th, I had 50 pages of single-spaced handwritten lines, with a lot of new stuff in it.  For example, the Sleep of Reason storyline wasn't even a glimmer when I did the first version, and I hadn't been to Korea, which made the scene in the Korean restaurant impossible when I lived in Oregon.

It has taken me until now to select bits of the first version to use in the second, type the whole thing, and go over it again.  But now it's done; please drop me a line and let me know whether you like it.  Thanks!

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