What I am Writing

​In the chutes but not ready to cast before the reading public is a novel I’ve not mentioned. It is to be called Hôtel Adiósthough the other has yet to find a nice title. Hôtel is a satire—what else is new?It consists of five interlocking stories told from the points of view of six characters.
 
Armed with a pair of JUCO courses, one on starting a small business and the other on creative writing, the principal character, Talia la Musa, runs a national ad inviting four other writers to join a literary group to be called the Kachina Round Table. This group is to meet in a decrepit hotel in Small Southwestern City, Large Southwestern State.
 
Soon afterwards she wakes up one morning to find herself in bed with a dead man, the owner of this hotel and her date of the evening before. With the aid of an old friend, Leticia Ladrona, Esq., she “inherits” the hotel and renames it the Hôtel Adiós. Then, one by one, four men answer her ad and immediately enter a literary contest, which is won by her new heartthrob, Myles na Gopaleen, Jr., a bastard son of a famous Irish writer who gave James Joyce a run for his Irish pounds. The other men are Arthur Unknown, a grandson of Author Unknown, the most voluminously anthologized writer in the history of the American grammar school textbook; Ab Ennis, a cremated Russian immigrant who is then furnished with a robotic apparatus by Mr. na Gopaleen; and Orville Slack IV, a hillbilly from the intertwining panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma who soon dies but is cremated and given a robotic body of his own.
 
This first story tells how Ms. la Musa sets up the Kachina Round Table. The second is an account of the literary contest, and the third consists of the inventions of Mr. na Gopaleen. The fourth is an account of a run for the presidency by the robotized Mr. Ennis on the Dead Rights Ticket. Finally, Mss. la Musa and Ladrona receive their just desserts—or rather, Ms. Ladrona does so, because . . . but I’ve said enough already.