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Journals in the Attic
By Lewis James

I mailed my first draft of Beating Kings and Burning Angels home for safe keeping from the colossal British-Colonial Post Office in Calcutta. Or was it from Varanasi and was the post office in Calcutta really colonial in construction and colossal? In the winter of 1996, or perhaps it was eleven years ago in the summer of 1995, somewhere in India, I completed the novel Beating Kings and Burning Angels.

I’d better go find the journals. I’ve looked in the closet and armoire and under the bed and behind my wife’s three colossal shoe racks and in the garage, but couldn’t find the journals that I wrote during my three years of wandering the globe and writing. Nor could I find the three backpack-worn notebooks containing the penciled-erased-penned-crossed-out first draft of Beating Kings and Burning Angels.

I don’t know why I feel the need to review my journals to explain what prompted me to write a book covering six days in the lives of five fictitious people during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. If you would have asked me after I had written my first draft of the book, I would have known what inner forces compelled me to spend hundreds of hours with imaginary people. I would not have mentioned the neurotic obsession that came over me upon seeing Pulp Fiction at a movie theater in Sydney Australia, nor the stack of books on American race relations purchased in Singapore while recovering from hepatitis (acquired from a chicken I ate on an adventure with Crazy Johnny on handmade bamboo rafts through Borneo rainforests), nor that in a moment of creative desperation, during a bumpy ride into Kashmir, I used the name of the bus line (Saxena) for the last name of a minor character in the book.

I most certainly would not have mentioned the fantasies that overcame me on that bumpy bus ride into Kashmir -- fantasies of having a dry throat as the eyes of billions watched me accept a Best Oscar award for my screenplay adaptation of Beating Kings and Burning Angels, fantasies of reading glowing reviews of myself in Time Magazine, fantasies of being a famous wealthy somebody based on the literary genius of my first published novel.

Ten years ago I would have known why I wrote what I wrote, would have erupted in a spasm of literary-correct musing, would have waxed existential over the reality of race relations in Los Angeles. Ten years ago, when I was thirty-two and knew, I wasn’t back working in the very business that becoming a famous wealthy novelist was going to save me from, wasn’t watching the Best Picture Oscar go to an ensemble cast exploring race relations in LA.

I am now 42 and can’t find the backpack-worn original Beating Kings and Burning Angles notebooks, can’t find the journals of frantic writing in search of philosophical truth and spiritual meaning, can’t quite grasp why a human would create an alternative world of intricately woven plot lines involving pretend people. Why did I write Beating Kings and Burning Angles? Why did I chronicle the daily events of my traveling life in mundane detail over a three year period of time? Why did I fill notepad after notepad with philosophical speculation, contemplation, and graphs illustrating the union of “Is” with “is” as filtered through personal and collective reality within the “poles of possibility”?

I need the journals to conjure up ghosts hidden within my neurons, to open an ephemeral gateway to the past so that my conscious mind can explain why I wrote what I wrote.

What was the purpose behind penning Beating Kings and Burning Angels? Was it a shout into the void, a wail into the grave that I was here and alive, an attempt to document the angst and concerns of humanity in LA in 1992? Was the driving force non-spiritual and devoid of poetry; more an attempt to prove myself through creating a work that could sell like Pulp Fiction, a neurotic obsession of an under-skilled artist blinding himself to his own mediocrity through the hubris of self-proclaimed creativity? Did a subconscious bourgeois compulsion drive me towards literary accomplishment in order to mask three years of hedonistic globetrotting?

Perhaps the journals are in the attic. I need to know the answer.

Lewis James lives in Monrovia, CA with his wife and three children. His writing reflects his diverse experiences. Lewis has been a dairy worker in Israel, a mortgage broker in Southern California, an Alaskan fisherman, a Beverly Hills nanny, and has even paid his dues as a solar sunscreen salesman. His travels have taken him from the top of Norway to the bottom of Chile and around Australia by van. He has traveled into the remote jungles of Borneo by way of a handmade raft, to monasteries of Tibetan Buddhists and to the bazaars of the Afghanistan Mujahidin.

Interwoven vignettes, in the style of "Crash", explore the racial tensions of Los Angeles in the days just before, during, and following the Rodney King Riots. Beating Kings and Burning Angels follows the lives of five Angelinos, lacing together their personal stories and views on race relations. Unpredictable revelations bring each story to a provocative and compelling resolution. The eBook is currently available at the DPPstore under the PulpBytes Imprint, for $8.95.

The DPPstore (www.dppstore.com), a division of DigitalPulp Publishing (www.digitalpulppublishing.com), offers the best in eBooks from new and lesser-known authors, just as DPPpress (www.dpppress.com) promotes works by self-publishers and independent presses. Our eBooks are downloadable on an assortment of readers. The dppstore – reinventing reading.