First full-length novel after several novellas and dozens of short stories. Got me agents (including Renee Spodheim, the actual agent of Robbe-Grillet, dropped as a knowing aside in "Sideways"), and author Vania Cooley read the first chapter and thought, "He's in," but then read the rest and wrote me a long letter excoriating my social values and political outlook. I should read it again; it's probably better than I think. But in typical freshman style I went for the weight: 140,000 words. Now I know: slim, slight, dense.

That opening chapter will be the opening piece in a compilation called "Anxy Skrbly" as soon as I can find a publisher. Haven't looked yet, but the draft is almost ready: parts of two scripts and three novellas. 

Here is a short section from the opening chapter of Generation Zero:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the Beach:  Sturdy Chick Eats Storm

    Bedlam: the tables were filled with foreigners, bathing suited and barefoot; Australian and Scandinavian accents fought the music blaring from the stereo; water pipes with smoldering blocks of hashish circulated, and empty bottles of Cannon beer were stacked in heaps on the sand floor; the plates of food included shark steaks, crayfish, tiger prawns, pancakes with jam, marsala squid, cauliflower. The restaurant owner Pedro ignored the drugs and rowdiness as he sat beneath a stereo speaker and studiously flipped the pages of a recent edition of Playboy.
    I watched Lucy pull a box from her shirt pocket. She tdropped a small dark slab, chocolate like, into tinfoil shaped into a cradle, and held a burning match beneath the foil and slab, bringing the flame closer to the foil until the opium square bubbled, orange, smoking. She glanced persistently at me while she elaborately inhaled the fumes through a hollowed Bic pen.
    "It's supposed to be from Burma," she said, smiling. “I’m wasting it by burning it this way. I should eat it, but I’ve got diarrhoea." She offered me a small chunk.
    "No thanks, Lucy."
    "Why not? Afraid to lose control?"
    "I'd rather not, that's all."
    "Up to you. I like it because it doesn't knock you for six. Hashish might make an experience absolutely wonderful, but the next day you can't remember the details. If you see a movie on hash or marijuana, you see the brilliance or pedestrianism of the film and the next day you tell an acquaintance the film was genius or trash, but you can't remember a single good line no matter how hard you try. On opium, you experience sensations as surely and sedately as an academic." She saw me restraining my humor at her outburst, and smiled. "Do you enjoy having sex with your girlfriend?"
    "Of course."
    "Are you sure you wouldn’t like to have some now?"
    "With you?"
    "Of course," she said, laughing. "The opium puts me in the mood."
    "Can I think about it?" I replied, thinking of Blue, still uncertain of his relationship with the girl, apart from not feeling much attraction for her frailty. But wait . . . Her frailty had morphed into a confident sturdiness. No greyhound, all panther.
    "You can think about it," she shrugged, still smiling, "But look at what thinking has done to the world."
    Look at what thinking has done to the world. There was more to Lucy Drake than I'd assumed. She was more sure of herself than I, even addled as she was by narcotics, and she was proof to me of Blue's impish declaration in my New York office that nobody is as ignorant as someone who thinks he knows better.
    "Would you like to swim?" said Lucy.
    "There is a full moon."
    "What does that mean?" laughed Lucy. "Will you grow hair?"
    "Don't you believe in bad luck?”
    "There isn't any such thing as luck, good or bad. There's hard work and there's tragedy.”
    I laughed. "Do you always talk like this, Lucy?"
    "Of course not. Why would anyone want to?"
    I laughed again. "I'm sorry, but you seem so different from this morning. You seemed so morbid then. Now, it's as if you lift weights or drive a truck."
    "Am I enflaccidating you?"
    "Enflaccidating? Can you find that in a dictionary?"
    "An idiot might try to. Does it matter?"
    The beach lit fleetingly, the flash of lightning ignored by the patrons of the restaurant, and Lucy stood. The waiter approached, but Lucy waved him off, saying "tomorrow." She motioned me to follow and turned away from the table. I picked up the briefcase and we walked toward the water, and then southward, away from the lights, as Lucy coaxed lightning from a turbulent sky, hued purple and electric by the clouds above us; the black waters roiled, mixed with the midnight milk of the moon. The lightning changed abruptly from hints of blue threat to skeletal menace with a sudden, single bolt screaming from the sky into palm trees perhaps two miles farther down the beach.
    Lucy walked ankle deep in the reaches of the waves, crabs retreating from her approach, their pincers lifted in self defense. The wind gusted, and Lucy moaned happily. She grasped my hand and placed it on her arm after rolling up her loose sleeve. She looked at me with eyes neon like in the reflection of the moon; the lightning reflected in her irises. Then I felt with a shock why Lucy had placed my hand on her arm: her skin boiled, steaming, and goosebumps rose dramatically the length of her limb.
    "Energy," she whispered. "That’s the energy in the storm."
    We stopped walking. The danger of the sky made the water seem    even with its powerful waves    a haven from the commotion overhead.
    "He said you'd have some money for me," she said, whispering.
    "Spikey did?"
    Lucy nodded; the wind blew.
    "How much, did he say?"
    Thunder rumbled and a dark vein of clouds pushed from its purple bunch toward the moon tender and full above the water. Lucy unbuttoned the loose dark shirt she wore, and put her hand on my shoulder as she drew off her baggy pants, handing them to me as she stood in her opened shirt and underwear on the edge of the waves.
    "I don't know," she said. "However much you think."
    Another bolt of lightning, slicing, impudently racing the peals of thunder. She gave me her shirt and slid out of her underpants to stand white and unexpectedly statuesque on the sand. The moon unclouded caressed her breasts, shoulders, thighs and calves with a brawn they didn’t have in daylight. She was as tall as I was, I realized, svelte, mysterious as gunfire. Even her malnourished face, so frail in the morning, now glowed on the beach, and her eyes suggested impossibly too much history and passion. She lifted her chin as if in dispute when she spoke.
    "I look different without my clothes on, don't I?"
    Lightning, rapier sure.
    "Yes you do, Lucy.” I looked away from her as she grinned. “How did you meet Spikey?"
    "On an island," she whispered; she watched the water. "I met him swimming. I bit his ankle hoping he'd think I was a shark."
    "Were you vacationing?"
    "Smack," she said. "I was drying out."
    "Are you going to swim now, in that water?"
    "The water won't hurt me."
    She walked out to sea, the water crashing against her shins, then her knees, and then against her thighs as she ignored the waves and looked toward the sky. I stood on the sand, eager to strip to join her but wary of the waves, which tumbled in front of the girl, and wary of the alcohol I'd consumed, which I blamed for the yearning I suddenly felt to touch her raised flesh again. Another crack of light, closer, too close, and smoke and sparks brightened the trees meters away. I ducked with the stab of lightning, but Lucy laughed before she dove into a wave and disappeared, emerging again on the other side in the gentle trough before the next wave. The thunder like a whale rolled over the trees.
    "The next one," she shouted, "will be even closer."
    "How do you know?”
    "You'll see."
    The wind whistled.
    "Why do you do the heroin, Lucy?"
    "At least with heroin, you don't mind that nobody tells the truth."
    She was shouting, but suddenly the wind dipped while the wave racing shoreward behind her drew more water into its curl, and I could see Lucy, beautifully profuse, luxuriant, naked to her shins in the shallow trough between the flex of waves. She whispered gently before the next sword of lightning, "Nobody can tell the truth."
    The white bolt tore from the clouds to frame her body in magnetic pale blue as the jagged white line struck her head: her white skin harnessed the lightning and she glowed, radiant, puissant, smiling and ecstatic as the torque wound through her to the sand beneath the water. She was more than the force from the clouds, and the defeat of the electricity wailed in the sky as she laughed the surge down, paralyzed only an instant by the concussion of the strike but too cool of vein to be disfigured, let alone destroyed.
    Thunder growled; the wave fell; Lucy disappeared, glowing, her white legs smoothly fading into the black water, and I ran stunned knee deep into the water, which snapped and hissed at my approach.
    She reappeared, gay, behind the wave, tauntingly.
    "Are you all right, Lucy?" I shouted.
    "Can you leave the money and my clothes in the villa?"
    "Where are you going?"
    "Following the storm."
    "And after the storm, what will you do?"
    "I don't know," she shouted. "Heroin, possibly. Pose for men's magazines. Why do you care? You'll go mental trying to figure how everything turns out."
    A wave blocked my view of her, and lightning flashed into the trees again. She reappeared, fifty meters farther south, waving and laughing in the moonlight.
    "Wait -- what about your offer to make love?" I shouted.
    "I went for a swim instead!"
    Lucy laughed. Bubbles of rain burst in my face and turned the ocean, calmer suddenly, into an undulating carpet of watery firecrackers; a finger of purple cloud covered the moon and plunged darkness over the beach. Lucy continued swimming smoothly, parallel to the shore. With her clothes bundled in my arms and the briefcase in my hand, I picked my way across the sand in the dark, pelleted by a weak rain. I searched for the lights of the restaurant and the villa; by the time I'd returned the storm was a hint of turbulence many miles away.