I’d like to thank you once again for reading The Golden State! In the first month since it’s been published, I’m so close to hitting my sales goal. So please keep sharing the book with your family and friends – it means so much to me. [Read about what The Golden State is here.]
In this post, I’m going to share some top-secret content from how this all got started back in the spring of 2017! I started writing The Golden State‘s first draft when I was planning a cross-country road trip with a friend in June 2017. But the idea had been brewing in my head for a lot longer than that. I hope that this gives you all some interesting insight into the beginnings of my novel, as well as inspiration for how to make a novel come to fruition. So I’ll talk about the origins of the story, and at the end, present some tips on getting through the enormously large task of writing a novel.
September 2016 – Lawrence is born
After spending a summer in Kanazawa, Japan-related experiences were on my brain. The very first piece of The Golden State I wrote was called “AKKESHI: A discussion of the pros and cons of being a white American living in Akkeshi, Hokkaido, Japan, in 1983.” I wrote the story in Japanese and English, a second-person short story for a bilingual magazine structured in terms of pros and cons. This was an early form of the Lawrence chapter – so funnily enough, Lawrence Stern was the first in the family to come into being. The content is only about 40% the same as the current Lawrence chapter, but it ends the same way: “And outside your window, descending in tapestries, the Akkeshi snow piles on, and on, and on.”
October 2016 – The Rosen family
Sometime in the fall, other characters in Lawrence’s fictional family started to appear in my brain. In what, when looking back, appears to be a sudden flash of inspiration, Matt, Becca, Allison, and Grampa Andy all materialized in an incomplete story draft I wrote about Grampa Andy dying and its impact on the kids Matt and Becca. Matt and Becca are young kids, unlike they are in the current novel, and the beginning of the story covers “Uncle Andy” sharing an old Native American tale with Matt and Becca.
February 2017 – A brief detour
Throughout the winter, the characters and circumstances of the Stern/Rosen family continued to brew in my mind. I thought a lot about writing a grand American novel about the family of a famed architect. This took a brief detour into attempting to write another bilingual story about a magical realist adventure of Lawrence’s kid Akio and Rebecca Rosen visiting from America in a haunted shrine, but it didn’t really go anywhere.
April 2017 – A Well of Dandelions
This was another detour, but it ended up, in a strange way, being the key to the whole novel. I remember being on spring break and extremely determined to write a short story for my fiction class at the time. I wrote a very different story about the Rosen family – a story in which a suicidal college drop-out is seduced by (or seduces) Allison Rosen after helping to find Becca, who had run off to meet Kaori, her cousin, via a magical water well. I was very proud of this intense, magical realist story and it probably was the most important piece of writing that kicked off my enthusiasm for turning these characters into something out of a novel.
May 2017 – The Golden State comes into being
The last shoe dropped in May 2017, when I wrote the short story that would later become the chapter The Golden State (where Lawrence and Michael go to a desert ghost-town). It was very different at first, involving the pair stumbling upon a saloon and meeting their own deceased immigrant grandparents there. But as I was writing the story, I finally saw that this was becoming a novel, or so I thought.
I came up with a plan for The Golden State. It was going to have five parts: 1) about Uncle Andy passing away, the reactions of a young Matt and Becca, and their adventure in the magic well to overcome grief; 2) about Leonard Stern working his way up the Jewish movie network, getting into a freak motorcycle accident, and struggling with his son’s depression; 3) Lawrence and David Stern in their ’70s college life at Columbia University, getting involved in the jazz and film scenes, and David coming out to his family as gay; 4) Lawrence is aimless in Kanazawa and has to fly home when David dies of AIDS, and has a miniature road trip adventure with Michael in the spirit saloon; 5) Matt and Becca visit Kaori in Osaka with their family and go on a parallel adventure of their own in a haunted shrine.
Or maybe… just screw that idea?
A month later, I started writing Matt and Becca’s road trip adventure from suburban Bay Area to New York City. All the of the major characters had been at least partially fleshed out in my head, but all of the sudden, I decided to make the family history the background, and the main story about Matt and Becca’s road trip adventure, not from when Matt and Becca were young kids, but in their teenage years. It turned out they were the main characters all along.
The road trip ended up serving as the perfect structure for the story and allowed me to actually write it to conclusion. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to just get through a literary family drama, which was my initial idea.
Thinking back, it’s fascinating the way the story grew and evolved. Lawrence, Allison, Michael, and David started out as the most important characters, but they ended up being Matt, Becca, Kaori, and Rubin Yakovlev. Pretty crazy.
All this goes to show… FIVE RANDOM TIPS FOR WRITING A NOVEL!
Don’t be afraid to expand the universe behind a short story or story idea. What other characters are worth writing about? What other adventures did they get into?
Don’t try to stay too focused – and write fearlessly. Let your imagination wander and slowly grow and build this universe.
Try coming up with an outline, but don’t stick to it. Coming up with the five-part plan for the book was helpful because it gave me such a concrete vision for the story. It turned out destroying this vision was the true key to writing the novel!
Structure always helps. Whether it’s setting a timeline for your book – e.g. all the events happen within the course of one month – or an ending event – e.g. the events leading up to a murder – having some concrete structure to work off of works wonders.
Be patient. “Good” ideas take a long time to develop. If the novel is meant to be one, it’ll come to you eventually so long as you keep writing.
So…buy The Golden State, leave a review, and talk next time!
Three weeks ago, I released my first work of literary fiction–a road trip adventure across America and deep into family and Jewish history titled The Golden State. The young heroes Matt and Becca embark from California to New York in search of a long-last family bracelet, only to find themselves entangled in a fight for the heart of America against a magical madman and white supremacist known as none other than ‘Cowboy Jim.’
I’ve been so thrilled and appreciative of the support I’ve received so far for the book. Five star reviews are finally starting to trickle in on Amazon, which is so exciting to see. But I want more! More reviews! And you can help me with that!
Here’s how.
It may not be much, but I’d like to offer the follow ‘incentive’ to get more people to write reviews.
If you either A) rate & review The Golden State on Amazon, or B) write a social media post or blog post reviewing The Golden State (just a few sentences sharing your thoughts), I’ll send you a hand-written poem from Japan!
This is how it works:
Step 1) Write and post your review of The Golden State. Either a rating & review on Amazon, or a few sentences with your thoughts on any social media platform. It’s okay if you haven’t finished the whole book yet – it’s more important to get reviews out now!
Step 2) Email me a screenshot of your review to ericmargolis[at]yahoo.com along with your home address.
Step 3) As thanks, I’ll mail you a hand-written poem from Japan on beautiful Japanese stationery! (Yes, Japanese stationery is the best. Proof here.)
Here’s a little example of the kind of poem that I might share with you if you do me the favor of a review. Just imagine it looks way cooler and is on awesome stationery.
There are no fountains here
There are no fountains here
besides the cafe terraces and sliding doors
that gush people,
and the geyser of blue light trapped in the sky,
and the downpouring of the train as it erupts and crashes away,
and the shadows that creep up the office towers,
flooding down with the voices
into a collision of fountains
on a street where there are none.
Love it? Then you’ll get a poem just like it! Hate it? Then you’ll get a totally different poem, I swear!
In short: leave a review, get presents. A poetry present on unique stationary. What could be cooler? And you get to help me share word about my book. It’s a win-win. So please – even if you haven’t finished the book yet, write a review with what you’ve enjoyed about it so far. Thank you so much in advance, and you’ll be getting your dash of poetic joy very soon!
Just two weeks ago, I published a road trip adventure, a work of literary Jewish fiction, The Golden State. You can read all about the concept and origins here, and discover two of the main protagonists in my follow-up blog post here. Today, I’m sharing an excerpt from the novel in hopes of tempting anyone who’s on the fence to buy a copy. The Golden State merges fearless adventure, long-lost facts and struggles of American history, and the evolution of a Jewish family across 100 years, three continents, and the forty-eight continental states. Please enjoy the read, and get your copy on Amazon here!
When their maverick great-uncle dies and leaves behind a cryptic will, sixteen-year old Matt Rosen and his older sister Becca leave their California suburb on a road trip to find a long-lost, magic family bracelet. Matt doesn’t care about his family, his Judaism, or history at all—only his great Goyish uncle who gave him a key to something greater. They begin their journey from the Bay Area to Chicago in search of historical clues and family secrets…
Salt Lake City
Though Becca did most of the driving, I took the wheel now and again. I had never driven more than a half-hour before, and it was a four hour leg to Salt Lake City. I was so nervous that I got carsick while driving. Becca was not happy when I woke her up. I tried to pull over on the highway, but Becca freaked out and made me swerve back and a pickup truck honked as it jerked into the left lane and blazed by. We got off at a gas station three miles later and switched. Every time I closed my eyes Becca gave me a hard pinch. “If I don’t get to sleep, you don’t either,” she said.
All that day we saw nothing but desert. Hot and dust-colored. Hour by hour it weighed down on me, like falling snow. Desert snow—now that would be a sight. Becca wanted to step out of the car every once in a while to take a picture of a big sky or striated cliff, but I was happy to stay in the car. I don’t like the desert. It’s dry, and lonely, and it kills things. Some things live, but in stunted, skeletal forms. There’s dark magic in the desolation, keeping winds sharp, keeping rain away.
I did sense a redeeming quality, quietly filling the dry air and whistling hills: the space, promise, and possibility for life. If I could cast a spell and make it rain, even Nevada could be a beautiful place…
So it felt great to get to Salt Lake City, to be back in some sort of civilization, even if we were only gone a few days. We checked into a motel on the city limits on Friday afternoon. We drove through downtown and had Chinese food. Salt Lake City’s plenty large and bustling, made extraordinary by the backdrop of stunning mountains, gray giants with broad shoulders and pointy ears. We asked our waitress what to do in Salt Lake City, and she responded that most people come for the nature around it, like Cottonwood Canyon and the Great Salt Lake, but that the zoo and history museum are nice. I suppose that’s life in the American west. And I don’t mean the west coast—I mean the wild west. Out here, the landscape is everything. And if human civilization happens to exist within it, even a city this big, then that’s just a big convenience.
We came to Salt Lake City for the Mormon Church. We checked out the Temple Square Saturday morning. It was impressive, pristine spires reaching for the sky, the heavens, presumably. You wouldn’t learn anything about Mormonism by going there, though. I only know one Mormon kid from school, and the only thing I know about her is that her sister got married at the ripe age of 18.3. Fortunately, Grampa Andy had taped some educational encyclopedia cut-outs into the notebook. Turns out—Mormons are positively bananas. The Book of Mormon claims the Israelites migrated to America in 600 BC and built a great civilization. Eventually Joseph Smith came along, and with his handy-dandy pair of magic spectacles interpreted ancient Egyptian glyphs left by the last prophet of the Israelites before their civilization was destroyed by the ‘red men’. It’s a whacko re-centering of Christianity around the good ole US of A. Joseph Smith founded the church in New York, but facing violent persecution (classic heretic problems) they moved around to Missouri, and after Smith was killed, to Utah.
Grampa Andy wrote about this outlandish Mormon dude named Walter Miller. He was an important figure in Mormon life in Salt Lake City and helped manage sites along the historic Mormon Trail (kinda like my buddy George Yoshida!). But over time he became an outcast from the church. He claimed to possess Joseph Smith’s golden spectacles, Brigham Young’s compass, and some eight or nine other sacred artifacts associated with Mormon history. There’s this 1974 newspaper clip about the different objects he claimed he had, and one of them was a bracelet, recovered from ruins of the Israelites. The bracelet had a gold coin.
You bet it did.
Grampa Andy came across the clip because one of his topics of historical research in the late 90s was Mormonism’s claims over Native American ruins and artifacts. Now it was up to me and Becca to unravel the mystery. I was excited. Each place we stopped felt like a passage into something greater. Each place was a place in itself, but also a place on the verge of a place that was more—a more-place, or maybe a place-place. And that place-place was the real place: my family story, wrapped in the cloth of American history, ribboned with a Star of David.
Salt Lake City was no different. We needed to find the door, the way in. We did a mini-driving tour of Salt Lake City, scoping out a place to do research. We found a public library and decided to look for a copy of the old newspaper that Grampa Andy had glued into the notebook.
After talking to three different librarians, we found out that the church in question, the Sterling Church of the Latter-Day Saints, had been closed for several years, but in fact had just reopened last year. One librarian, a superbly whiskered man, helped us find copies of the church’s old newsletters. In July 1974, a new pamphlet was published every week, and in some cases on consecutive days.
I read the pamphlets, July 5-23, 1974. Written by Rock Jones, Mormon kid, journalist extraordinaire. The events rose into a theater in my mind, and I swear I was really standing there in the crowd. Heavy sunbeams beat me down. Dry air scratches at my throat. Walter Miller gives a speech. He professes his ability to make miracles. Half the congregation erupts in rage, half in profound awe. I hop in the back of a sedan with Rock Jones and we follow fifty congregants into the desert. Before our eyes, Walter Miller draws crystal water from dry sands. He calls two rattlesnakes from the thrush, provokes them, and survives both bites, sending the snakes slithering away. He holds out his arms to display the twin bites, sacred mirrored wounds. And he calls to the crowd:
“I am Isaac and Avraham before the LORD! Stretch thy hand out not against me,
Do not do anything against me!
For I am in awe of God!
Mounting through the spires of form
The Worm strives to be a Man,
And speaking all languages rises forth,
Breathing out omens and seeing great lengths,
A fluid chain of countless rings
Built by the Worm, the phenomenon perfect!
Let the one set-of-words baffle us not;
Let us mount the solstice desert of Ourselves—
Let us fill nature with our overflowing currents—
I have ascended to the realm of God and I dare you all to follow—”
And with that, Rock Jones and I absolutely lose it. Rock admits in the article:
“In the resulting chaos I have become unable to remember and therefore record any further events.”
If that isn’t wild, I don’t know what is. I could not be more excited to meet Walter Miller.
I raced through the rest of the pamphlets. Turns out Walter Miller advocated a transcendental spirituality, where humans can become gods by joining the spirit of nature. He thought he had bridged the gap between Man and God.
I raced through the rest of the pamphlets. Turns out Walter Miller advocated a transcendental spirituality, where humans can become gods by joining the spirit of nature. He thought he had bridged the gap between Man and God.
It almost makes sense. Think about atoms for a second. If all atoms in the universe are recycled, and we really are stardust, since exploding stars churns out heavier elements like the carbon and iron that make up our bodies, then humans, somewhat straightforwardly, consist of eternity. Our bodies and minds have already got Nirvana, the universal spirit, endless void. That means there should be a way to reconnect with our immortal matter, and therefore “god”. Just like people, no matter where they come from, can be friends if they can speak a common language—or even if they can’t.
“He’s a raving lunatic,” Becca remarked, throwing a pamphlet down. “Oh, no doubt,” I said. “We need to meet him.”
However she felt about it, my enthusiasm bull rushed us out the library door. A few maps, a call with Mom, Becca’s theory that Bush would use the London bombings as an excuse to invade various Middle Eastern countries, and one bathroom-stop later, Becca and I were at the doorstep of the Sterling Church of the Latter-Day Saints.
Only when we were approaching the church did I start to get nervous. I think I was more nervous than Becca, likely due to prejudice (Mormons always freaked me out for some reason). We stared up at the tall white church, fronted with a thirty-foot stained-glass window. It was a gorgeous building, walls white and flat and broad. The parking lot was separated from the building by a hedgerow and lawn, and a backyard of irrigated trees gave the church its own landscape. The green and red of the stained glass glared down as us like a burning forest, the Burning Man himself.
We followed a sidewalk around to the back and entered an ordinary looking office door. A noisy AC unit rattled behind a dying bush. We came into a quiet lobby with a tile floor.
“This is kind of like Beth Shalom,” Becca said.
“Not everything needs to be like Hebrew School, Becca,” I said. Though there was definitely a tile floor in the Beth Shalom Hebrew School lobby. I thought about how I hadn’t been to synagogue in a few years. Dad went the weekends he was around, and both of us were Bar/Bat Mitzvah-d, but he stopped making me go when I started high school. I always hated the place, and I didn’t like the comparison. There were no mystical secrets at Beth Shalom, only a big tree with a swing out back, kids that smell like pee, and fat Rabbi Isaac Kornfield, a little too willing to hug you tight.
“I don’t know about this,” I said.
Becca looked at me with her head cocked sideways, a look that said, we are literally standing in a perfectly innocuous hallway with an old tile floor.
We went in and knocked on an office door. When I saw an old secretary with dyed blonde hair, more Beth Shalom memories attacked me like a swarm of rabid bats (Julie Appelbaum kisses me on the cheek. I draw on her face with a marker. I am six years old.), I felt even more nervous. I wanted to tap Becca on the shoulder and tell her, never mind, let’s forget it. I don’t know if it was a dire aversion to 80s hairdos or plain old cowardice, but I couldn’t go into the office. All faith that this new-old beautiful-boring Mormon temple would lead us to the bracelet drained away. I waited for Becca and heard the high-pitched, cotton-candy voice of the secretary respond to Becca’s questions.
According to what I overheard, the secretary remembered the events well. She called Walter Miller a psychopath. She hated him for ruining their community. She saw faith and family as the twin pillars of life, but Walter Miller had to go off about becoming a God and nearly destroy their community in the process. Everyone in the congregation had to respond to Walter Miller—you were either with him or against him, and if you were against him, you might’ve been subject to threats or even violence. She and her husband had stood firmly against, lost their son to a hippie commune in Santa Barbara and their cat to a fire, seen the church close and reopen. She had never heard of a bracelet.
My armpits were stained with sweat and I just wanted to leave, but Becca was harassing the secretary for Walter Miller’s daughter’s address. After gentle protest, the woman gave it to Becca, and told her to have a lovely day.
Becca grinned at me. “I crushed it, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said, picking at my sticky shirt, “so can we please go?” According to the map, Miller’s daughter lived way out in the suburbs. As I sat there miserably listening to the Pretenders fight the system, I thought about how I didn’t come on this road trip to interview sad Mormons. I wanted Walter Millers and Lisa Montanas, not church secretaries and tile-floor lobbies.
We arrived at a gray apartment building that existed for no discernible reason. It was just a highway exit and a gas station, and some sprawl connected to nowhere. We got out of the car onto a scorching blacktop. The building was decaying and the lights in the lobby flickered on and off. We waited two minutes for an elevator before taking the stairs. We climbed to the sixth floor. We knocked on the door as I tapped my foot. A moment later, Walter Miller’s daughter, over 50, greeted us in a gray bathrobe.
Becca apologized and explained to her what we were looking for. “Yea, yea,” the daughter said several times. “Yea, yea.” She was busy, told us what happened, and shut the door in our faces.
Walter Miller had given her the bracelet in his will after he died in ’74, just a few months after the incident. Yep, one and the same—it had a gold coin, a silver spear, “California” written on it. But she pawned it off. She had been addicted to heroin and needed cash. She sold it to a handsome older man, tall, leather jacket, hat and boots. Strange accent. He gave her $500 for it and she never saw him again. Never did heroin again, either, so that was good, she guessed. We were only 30 years too late, and she had no leads for us.
One week ago, my latest novel, The Golden State, went live. It’s a literary road trip adventure into family and American history, about two Jewish teenagers who set off in search of a long-lost family bracelet. You can get your paperback or eBook right here on Amazon, and I’m here today to tell you about the two protagonists of the story, featuring original art.
Yes, that’s right! I commissioned wonderful illustrations by the talented Arielle Losar of Matt, Becca, and Kaori. In this post, I’d like to introduce you to the heroes of The Golden State, Matt and Becca Rosen.
Matthew Rosen
Ah, Matt. Our story’s fearless narrator, who lets a reader deep into his consciousness and darkest thoughts, perhaps, at times, too far. 16 years old at the time of the story, born January 11, 1989. 5’9″, gangly limbs, extremely tan, skinny from track and field. Hasn’t quite figured out his shaving routine yet.
As a “manic-stoner”, Matt, like the generation of California Jews before him, discovered weed at a slightly too-young age, and has already grown out of the green by the time of the story due to what he suspected to be weed-induced anxiety attacks. Nonetheless, marijuana had a lasting influence on Matt’s personality. For most of his teenage years, he aligned himself with all things stoner-adjacent in aesthetic: hoodies, skating, grunge, hip-hop, old movies, sitting on roofs, pondering the meaning of life, etcetera.
Matt is academically average, but nonetheless a very good storyteller. He loathes Silicon Valley but has a noteworthy interest in technology as he is often recruited by classmates’ and friends’ bands to operate recording equipment for their very bad albums. Matt is a strange balance of quiet on the surface and wildly talkative underneath. Or perhaps he’s extroverted on the surface, but a solitary thinker. Regardless, he’s gotten by socially largely with his height and his humor. The brightest part of his personality comes out around those who he has a close relationship with: his sister, his friends Will and Christine, and Grampa Andy. His great uncle Andy Wessel has an outsized influence on Matt: Andy’s active lifestyle of outdoor adventuring, his go-with-the-flow attitude, and his independent thought process (rejecting all religion, coming up with his own philosophies) seemed to Matt to be the best possible adult to grow into. Due to this obsession with his great uncle, Matt lacks career orientation and can only vaguely push back at his father’s attempts to pull him towards a career in law.
His favorite colors are bright and ugly: scarlet, pea green, mustard yellow. He likes classic comedy movies like Airplane and The Big Lebowski. Perhaps he’s meant to be an academic, because the proudest he ever was of himself was after he delivered his intensively researched Bar Mitzvah speech. He’s a great narrator for a story, and I sincerely hope you enjoy living in his head for 200-something pages.
Rebecca Rosen
Matt’s older sister and road trip companion for the novel. Nonchalant, casual, confident, Becca, 5’8″, was taller than Matt up until winter before The Golden State begins. 18 years old at the time of the story, born March 2, 1987. Broad shoulders, severe features, fantastically curly hair.
While ‘weed’ might be the entry point into Matt’s personality, ‘politics’ is the entry point for Becca. Finally able to vote, she’s long been politically engaged, and has gone through countless phases that nonetheless have a clear direction of radicalization. She was first interested in the 1998 midterms as a Democrat. Then in 2000, she was a Gore fanatic. By 2002, she was left of the Democratic party and a staunch supporter of European socialism, writing essays in class from the perspective of Democratic Socialism and the welfare state whenever she could. By 2004 and the time of the story, she’s an all-out anarcho-socialist, interested in only complete, radical revolution and the comprehensive reorganizing of society, resources, and capital. These ideas are contained largely to inside her head and the books that she reads, but she has started lately to go into Berkeley to listen to talks and join political organizing first-hand. Fortunately for all of us, she’s not too overbearing about her politics, although she does absolutely believe that she is right on every issue.
That’s not to say that Becca is close-minded. She’s straightforward, honest, and enthusiastic, and has a wide circle of friends. For Matt, she is a fearless leader, showing him the best and most interesting ways to experience all the parts of high school (except for skateboarding and smoking weed). She’s an active participant in Judaism, keeping Kosher when she can, and always enjoys the singing and communal prayer of Shabbat services and holidays. Lastly, she’s a bright student, intensely organized and a fearsome opponent in a debate.
Becca may not be much for fashion or anything girly, but she identifies as a Pisces no matter how little she seems like one. She’ll immediately take you up on any offer to visit art museums or eat Chinese food. Becca is excellent at Spanish and loves reading novels in Spanish; she has a love-hate relationship with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Her favorite color is blue.
Kaori Stern
Also, here’s the illustration of Kaori. I don’t want to spoil her, since she doesn’t appear till late in the book, but if everyone is interested, I can do a similar write-up about her at some point. Be sure to follow Arielle on Instagram to see all of her awesome art, and thanks for reading. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to get your copy of THE GOLDEN STATE!
over the offing 