My little project now known as The Coldwater Diaries started out on a blog-site identical to what you see before you now. It was Fall of '07 and I was spending an afternoon sharing lines with a china-girl twenty-three-stories above Wilshire Blvd in a high-rise apartment in Brentwood I had been living at the time. It was somewhere around noon and we had already hoovered our fair share of Bolivian-flake while managing to burn through two packs of Parliaments at the same time. Slightly bored with our stash running low I flipped on the tube to find Less Than Zero playing on one of the movie channels. I thought to myself how similar my situation was to some of the situations in not only Less Than Zero, but all of Ellis' work. I had managed to weasel my way into a clan of the wealthy and elite and the Westside of Los Angeles was my playground.
I took a moment to reflect while watching Robert Downey's Character Julian smoke base at some House Party in the hills and for reasons still unknown to me today, a sudden urge to write a flash-fiction piece overcame me and within moments I found myself before my laptop prepping a blind writing session. What followed was a piece of flash-fiction through the eyes of a character named Donnie as he navigated his way around a party he didn't want to be surrounded by cretins he loathed to see. And one thing came to mind after another and next thing I knew this little piece of flash-fiction grew legs and the moment I finished up with Donnie I dove straight into a whole other kind of character in Andrew. And like Donnie before him, once I wrapped Andrew I dove into another character and then another and before I knew it I had a little piece of smut fiction that was in a sense writing itself.
By sunup I had written close to ten-thousand words and a thought came to mind – what if I tell a story day by day online… in blog form as if the characters wrote each entry themselves… and each day interested parties could watch the madness unfold in real-time. I called it an online novel for the blog generation – with the idea being to trick people into actually reading a book – no matter how smutty it may be… And thus the following day a blog was built and from it (initially titled "The Shitty-Pipe Diaries" now known as) The Coldwater Diaries
was born.
Loaded on creative inspiration, a gallon of hundred-proof optimism, and 30mg of Adderall I slaved over the project for a little over a week – absolutely certain this unique way of storytelling would take off in very short time in turn launching my writing career at the mere age of 22… all the while neglecting to recognize a very large elephant's presence in the apartment…
… I wasn't yet ready to tell my story as I hadn't finished living it…
…These characters I had birthed and the world I created around them were hardly the products of a sane mind in a stable place. That said, those initial chapters written during that first week were born off experiences of my own – loosely based off my time in Los Angeles, the people I had met, and moreover, the many faces I had taken on for myself…
Point being, what is now The Coldwater Diaries (originally The Shitty-pipe Diaries) was more at the time (despite my not knowing this fact then) not a story ready to be told day-by-day but rather a very sloppy account of the life I had lead up to that point – with any prospects of finding a beginning, middle, and end for these characters no more than a pipe-dream…
I still had quite a bit of living to do…
And although I had committed just over a month's time to the actual writing of Coldwater through week-long spurts here and there of non-stop, on-the-fly, unedited, spontaneous prose – almost two years have since passed to get the words on paper – as within the last two years, when not in one of those week-long writing trances, I had to deal with my life of the present along with the demons of my past – where not only had I grown as both writer and person, but found myself at last able to tell the story I needed to live to tell…
Now finally at point of execution after many months of living and getting over some of the stories seeded deep within the words of Coldwater, I've Two Volumes "In the Books" with the Third Volume being told in three-acts live on the Coldwater Site – www.TheColdwaterDiaries.com
The function of The Coldwater Diaries (Unplugged) is to present the work as originally intended – individual blog posts/chapters as if written by the characters themselves – where the focus isn't on the material itself (as that can be found on the main site), but rather the material behind the material. Readers of The Coldwater Diaries Unplugged will not only find the chapters of Volume One (along with whatever updates I've applied to the main site regarding Volumes Two and Three) but along with whatever chapter in question – details behind where I was in my life when the chapter was written, where ideas and instances may have come from, and a detailed look at the facts behind the fiction.
Apart from these more in-depth entries this branch of The Coldwater Diaries will provide more insight to those interested in the upcoming Video Short projects on tap – with character synopsis, outlines, scene sides, etc – that go beyond what's available on the main site. Prospects for projects and fans alike will find in-depth character bios that go beyond explaining their complex arcs and eccentricities, but provide insights as to how through choices I've made in my own life (more bad than good) inspired this organic tale being told… whether an actor trying to gain perspective or a college-kid in Idaho, one way or another, through the depravity and mistakes of my characters (ultimately spawned from mistakes I've made) if even just one single person is able to forego any-of-the-many unfortunate consequences and situations befallen on me in the real world, by simply living a day in the life of one of my characters in the world of fiction, then I've done my job – making all the shit I've sifted through worth it at the end of the day…
Again as I write these words I stress The Coldwater Diaries has still a bit of work left… but I can still say with confidence I'm closer to telling the story proper – more now than ever before – dating back to its conception in the fall of '07.
There's more to come I assure you. For now I leave you with the preceding words, all the while laying finishing touches behind the scenes so as a 947 word introduction such as this won't be required to tell you (the reader) essentially nothing…
Until it all makes sense I thank you for hanging with me thus far and hope you return when all affairs are in order,
Geoffrey A. Citron
Los Angeles, October 2009
In the meantime be sure to check out both My Blog and The Main Coldwater Site – both of which part of this online overhaul I'm so diligently working on…
And in the event you've recently suffered an aneurism or are considered mentally unfit and a danger to society and yourself or anything else of the like and would entertain the notion of actually purchasing a print version of either The Coldwater Diaries Volume I – Conflicting Personalities or The Coldwater Diaries Volume II – Merging Lanes, you can find them on the temporary storefront setup for the next few weeks by clicking here.
