For various reasons I’ve been relatively quiet online recently. But I’ve still been busy – mainly developing a long-form story idea called ‘The Sleep Artist’. And now finally it’s morphed into something coherent.

Yes, I do believe I’ve written a novel!

I’ve never written a novel before. Digital fictions, social media fictions, immersive theatre productions, radio plays, TV half-hours, self-help books, magazine articles, song lyrics – all of those. But never a novel.

Here’s a basic synopsis:

The life & death of Peter Shure: the actor who turned sleeping into an art form

“Peter Shure rarely took leading roles in films. He often had no lines at all. But he remained box-office his whole life due to a hypnotic ability to sleep or ‘play dead’ in such a way that kept cinema audiences flocking to see him for 40 years.

In this eccentric creative biography-cum-memoir  (biogoir? memography?), film historian Tim Wright tries to identify the source of Shure’s compelling sleeping powers and make sense of Shure’s extraordinary career.

Attempting to piece together the story of Shure’s extraordinary life, Wright adopts a ‘montage’ approach to storytelling, using a range of contributions from family members and close collaborators:  

• Helen Grosvenor – pretentiously psychic ex-wife, fellow thespian;
• Isabella Shure – daughter, angry and frustrated writer;
• Christopher Shure (aka Clem Media) – errant son, lead singer and songwriter for the cult NY punk band The Fuggers;
• Martin Chambers – needy and controlling PA and agent, 80s casualty;
• Devon – the artist and filmmaker who directs Shure in his last fatal film ‘The Rapture’.

Excerpts from taped interviews with Shure and extracts from his personal diaries are used to drive the narrative, revealing how Shure’s odd and iconic life and work affected those close to him in dramatic ways, in particular his two children, Isabella and Christopher. 

Wright charts the man’s entire life from its beginnings in a post-WW1 world of fairgrounds and amusement parks, his experiences as a WW2 flight engineer and prisoner-of-war through to his entry into the world of film, his establishment as a famous sleep actor, his decline into a world of cheap horror movies, TV adverts and pop videos, right through to his mysterious demise during filming on a beach in Kent.

The book includes reviews of many of Shure’s performances, as well as details of his encounters with many of the most famous artists and filmmakers of the age (Elvis, Warhol, Lennon, Ono, Attenborough, Polanski, Burden, Andress, de Laurentis, Herzog, Greenaway, Cimino, Hopper, Taylor etc).  

As well as a multi-voiced family drama told across several decades, ‘The Sleep Artist’ is a partial history of the film industry in the second half of the 20th century and a comic meditation on the cumulative effect of cinematic media upon all of us.”

NOTE ON IMAGERY & AI

The first draft manuscript contains a number of images that have not been cleared in terms of rights. (but I think could be for the most part). They are designed to amplify the sense of Shure as a real person operating in the real world, as well as to show how images of sleep and death run through the history of cinema from Chaplin onwards.

The book can ( I think) be enjoyed without images. But it may also be possible to use the manuscript as source material for producing AI-generated posters and scenes from the many imaginary films Peter Shure might have appeared in. It might be fun, in fact,  to create the first novel to includes a range of seemingly realistic AI-generated images based entirely on the text of the book.

Already a few experiments with AI have taken place and with just a few basic prompts it’s been possible to generate early-draft posters for imagined Peter Shure films.

I’m not sure if this will appal or intrigue people in the publishing industry as an idea. But please do get in touch either way if you’d liek to discuss the work and the different ways it might be developed and brought to market. Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

In the meantime, here’s a sample of the work for you to enjoy: