What Novel Writing Has Taught Me

I’m a short story writer.

Twilight in Mumbai is the fourth novel I’ve gotten more than two-hundred pages into and each one feels the same to me. A big hairy mess. They have all stagnated in varying states of disrepair. If I had a stove with a middle burner between the front and back burners, that is where this novel would go. It’s no longer going to be a primary focus, but I will be working on it regularly. So I don’t expect it to be done by October 31st like I had originally planned. I told some of you that I would definitely be doing NaNoWriMo again in November of 2008. I’m not so sure of that now.

See I’ve got my mojo back, but it’s because of short stories. I spent a good chunk of my vacation working on a short story (Unit One) and I was extremely excited to be working on it and that hasn’t happened since early last summer. So, that story being completed, I’m moving on to another, with a working title of Process Five, from comic book scripts I wrote for an unpublished series I created called Unity, which some of you may have read.

I’m still keeping a hand in Twilight. Don’t ask me why, but the entire novel was squashed into five chapters. Have you ever read a five chapter book? Neither have I. I’ve broken it down into seventeen much more manageable parts and I imagine it will grow more chapters in time.

Sleepy Time Soon

My brain isn't working so well right now. I'm crashing in mere minutes. Yes, this is very early for me.

I finished up a new short story yesterday called "Unit One" and sent it off to my first readers. Depending on what they tell me, I'll tinker with it on Thursday or more and send it off to find a home in the publication wilds of the Northeast. Then and only then will it take its place at number fifty-nine of The One-Thousand.

I've broken down the hairy mess known as "Twilight in Mumbai" into more chapters to make it easier to wrangle. I've gone from five insane megachapters (don't ask me what I was thinking) to seventeen chapters. I'll jump back into that fun tomorrow.

Good Night all.

Experience Pathetic Doldrums Vicariously Through Me!

No story. I’ve just got unparalleled verbal diarrhea today, I don’t know why. I have a good friend upon whom I often thrust meandering speeches such as this one, in the form of e-mails, but I decided to turn this one into a post to give her a break. Writing e-mails to her is almost like throwing bottled messages into the ocean. She never replies. If I didn’t talk to her outside of e-mail, I’d never know if she’d received them or even if she’s still alive. Still, it’s cathartic and if she deleted the messages before reading them, I’d never know. I’m on vacation this week so I may be posting more stuff like this. I feel like I’m on some sort of writing crack today. I hope it keeps up.

The thing with the stories is, I’d had a streak going from January 1st through the 23rd, one story a day. The first week, my hits broke a record for me, then they went steadily down, so I asked myself why the hell I was doing it. And I stopped. I’ll post stories intermittently now.

Strange things happen when you come back to a part of a story you haven’t looked at in a while. I’m going through my novel and I found this little speech by my main character which makes no sense to me at all. I’m sure it made sense to me when I first wrote it. I’m leaving it as it is for now, hoping I’ll remember or get in the right state of mind to understand it in the future. I made a little comment next to it saying, “What the fuck did I mean by this?”

We haven’t had my preferred type of Ramen noodles in the house in a week or more and I’m going through withdrawals. I may have to drop everything at some point and buy noodles.

There are psychological and relational patterns that run through everyone’s lives. This is a human truth, which I’ve discovered through observation. Take a look at yourself and your co-people in life and you’ll see it too. A person can run the same pattern over and over again throughout their entire lifetime, like hooking up with abusive men again and again, or getting free things from people all the time. I just realized a huge pattern in my own life a couple of weeks ago. It’s almost the theme of my life. Again and again I impress people when they first get to know me and then as time goes on I never live up to that expectation that they have of me and they are inevitably disappointed in me. This makes it easy for me to get a job but difficult for me to get promoted. It happens on a small scale and it’s also the trajectory of my life. I showed huge promise as a kid, and have failed to live up to it. I was aware of this pattern to a smaller degree for years, but it was only recently that I understood how pervasive it was. The first step to breaking a pattern is to recognize it, so I hope I can change it now. This means I’ll have to get better at things as time goes on. That sounds like work. No wonder I haven’t changed yet.

I’m peeing like I’m on a beer binge today. I have to keep drinking so I don’t turn into a giant man-raisin. If I do turn, at least I’ll be sweeter, I guess.

I just got noodles. I saw the cutest kid on the planet at Publix and a bird that flew around inside the store. I hope they don’t have motion detectors, they’re going to have a miserable time tonight if that bird doesn’t leave.

More later, I think.

The Big Finish

I have done it. 50,000 words in one month, and it's not so much that which impresses me, It's the nearly 26,000 words in the last five days. I have stretched myself, and learned that I can go a bit farther than I have before. I wrote nearly twelve thousand words on Thursday, about 4,500 more than I ever have before in a single day. And on top of that, most of those words made sense when they were strung together.

The novel's got a working title of "Twilight in Mumbai," and it's still going to be a long while and many drafts before it's beautiful. But it's cool that I have the first draft of a novel, a beginning middle and end and it's not too bad. Subsequent drafts will be longer of course. I'm hoping that you'll be able to read it in book form.