finish my novel

414 more words. Another scene. Kind of a busywork scene, but still, I’m gettin’ on with the business. Besides, I don’t want to get my eyeballs pecked out. So.

Progress is being made, slowly. But it is being made. Tra la.

It’s one scene. It’s not much. But it’s a start. So, yay.

It’s also got a first line which I kinda like: “The next morning, Chad stood in the kitchen, Cliff’s bricklike antique cellphone in his hand, dialing a number on a slip of paper he’d found in one of his mutilated Thursday-night pockets as outside the wail of electric guitars rose on the breeze.”

So there you are. Progress is being made. Fleets of assassin messenger pigeons be damned. Hee.

It’s actually a little bit different, as it turns out, than ScriptFrenzy was…hearing the clock beginning to tick, beginning to feel that pressure…when you realize that you’re not starting cold, but in fact you have 220 pages written that you haven’t looked at (and, indeed, have tried subconsciously to forget about) for six months or more. More like eight, now, actually, when I think about it. Hee.

Spent some time last night rereading (I got through the first fifty pages), and read the rest when I got home from work today. It’s actually pretty damn good, and I think there’s some definite momentum at the point where I stopped that I can just sort of dive back into.

The other thing that occurred to me upon rereading was that there are just too damn many subplots (which is kind of what I wanted, at the outset, and something I still kind of like) for all of them to get resolved in one volume. So now I’m thinking that, especially with only thirty days to go, I’m going to have to think about spreading the whole story (stories, really) out over a couple or three books. Which is sort of inconvenient in a way, but also really helpful…there’s a lot of back-burner stuff going on in the first two hundred pages or so, but also three or four very much live narrative threads, which in and of themselves would be sufficient to comprise the plot of your average one-volume novel. If I break the larger narrative into two or three discrete chunks, though, it seems like I can focus on the live threads, and keep the back-burner stuff simmering slowly towards a boil, kind of in the background, and produce a book that not only feels acceptably like a novel, plot- and scope-wise, but also does the work of getting the simmering stuff ready to be the three or four main narrative courses of the next one.

It’s actually really interesting to be thinking about, and beginning to try to plot, in this way—I’m starting to think of the various interwoven stories and subplots not as an undifferentiated tangle, but according to how quickly they could (and should) play out. And according to what I have imagined would be the course of the overarching story, it seems like there could be appropriate volume-ending plot points at the right intervals to make this a good three book project. A significant but ailing character dies at the end of the first book, the second concerns her successor sort of learning what he’s doing, on the job and in something of a crisis situation, and the third volume winding up all the various loose ends and resolving the ultimate crisis as he achieves some sort of competence or mastery in his new role. I think, actually, that that totally works. Each book will have a distinct arc of its own, and each will serve as a segment of the larger arc.

And getting from where I am to at least the first break point is doable with some hard work (another 200 pages or so, I’d imagine). So, yay. This actually doesn’t feel like it’s dead in the water anymore. I’m on it. Of I go, to write—or maybe to outline. We shall see. More later, in any event. Onwards!

Hee. melb100, that is. Specifically, this post. But what the hell. I really wanted to spend some time with this this summer, and I haven’t, and now I kind of have to. So.

All good. Hee. Cheers.

Last week or so of the semester, and then I can begin my summer projects, of which this is definitely one. To that end, I managed to print out a hard copy of what I’ve got so far, in fits and starts, while nobody was looking at work this week. 220 pages. I’d forgotten it was that long at this point. All the more reason, and kind of an added motivation, to get back to it. After all, that’s an awful lot of writing to just let go to waste. So. Depending on how things go with the end-of-semester workload this weekend, I may begin reading it over in the course of the next few days. Good, good.

At least not this weekend. Spent all day Saturday recovering from Friday night, and then all day today cleaning the apartment. I also discovered on Friday that my last story for the semester is due in the hands of the workshop this coming Friday….eep. So much, I expect, for realizing the goal of writing a good short story on this go-round. Sigh.

Anyway. Won’t have the time to sit down next weekend, as I’ve got fairly all-consuming plans. Well. It’s in my head, anyway, and once I’ve got this upcoming story handed in, be it good or ill, I won’t have any more creative writing obligations until September. So there will be time. I really was hoping to get around to doing something with this this weekend, though. Bleah.

Heh. That title probably isn’t a good way to start motivating, is it? Well.

Problem is, really, that I started writing the damn thing back in 1993, my last year as an undergrad. I kind of fiddled with it, on and off, for a year or two after that, probably got about 100 pages written, and then gave up on it for a variety of reasons.

So then, about four years ago, I fell in with this sort of impromptu writing group in NYC, and that got me writing again, and so I revisited the abandoned novel, and found that, while I still liked a whole bunch of it, I couldn’t write it from the same perspective that I had been writing from back in 1993. So I started over, using the original stuff as inspiration. It went really well for awhile—I got about 150 pages down in the next three years, and then, for a variety of reasons, put it down again this past fall, swearing that I was just giving up on it.

Now here I am this spring, thinking about it again, and thinking that what I’ve written in the second go-around is fatally flawed, but I still can’t quite be done with it. So I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid that if I don’t write the damn thing out, in some form or other, from start to finish, it’ll just keep following around after me and I’ll never be free of it. And, there are some kind of cool notions in it, and some characters that I like, and some great settings, and I want to do something with all that—it seems sorta criminal not to, especially given all the time I’ve put into it over the years.

Well, I dunno. I’ve never been one for outlining and all that, but I think there might be something worthwhile in trying to do that, so as to root out the “fatal” flaws and see what I can do to mitigate them. I’ll certainly have time over the summer, once my semester ends…maybe it’ll be a summer project, to figure out a way to forge ahead, and then begin to do so.

We shall see.