finish my novel

Will I ever make time for this? It needs a lot of work, a lot of time. But it’s come so far that I can’t abandon it, because it would be like losing a child.

What I need, what I really need, are a few months where I can just work on this without a part-time job and without a full credit load. I need my own place. I want a wall-sized white board. I’m willing to forget about that last one.

I don’t think I can convincingly create the main character until I get back from India anyway. It’s strange, because I have an entire universe and some really good supporting characters, and a couple hundred pages, but I have yet to really connect with the main character, and that’s a problem. I know exactly who the main male character is and what is going through his mind. I understand him. But her? I don’t really know her.

My poetry professor told us that with a poem, the artist usually starts with a small subject and spirals outward until the poem is actually about something much larger than first meets the eye (which is why I love so much of eec’s poetry – you have to find the huge meaning hidden within seemingly innocent and sometimes pointless constructions – it’s a puzzle). As a writer, this is my problem – I started with a universe and I’m now trying to zoom in on this one girl, and it’s not working.

“Not working,” but a couple hundred pages later . . .

So I’ll get back in April-May 2007 and spend a couple weeks crashing at my friends’ apartments while re-enculturating myself (only an anthropology major would construct such a word). Visit my office. Graduate. Walk by the river at night. Go out one last time with the Russian Mafia and the Pakistanis before they scatter for the summer. Say goodbye to people I love very deeply and who have changed my life.

I will hopefully spend some time with family that summer, visit the mountains, spend time with Logan, visit violetbaudelaire at grad school, get back on the trail. I’ve got a pesky (but probably beautiful) 40 miles or so of the SHT to complete. Three days on the trail.

And then find a cheap one-bedroom apartment (efficiency perhaps) and write for awhile. And hopefully I’ll be able to make it for awhile without a job, because I have some savings and I’m willing to use it for the opportunity to write.

I can’t imagine sending these books off to a publisher’s. I have no plans to be the next whoever. I just want to finish it for my sake, because I have this world and I’ve had parts of this world floating inside my head since 1993. I’ve had characters since that time, I’ve had plots, I even wrote hundreds of pages at that time. It’s all pretty terrible and I wouldn’t use any of it, but the ideas I had back then were rather creative, so I can salvage the ideas at least. I need to finish this story.

I really need to finish this story.

And I’ve got a collection of short stories (okay, so currently it’s a collection of one short story, but I have plans) that I want to work on.

And there’s the kid’s book I wrote a couple of years ago. I need to find someone with more artistic ability than I have to illustrate it.

So that’s the plan for completing this goal.