Current status…

Revising is fun, I guess. Referring to 130+ notecards, my 260ish-page marked-up draft, and 20 pages of notes-to-self from my last read-through.

There’s really not enough room on my desk for all that.

View high resolution

So I turned my manuscript into about 130 note cards. My writing process involves spreading them out on the floor and wondering how the heck I’ll ever make sense of them.

View high resolution

I’m making a notecard for each scene in the manuscript, and in order to do that I’m spreading all the pages out on the floor. Ruby does not like it.

Why yes, I believe we have a complete manuscript here.

Happy accidents

Someone has been driving Binx Bolling’s car around here — a bright red MG-A, shiny as though it’s 1961 and the car has just rolled out of the showroom. I keep seeing it parked on the street in front of a small park, the sunlight gleaming off its curves and chrome. It’s such a fundamentally happy car, in that I can’t help but smile when I see it, and I suppose that’s why Binx likes it. No matter how stuck in despair he feels he can always close the office up early, strap his suitcase to the back rack, and go spinning along.

There’s a scene in The Moviegoer where Binx and his secretary are driving on a coastal road and get in a minor accident. Binx is happy that it happens, because the collision snaps him out of the everydayness of the situation. Something that he’s done over and over again — trying to seduce one of his secretaries — becomes new and uncharted.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that this past week — even before Binx started parking his car near my office. Some misfortunes can in fact be fortunate, because they direct us in other directions. A little adversity can cause us to dig in and try harder than we have before. Disrupting a routine can invest the entire routine with a newfound sense of purpose.

So, this is the point: I finished writing this novel I’ve been working on and thinking about for years. I am very happy about that, but I know I’m not done yet. I haven’t settled into a routine yet, the entire time I’ve been working on it. I’m still discovering, still working, still making it new. Very little in it has worked out the way I wanted it to, but then again all of it has worked out the way I wanted it to, because here there is — it’s finished. But then it’s not finished, because it still needs a lot of fixing and rewriting and rearrangement.

The first draft (of the big rewrite) is complete. It’s been a long journey. This isn’t the end, but it’s a nice stop along the way. Woo-hoo!

Bam

In June, I threw out everything that I had written on my novel so far and started fresh. At the time, I had been thinking about the book and dreaming and fretting over it for more that three years. Less than a year after we were married, my wife told me to sit down at the kitchen table and start writing already. Eighteen months later, I’d managed to eke out 50,000 words, about 160 manuscript pages. I hated everything that I’d written.

I kept forcing myself to add pages for a lot longer than I should have. Last April, a little more than a year ago, I decided to quit. Silently. I didn’t tell anyone that I wasn’t writing my novel any more. In fact, I’d hardly told anyone I was writing a novel. I let it sit there, abandoned. I didn’t think about it.

Then in June, as I was walking to work one morning, I had a new thought. A new way of getting into the story. Though I hadn’t been consciously working on the book for three months, subconsciously I must have been doing something. I opened Notepad when I got to my desk and typed the first few sentences of my new draft. And after that, I kept going. A little bit at a time, with a few pauses here and there when I got stuck. Yesterday, I passed the 50,000 word mark again. With the exception of two very brief passages, all 50,000 words in this draft are brand new.

(I read an article about Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union that mentions, as an aside, that Chabon wrote and abandoned a 600-page draft before starting over and writing the manuscript that become the published book. He’d already won a Pulitzer at that point. If even he needs to start over once in a while, I feel like I’m in good shape.)

Unlike last time around, where 50k got me less than a quarter of the way into the story, this time I’m about 2/3 through. If I keep up my current momentum (again thanks to my wife, who gave me an only-half-joking ultimatum about when the first draft should be finished) I’ll get to “THE END” on June 10, (approximately) one year after I started. I have my fingers crossed. It will be exhilarating.

(Source: franklynothing)

Slow progress is still progress

Robin Sloan launched his Kickstarter project on August 26 with 4,500 words. By November 18, 84 days later, he had a stack of boxes filled with the printed book.

Now, granted, Annabel Scheme is a 30,000-word novella and not the huge beast I’m working on. (I passed 40,000 words the other night.) On the other hand, 84 days from start to finish is pretty impressive. I’ve been working on this book for more than a year now — beginning in October 2008, when I first sat down and wrote the three paragraphs that now open what’s currently the book’s third chapter.

Read more