I Finished a Novel
July 2, 2008
When I say “finished,” I mean I was writing it and I’m not writing it anymore. I sent it to some publishers, but naturally one assumes that will come to nothing. But it seems finished, in the way that things sometimes seem finished; and I feel different now — at least I think I feel different now — than I did before I started it, so it’s also finished in that some change in the way I feel has been completed. Of course maybe I felt this way before and I just forgot. But I already have a new favorite David Bowie album (was Ziggy Stardust, now Hunky Dory), which seems significant.
The main change, which I admit I didn’t expect, seems to be that I have even less idea what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis than I did before. And I’ve never been strong in the knowing-what-I’m doing department. I tend to drift around inside. And it’s as though, in order to write this thing, I had to stop drifting a moment, and somehow fix some part of myself in a finite and durable form; and now that it’s done, all that fixity or concreteness that I had to scrounge to put together two hundred pages of text has gone out of me along with the book, leaving me vaguer and more indefinite than ever. It’s a bit how I imagine Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, might have felt after placing the greater part of his power in the One Ring. Is that weird? Does it happen to other people, besides me and Sauron? I always thought (stupidly, it now seems) that learning to write fiction would be a process of increasing certainty.
My working title is The Fixed Stars. That could change. If you’ve been walking around with a really killer book title in your head for a while, but despair of ever writing the book to match the title, please contact me.
Like I said, maybe someone will publish it, maybe not. The question turns out to be less important to me than I thought it would. I’ll keep the blog abreast.
Maybe the thing to do is take up new hobbies. Stringed instruments? Herbalism? Shooting?
July 14th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Play the wonderful video game IKARUGA, while reading PROUST. A helpful symbiosis results. Eventually you will be playing proust while reading ikaruga.
Take NIACIN (vitamin B3) if you feel suicidal.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:09 am
“I always thought (stupidly, it now seems) that learning to write fiction would be a process of increasing certainty.”
This is precisely why you must waste no time in beginning work on another novel. That’s the whole thing. After I’d finished Forecast and began Interference, you said something about how you couldn’t imagine starting another book so quickly. Well, now you know. Once one acquires the writing habit, one feels strange and often unpleasant symptoms of withdrawal when one is not actively feeding it.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:09 am
And congratulations, btw.
August 7th, 2008 at 4:35 am
Congratulations. :)
Stuff to do–web development? Game development? Seems like you’ve probably got the slot filled with birkensnake, but those are generally what I offer up when people complain of having free time. :)