I'm thinking of renaming this blog "Blog For No One" since it gets no attention whatsoever. As no one reads it, I suppose it doesn't matter anyway. But it does cop the title of one of my favorite Beatles songs.
Almost three years since my last entry. Time has mostly been spent on another novel attempt. I started it on Halloween in 2019, and as of two weeks ago, the first draft has been completed. Just north of 110,500 words. It's the first time I've gotten this far on a novel. It took way too long, but I was determined not to abandon another attempt at this. I'm sure that if I didn't have to work full-time, I could've finished it in half the time, maybe less. Being serious about this effort for a change, it only emphasized how frustrating it is having to work for the man. There was enough frustration dealing with the story itself, as you might imagine.
In another few weeks or so, I'll dive back in and start editing/revising. I already know of some areas that I'll have to work on. One of them may be difficult, or it may be a slog the whole way, I don't know. I only went back once during the process, a couple years after I started, and revised what I had. It was about 40,000 words at the time, so less than half of the total. Beyond that point, I was flying blind, which may have been unwise. I often had the feeling that I was adrift at sea with no landmarks in sight, relying on my memory to maintain the narrative thread in a coherent fashion. I would only read the previous several paragraphs or pages to get a sense of where I was. It felt sufficient at the time. I'm about to find out how accurate that feeling was.
The working title is "The Western Paradise," and I still haven't found a reason to change it. It still fits. I'm trying not to think of how much more work there is to do.
I haven't worked on anything else in the meantime, apart from a few poems. I was sending out submissions somewhat regularly until the last couple years. I recently sent out five after a seven month break. Mostly, I got tired of getting a stream of rejections, so I said fuck it and stopped submitting. Of the latest group of subs, two have already been rejected. I still can't find a home for these last three or four stories. Guess I should create a Misfits folder and stick them in there.
Anyway, that's the state of my art these days. I have absorbed the interim accomplishment of the draft, but my writing schedule was scattershot at best. These last couple years, it was terrible, especially during the winters. I had zero motivation to enter that dark, cold office and sit down and agonize over sentences in front of the screen. It was preferable to sit in my recliner in a robe under a warm blanket and watch how others crafted stories for television or film. And I still read. I've kept up my average of reading 30-35 books a year.
Hopefully, later this year, I can turn this manuscript into a finished novel and put it up for sale. It may sit there forever, a mute monument to another attempt by a nobody to stand out in a cacophonous literary market (which few read anyway), but it will be done. I'll never have to ask "What if?"
