Progress Report on my New Novel.

Monday, March 23. 2020.

Here is the great thing about being a novelist, or thinking you’re one --

You create and inhabit your own world, so that when the real world crashes, burns, and smolders, it’s not such a big deal. I am now building and inhabiting a new world full of my own characters, and so what’s going on with disease and war, poverty and homelessness, seems like a report from our colony on Mars -- interesting, but not terribly relevant to my current circumstances. I hope that doesn’t sound too cold hearted, but a novelist cannot serve two masters. At least, not THIS novelist.

And of course I can always assuage my conscience with my daily cooking. I made a dashing beef stew in the slow cooker yesterday, which pleased me immensely. But I was peeved no end by a woman here in the building who likes to gush over what a saint I am for cooking meals for others. She gets on my nerves. She offered to make a big pan of corn bread for Sunday dinner. I told her no thanks I like doing it all myself, but she started to get teary eyed and said it would help her work through her depression, so I said sure go ahead we eat at noon. She never made the darn corn bread and never told me she hadn’t done it.

Now I’ll stop myself right there, because I realize this is a digression -- and I want to save my digressions for the novel itself. One of my favorite books of all time is Laurence Sterne’s ‘Tristram Shandy.’ And that’s nothing BUT digressions. I’ve been reining in my digressions with my recent poetry and flash fiction, but with a big fat meandering novel I can really let loose and wander about to my heart’s content. I’m a regular Thomas Wolfe.  

 But you can soon decide for yourself it you like that style of story telling, because I finished another thousand plus words yesterday, bringing the first chapter nearly to a close. All I have left is a little bit of character exposition to establish the mood and indicate the path of future events to build reader interest. So you should have the first chapter tonight. You lucky devils!

One stumbling block that has already occurred is that one of the ancillary characters is threatening to take over the entire story. We can’t have that! So even though he’s a fascinating old cuss (I wonder who he’s based on?) I have downsized both his dialogue and relevance to the story. In fact, I’m steeling myself to kill him off about halfway through the novel -- hopefully by then the protagonist will have developed and matured enough to not need a gang of seedy characters capering around him to build and keep reader engagement in his story.

And let me reiterate -- there will be absolutely NO characters whatsoever in my novel with the name of Marilyn. Period. End of story.