Sixty-Nine

On Sunday I had lunch with a literary agent and another writer friend, and we discussed the state of publishing and our place in it. The agent was a wealth of knowledge, having been in the business since the sixties, and she assured me and my friend that we are on the right path with our work. It was something I definitely needed to hear.

During the meal the topic of my "novel" came up, again. Not the one I started this year with the girl who killed her stepmother, but rather the one that is (or was) shopped up into separate short stories, trying to pass for stand-alone tales. It was long-ago suggested that I mesh the seven or so short stories I'd written for my MFA into one grand saga, but I was reluctant to do so.

First, it would require an incredible amount of work and concentration on one project on my part, and we all know how much I hate to work hard and concentrate for too long. Second, I'd have to go back and deal with these characters again, long after I put them to bed and washed my hands of them. And lastly, what if I wrote it and no one cared? But that's just doubt and pride and fear getting in my way, again, and me allowing it.

Therefore, in the wee hours of Sunday night/Monday morning, I took all the stories and cut-and-pasted them into one. The idea for the chronology came to me on my commute home from lunch but it took me hours to gather the courage to do it. But I did it and I have it and, on my way home from the CRAZIEST Monday I've had in a long time, I thought of how the novel should start, which in turn helped me think of a way it can all be framed throughout.

It's going to be a lot of work. Right now I have 69 typed, double-spaced pages and about 24K words of varying POVs and voices and tenses to work with. It's saved in three different places and printed out on clean, white paper.

I am about to become this novel's bitch for the rest of the year.

*smooches...gearing up for a long winter*
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please excuse me if I ignore you for a while...genius at work, SON!