Post-Noveling Analysis

I wrote 5,000 words today and finished the novel. It was an arduous grind but it is all over. I finished two days late but I wrote long, ending up w/ 64,000 words (228 pages).

There were three goals:
1. To finish
2. To create a literary thriller where no one dies and where no weapons exist
3. To cram all of the story beats into a plotty 50,000 words, so that the expansion to 100,000 would still retain a rigorous plot in spite of digressions, meditation, and writerly wheelie-poppin

The MS steals from a bunch of different things, most notably "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" and 'Red Harvest."

It centers around the famous 1940 Narrows Bridge collapse in Tacoma, Washington. The protagonist, an agoraphobic nineteen-year-old man beset by a lifetime of weather-related tragedies, discovers a mystery in it. He must engage with the scary outer world if he is to solve the deal and finally grow up.

It will be called "Strange Weather."

This writing experiment was really awful, but also kind of fun too. Since this was my first time to ever work on a novel (let alone one written at breakneck speed), it was interesting to see how sleep, diet, exercise, caffeine infusions, and scheduling affected productivity and quality. I found that I became superstitious, like a sportsman, to the point where I had a hard time writing at all if I had the wrong kind of coffee or the wrong music on or if I tried to write in the middle of the day.

I never did quite shake that feeling of pointless, though. Like what a waste of time this is. Playing make-believe. Inventing plots and schemes. Why? I mean, it's kind of fun but I have a hard time taking it seriously. It's hard to think that a book could actually make a difference in the world. Especially a novel.

I will come back to this MS later but I don't want to spend more than a couple of months on it. I think about all of the other things I could be doing with my life, like watching good movies or cooking more or going on dates or taking swimming lessons or hiking or resuming study of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Spanish. Anything really seems more important right now.

Tomorrow we shall start the Coffee Reduction Act.