Two days ago, I was falling apart. Now I’m putting it all back together.
In fact, I started writing a post called “Disintegration” around this time on 3 March. All I could get through was a single line. It read: “I am falling apart.”
There were a number of additional places the post might have gone, but by the very nature of the veracity of its opening salvo, I was unable to complete more than said preamble. And while I’m all for honesty and forthrightness with this blog and all my projects, I know a bit better than to post a one-liner saying “I am falling apart.” in the wee hours of a Wednesday in March. It’s like begging for misinterpretation, paranoia, and panic.
None of which, surprisingly, help those who feel they are falling apart.
I hasten to add that the issue was nothing personal, nor anything really all that dramatic. There was some roughness around the edges, some bleeding into arenas of feeling like I might be unable to control my mental state. But mostly it was about writing, about figuring out what to write and when to write it and arguably, though less so, a little bit how. And now I’ve pretty much put it all together, or at least I think so, enough to feel good about it, to get going and not look back until I have a setback of this kind of magnitude again. If I have that. Which I’m hoping to avoid.
I’ve been working for a month on Good God, my first serious foray into non-fiction. I have concluded, after writing ~42 pages in a month, that this foray is not optimally timed. I am putting the project on the shelf. In its stead, I will begin working tonight on The Best of All Possible Worlds, another novel. If successful, it will be my third novel to be completed and my second this year (by which I mean the academic-ish [plus summer] year of 2009-10 in which I still aspire to complete three books).
The Best of All Possible Worlds is jumping in line, not just over Good God, but over another novel whose idea is older, namely that tentatively titled We the Purple. There are four more novels in the queue behind it, and they’re staying there for now. When and where any of these will be written is largely becoming up for grabs, but for tonight and the foreseeable, it’s TBoAPW‘s job to lose. Sadly, this work doesn’t devolve into an easy acronym like my first two novels, but I’ll probably shorthand it “Best of” or similar.
Unlike the originally slated nonfic project, I can’t reveal anything about Best of, as per my personal protocol on fiction. So this may be a less exciting development for you. But given that I’m tentatively trying to stick with my original deadline of 17 May 2010 to complete the first draft, there may be excitement yet for my fiction fans. To say nothing of the shortness of this wait in comparison to the near-decade it took to finally complete ADO.
17 May may prove unreasonable, though, since that deadline presumed a 1 February start-date and it’s currently 5 March. In which case, I could push it to sometime in the first couple weeks of June. I’m hoping not to have to, but I’m also not about to set up a deadline which is guaranteed to fail. It’ll probably take a month to make a good determination about that.
The larger point is that I’m opening this project with the fresh energy and excitement a new project deserves. Which is not to say that I didn’t feel that way about Good God, but 40 pages in, that was starting to look like a flightless bird. I wasn’t sure it worked. It wasn’t turning over, but rather coughing and sputtering. And rather than continue down the path of trying to right a potentially sinking ship, I’m tabling it in favor of something I know functions on its basic premises. I still hope to write GG, and soon, but it’s not the project for this Spring.
And so it begins. Again.
