Novel-ty

Last night at 8:08pm I finished the first draft of a novel.

This is the eighth time that’s happened. It’s funny to look back on each prior instance. The first, the summer of my freshman year of high school (though I think it was probably more a novella. Long since lost, which is no loss at all, it might have been 40,000 words. I wrote the whole thing on an antique manual typewriter. 🙄), the second, a few months after I’d graduated high school and married, at the desk in the corner of a sunny bedroom in our first apartment.

Most of the rest took place in the study of our Brooklyn apartment during a very productive four years and three months that concluded with the purchase of a house and a move upstate in January of twenty-ten.

Upstate I had to work a lot more to make a living than I had in the city. And all I really wanted was a family, so between jobs and small kids there wasn’t much time to write. But after getting a decent position at the local college and the kids getting old enough to entertain themselves, I tried to pick it back up as I’d always meant to do.

I finished the seventh novel in the summer of twenty-nineteen in my study in Callicoon. The second floor of a sweet old house that looked out over the hamlet’s Main Street and the Delaware River just beyond it and a hilly wall of northeastern Pennsylvania rising up out of the valley beyond that. It was one I’d meant to write since at least two-thousand-and-five; a sort of narrative-non-fiction centered around my great-great grandfather, who got the electric chair for murder, and his son, a deputy sheriff in the town in which the murder occurred.

I’d written it for my sons. I’d spent so much of my life trying to find my father by finding his father and his and his and his, I wanted to put it all down so that if either of my sons felt inclined to look they would have an easier time of it. I shared it with a couple of friends for feedback, did a bit of half-hearted revision, but ultimately realized it wasn’t really for anyone else. So as was the case with most of the books I’d written, I didn’t ever make any effort to get it published.

At any rate, when I, last night at 8:08pm, tapped out the 101,476th word of a first draft, it wasn’t an especially thrilling, satisfying, or novel experience. So then what am I writing all this for? Well, I got the thing done largely by setting a routine for myself that I stuck to pretty diligently for maybe the first time in my life. If I’d known how much time I’d find myself with as a divorced weekend-dad, I would have bailed earlier! Though then again, if I’d known how expensive it would be, I would never have left. Of course neither statement is true.

But after writing the first chapter of a draft in July of twenty-twenty-one, and then abandoning it, I picked it back up this past summer. And with a daily output only broken for a couple of weeks in September when COVID finally caught up with me, I’ve been writing so regularly I’m not sure what else to do with my evenings.

So here we are. Another novel, but this time around I mean to do everything I can to sell it. Why? Because 1) I want to be rich and famous. And 2) I have always believed in finding the most ludicrous possible solution to any problem and literary fiction meets that requirement.

I have a pretty clear and convoluted multi-phase revision process planned which I figured I might try and document here just obliquely enough to seem interesting. Also, the other day I was talking with a writer friend much more successful than me (which isn’t saying much) and he was lamenting the fact that the Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster merger deal anti-trust hearings had brought out documents and figures showing that only 2% of titles sell even five thousand copies, and that the first question a publisher asks an author nowadays is how many TikTok followers they have. I don’t intend to get on TikTok--I deleted Facebook and Twitter and barely have an Instagram--but I thought I might at least show some sign of life online.