Day Three & Four (writing a novel #3)

THINGS I’VE FORGOTTEN ABOUT WRITING A NOVEL FROM ZERO

These are top of my head kind of spontaneous thoughts about the process of drafting a novel:

I forget how your life influences your novel even when you think you can detach yourself from the real world and just…follow the story outline, even if it is playing out in real time. I forget about how dreams happen in the morning, best when you hit the snooze button or turn off the alarm clock. I forget how the closest people in your life will never understand what you are doing when you’re writing your novel. It’s so alien to non-writers and artists, even for people who love you. They don’t understand that the novel is for them, for all of them. How it is, about them, all of them, and then I forget how hard it is to write. How hard it is to go all over the place. How the first draft is a mess or fat and ideas and concepts. Sometimes, it takes even longer to get into the groove and forget about what you’ve seen or heard in the reality of your real life. I forget how everything influences you, like your dreams, and sometimes the best ideas happen in your dreams when you transfer them to alternate life into the fiction in your waking life. I forget how real the characters are now, being book E in the series. When all is said and done the five books and two short story collections that take place in the Universe where the main protagonist (possible anti-hero?) lives, the narrative about Henry O’ will be close (or a bit over) two-thousand pages. This last book that I’m working on is supposed to be one thousand pages even. That is the amount of time there has been an unknown escape pod that originated from earth, stuck in the gravitational field of Jupiter. I forget how fun, it is to write.