By way of background (because background is everything) it is a rainy, dismal grey day. It's the sort of day that you're thankful to be working, even when you're on your own - because if that boring daily drudgery that we call earning a living wasn't occupying one's mind, heaven only knows where one's unbridled thinking centre might suddenly richochet off to...
Like deciding instantaneously to write about why I cannot, for the life of me, finish the novel I started all those years ago, and which was motoring along at a rate of knots late last year, but now sits maybe forever unfinished. A crying shame, with no one else to blame.
Carol Howden's great big Monument to Nothing. Here's to Nothing, fellas.... here's to Nothing.
I should add at this point that I am freely going to partake of other writers' cliches and lines in this most unsublime piece of crap I am writing here (and also make up lots of ill conceived new words) because my mood is of such darkness today that the care factor is unmysteriously absent also. So the first line about the lack of toilet paper came off a dunny wall somewhere when I was about six, and when I didn't even know what caper was. I'm not even sure now. If you do, perhaps you can tell me. And the one about a crying shame and no one else to blame is a line out of a song you probably know, or have at least heard. And lastly, and bestly - and yes I KNOW that isn't a real word, and who cares, I'm the creator here - the line about my great big fat monument to nothing is courtesy of Eddie Wilson, a good looking sort who was also a tortured soul. I can occasionally identify with those sorts. Here's to you, Eddie. Here's to you... (Eddie repeated everything twice)
Back to the aforementioned Book.
So I had started this ponderous beast sometime back in 2012, when I frightened the wits out of a very good friend by telling her what the first chapter was about, and the basic premise of the book - as far as I could see it anyhow. Which wasn't far at all. But it frightened her enough for her to have the most God awful nightmare that very night, wherein she ended up leaping out of bed - no I am not kidding - striding to her window, smashing her way through it and then stepping through, to escape the horrors, it seems, of Scene No.1 in my novel - and cutting herself to shreds in the process. Those lacerations required stitches, not only to her body but perhaps also to her grip on sanity - and made me think at the time I was either one hell of a story writer, or she didn't do horror too well. Probably the latter.
The book had a working title of The Volt - in fact, it still does. But there wasn't much electricity going on in there, and so the book sat shelved, unloved and even unthought about for another three years or so, while I got on with the business of Life, earning enough peanuts to subsist on and thereby tread water for a bit longer. Meanwhile that book would nudge me once in ever such a while. I'm gonna be GOOD, it whispered. There is nothing out there like ME, because I am coming straight out of YOUR HEAD (this is the part that scares the bejesus out of me actually) - and last but surely not least - I am gonna make you a SQUILLION. Because not only is the world going to embrace the sheer madness of The Volt, as unprepared the world might well be, it is also going to make a hell of a Hollywood blockbuster out of it - and You, cazhow.com, will not have to work ever again. You can sit on back to back cruise ships, sipping pina coladas (my subconscious doesn't know it's actually beer I prefer) and what's more, you can bring all your friends along as well.... if... you... can... only.. FINISH THIS SODDING BOOK!!!
I hate it when my creative brain screams angrily at me. Especially when it's right. Inasmuch as I hate being wrong, I wouldn't even attempt to argue with it. Because I know the book is an outright ball tearer, original ripper of a beast, there is simply nothing else like it, and it deserves to be written, even if it never sells a single copy.
So why aren't I writing it (instead of this self indulgent crap you're now reading) I ask myself...
There are 66,000 words already logged onto this creation which is The Volt. That's a third of the way through. Those words took me around six weeks, following Stephen King's disciplinary bible of On Writing. He is a very clever man, Stephen King, and I would not have even come thus far without his guidance. But those words were difficult to write, and some days, near impossible. I had an outlandish situation, a frighteningly interesting array of characters - but no Cunning Plan. Because I was trying to do what Mr King advised, which was to let the characters do whatever they wanted to do, in order to either (a) develop into somebody important to the storyline, or (b) fade away into nothingness, and meet an ignoble end on the editing floor during Draft No.2.
But my characters thought otherwise. Headstrong, impulsive, and downright crazy and unpredictable would describe at least three-quarters of them (gee I wonder why that would be!) , and as soon as I let them loose, they were like wild brumbies galloping out of a corral, and in five different directions. Because my guys didn't stick together in any sort of orderly posse - oh no! They each had their own places to go, things to see, people to do - and none of it correlated with where I had vaguely surmised the story was heading. It didn't even feel like my story anymore. So it became more and more difficult to keep writing, to find some direction, to round up the brumbies and head them towards some sort of righteous action that would generate a Grand Conclusion, and of course, a story that people would want to read.
But my horses wouldn't round up, and the story kept diversifying each time I sat down and wrote my further daily 2000 words, and at around 64,000 words, I was in total despair, flinging my hands up at the disarray I had created, and just about ready to give up and go back to my day job.
So I went back to my day job. And about two weeks later, I wrote a further 2000 words. And that 2000 words, my friend, suddenly found a direction for where all this was going. A big sigh of relief, you might say. Wrong.
Knowing where the story was going - well, sort of anyway - gave me enough breathing space that I closed the document, comfortable in the knowledge that next time I picked it up, I could move my troops forward in a much more orderly fashion, and therefore the challenge was conquered. Whew.
I haven't written a word since, and that was five months ago.
In the meantime, I can hardly remember the story, or even the epiphany that caused me to believe I could stop for a while. I'm just scared out of my wits of the whole thing. Every time I turn on the computer, I can feel the brumbies in there, their hooves thundering around my hard drive, stamping, snorting, colluding with aliens, trying to find their way out of my computer, out of my head, and out into the world. And I'm scared. Scared of the mental effort, of the discipline required to finish this monstrously onerous task (Stephen King said that writing a novel is like crossing the Atlantic in a bathtub, and I can tell you, I know exactly what the man means!)
And on this perpetually rainy grey misery guts of a day, I can't even find my gratitude, just a big fat case of fedupedness (ooh now that's a word) with why I can't get on with it and TCB (take care of business - like the King - Elvis this time)
I have seriously run out of excuses, my hands are running out of time, and I think my memory expired quite a while ago. It's either now or never.
My creative muse has left the building in disgust. It is time to coax her back, or give her up as lost, burn the book, and get the heck outta Dodge. (I love getting out of Dodge - you might have noticed)
To be continued..... (hopefully tomorrow).....
I think this is the first prehistoric scratchings of how the book cover might look - which means I did in fact work on the book today, however minutely... :-)
Like my writing? (probably not) - Read more at www.cazhow.com !
