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Riding Out a Lull
And enjoying it
Serious question here for all the novelists in the room — especially you weirdos who manage massive 800+ page monsters — how do you do it?
I recently published my first completed novel and this girl clocks in at a modest 177 pages. Grace, the protagonist and star of the story, and I began hanging out together in 2018. I have to admit the woman could be tough to be around but there we were day in and day out for most of 2018 and 2019, hammering out what would become “Graceless”.
We’re all aware of the dance. The endless rewriting, the dead ends, the bargaining with the gods to unravel yet another knot of continuity train wrecks.
Even people who don’t suffer from this particular mental quirk — you know, the one that results in novel-writing — are aware of our agonies. Mostly because we moan about nothing else while we’re in the throes of the work. Kudos to all the partners of writers out there who stay the course and don’t show us the door (and, yeah, there’s a reason writers shack up with other writers).
Now that the book is a book, however, I find that the old itch to write has deserted me. Suddenly I can not write and it’s actually rather enjoyable. For now.
Fortunately — or not, depending on how you look at it — I have a lot of other things to do besides writing. For one thing, I really need to step up the job search. My lovely six-month sabbatical thanks to the taxpayers of New York is coming to an end and once the unemployment checks stop, reality steps in wearing steel toed boots and a sneer.
And no, royalties and the monthly offerings from my treasured handful of supporters won’t keep reality at bay.
Still, it’s easy(ish) to shrug off the anxiety of losing that bit of income when I can walk out the door and lose myself in the enormous, ever-changing, sometimes horrifying and never boring city I live in. So, out I go.
