In which she fantasizes she is a fiction writer

I have at least a million things I should be working on. Probably it is closer to two or three million. But none of that mattered today. Today I woke up thinking about how Bill K asked me last week if I was still working on that fantasy novel. I wasn’t, but that didn’t stop me from dragging it out to give it the old read through.

And so it happens that I have spent the entire day with an old manuscript, reading it and dividing it into chapters. I thought that I had something approaching 100 pages written. When I double-spaced it, and put in some chapter divisions, it morphed into 217 pages (slightly more than 77,000 words).

It is still far from over to borrow a phrase from Dune, but it lives today in my head.

And so it is that I have done the embarrassing thing of uploading the first chapter to Scribd. It is here if you want to read it…not that I expect you to. 🙂

Wolf’s Passage Chapter 1

I am somewhat embarrassed that I’ve put it on Scribd. For some reason that embarrasses me more than putting it on my blog. I think I thought of Scribd as a place to share academic stuff. This is not academic. Even as a piece of fiction, it is not academic. What this is is…

This is my substitute for relaxing by watching TV. This is my way of entertaining myself. This has nothing to do with literary efforts. This is just escapism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

I’m approaching 80,000 words now. I figure I need about 120,000 words to finish this book, which would basically only take me as far as the start of the next book. This is not a saga that can be easily completed. This is an entirely make believe world. You can’t go around making up a whole world and then abandon it after one book.

If I don’t completely embarrass myself out of quitting the idea, I figure it will take me the rest of my life to finish the story, especially considering that it would take me about five years to finish one book.

I don’t have that kind of time. I certainly don’t have that kind of time to both write it and attempt to publish it. And since it is just for my own entertainment anyway, I’m not sure I would ever attempt to publish it anyway.

That’s why I’ve decided to inflict it on my friends.

I want to publish this serial style, like Dickens with the novels by newspaper. Of course, I’m no Dickens, and newspapers don’t really go for that kind of thing these days, so I’m using Scribd + blog.

I tried blogging some of this last summer, but I wasn’t happy with novel blogging because blog posts don’t seem to me to function well for longer entries.

And so I have turned to Scribd, which is a service that will allow for easier online reading of whole chapters…I hope.

I currently have 13 chapters of this incomplete haphazard work of wannabe fiction. If I blog a chapter a week, I have until the end of September to write Chapter 14.

I guess I’d better get busy…or whatever it is you call it when you write for sport.