Forward motion…
Just finished working on the novel for the morning, and still have about 15 minutes on this bus before I’m at work. Private, corporate bus filled with overpaid tech employees, so it’s OK to be on a laptop here. Nearly everyone is.
Really enjoyed the book this morning, which always seems strange, but I’ve definitely hit the part of the book that hasn’t been edited as much as the rest. See, I would always start at the beginning every time, so it was always dependent on when that cycle would trail off that determined how much of the book got edited.
I recently raised the stakes on the novel by sending out copies of a book to review. It’s actually the 150ish page book that my lead character writes as part of my novel. Didn’t really warn people, most just it show up unannounced in their mailbox.
Not sure what the review cycle on that will be. Or what the fate of that text ultimately is. I think it’ll be clearer what to do with the proper novel when that arrives, as opposed to the book of the character in the novel.
Of course, for my family, this has started a whole round of craziness, because they think this is memoir. I once said that everything I write is real, and I think that should be true of all fiction. It is all inspired by things that are real. That said, these real thing didn’t necessarily happen to me. I steal everywhere I go. And this isn’t some James Frey confession here. It’s a novel.
So, yeah, I can’t really say it bothers me to create a fictional character and have people think it’s me. I guess that is the price of admission.
There’s a lot of me in the book, but there’s a hell of a lot of invention, too. It’s too easy to think the main character is me, but since I came up with all the characters, aren’t they’re me, too?
But I know there is no way to divorce the writer from the art, especially when it comes to family and friends.
Although, considering I’m already locking in on what my next novel is going to be (based on this, but don’t expect me to ever reference it again on here), I think book two will provide them with even more to question if they keep thinking that.
