Congratulations!
Who knew a promise had a 22.5 year-old shelf life!
I just read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen for the first time.
This delay happened despite buying it shortly after its release and attending an event with Franzen in San Francisco in December of 2001, where he signed my copy.
I also have a signed copy of his follow-up essay collection How to Be Alone, from a subsequent event in December 2002. I could be wrong, but I think both books were signed a year apart at separate events, rather than both in 2002.
It was during a time when I kept telling myself, and literally anyone who would listen, that I was nearing completion on a novel. It wasn’t entirely untrue, but I didn’t really know at the time how close to completion I was but, in hindsight, I now know the proper approach was just to shut up and finish it.
Instead, getting my book signed by Franzen in that moment, the most talked-about author with the most celebrated novel of the time, I said, “I’m about to finish my first novel!”
This was not a lie. You could have hooked me up to a lie detector in that moment, and everything I was saying I honestly believed to be true.
Franzen looked at me, sized me up and, as he was signing my book, said, “In that case, let me be the first…” and signed my book.
As I walked away and opened the novel to the page he signed, inside of his ornate, double-looping signature, he wrote “Congratulations!”
Given his stature as the craftsman of The Great American Novel, I decided to honor that small, throwaway exchange. I vowed that The Corrections would be the first novel I read upon finishing my own novel Haterobics.
I kept that promise.
The Corrections was indeed the first novel I read after finishing my own, devouring all 568 pages in a breakneck four-day session this past weekend.
It just happened 22 and a half years after my exchange with Franzen.
It seems pointless to hear someone’s hot take on The Corrections at this point, so I’ll spare you, but it definitely lost none of its power or magic in that time. And, unlike everyone else, I still have Freedom, Purity, and Crossroads to read now! I always wanted The Corrections to be my first Franzen experience.
This is all a long way of saying that Haterobics is finished!
It still seems weird to say such a thing, but here we are. I should first disavow anyone from thinking I am the ultimate perfectionist and have been slaving and tinkering over every line and it took this long.
Haterobics mainly sat as a file on my computer, ignored for years at a time. When I would work on it again, I would start with Chapter One and then drift off before ever getting close to the end.
I found it hard to work on it when I had a job, since I was usually writing in some capacity for technology companies, and this just seemed like even more writing. I tried staying up late or shifting my sleep patterns to get up at 4 a.m. and do it before work, but it seemed impossible to sustain the level of focus required for as long as it would take.
Since I worked in the tech sector, there were also periods between jobs, but then all of the associated financial crises of being unemployed made it difficult to generate the level of whimsy required to escape into a novel and ignore everything else.
I even decided to abandon social media as a means to free the necessary time, making a pronouncement on November 13, 2016 that I “want to dedicate my free time to more deeply follow narratives of my own,” which was also a reference to being captured by the political narratives then, as that post was five days after an election. That will likely change since I’m unfortunately not famous enough to be a reclusive author.
The turning point was two-fold. First, you start realizing how quickly time passes, and that you can easily distract yourself into not accomplishing what you desire. Second, I took actual steps to shift my life toward jobs and lifestyles that would better support accomplishing big picture goals like this.
Basically, a year ago, on June 8, 2024, I decided it was time to finish (or abandon) Haterobics. And I spent 90-120 minutes per day editing the existing draft of the book, reading several chapters aloud at a time, to ensure it read okay and had a decent pace. I never missed a day until January 20 of this year, when I considered it to finally be finished.
In early June, I spent a full day reading the finished draft. Since the editing process took seven months to finalize, I wanted to read it in one uninterrupted session to see if the pacing seemed to work. Which brings us up to date.
Nothing else is happening yet. Some friends are reading it (if you’re wondering why you weren’t asked, let me know and we’ll make it happen). I’m reaching out for advice. Reading about publishing and self-publishing. And, of course, becoming a bit more public again.
Basically, this site is going to be where I unpack the sordid history and as-yet-unknown future of Haterobics. As far as what comes next, I truly don’t know.
But thanks for the well-wishes, Mr. Franzen!