Progress Report on my new novel. Sunday, March 22, 2020.

Yesterday I managed to whip up just over a thousand words to start my new novel. I named the protagonist and began introducing the reader to his thoughts and his associates.

It’s an amazing feeling to begin a vast new enterprise like a novel. It bucks you up no end, gives you that frisky Tolstoy-like feeling that makes you want to put pink ribbons in your hair. I imagine Tolstoy did that quite often at the end of a long day of steady writing. His novels, of course, run well over six hundred pages, more than two-hundred-thousand words. Me, I don’t aspire to that kind of bulk, not this time around. I’m looking at around fifty-thousand words. Which, at my present rate of production, a thousand words per day, should put me over the finish line in about two or three months. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I also don’t believe much in plot lines and character development, as will become apparent as you are privileged to begin reading my magnum opus.

Oh, by the way -- from now on, when you refer to me to other people, please do so as “the novelist,” not as “the circus clown” or “lazy old bum.”

And for those of you who responded to my initial email by asking if my new novel would be about Marilyn -- no, it will not. And pick your minds out of the gutter.

After I finished my thousand words yesterday I got out a dog-eared notepad I’d been using to prop my bedroom door open and began recording ideas and making notes for future episodes. In my excitement and creative ferment I didn’t bother with coherency, so this is what my notes looked like:

Use babs

Mudbirds and have a Puddle Bat somewhere

Remember to go back to the statue of the angel sneezing -- make it a plot point.

Just keep reading and stop speculating

Daydreams never buttered any toast

Give snork a bunch of wives

Don’t give away the bumpsies till the end

Breakfast not dinner is what’s for dinner

Make the pineapple tree stop, who can do that?

Make a game of the horse eating, maybe a sledgehammer or rhino.

The story is an inverted pyramid starting with one person and blobbing frot mishmaw gpoel . . . . 

(my cursive has never been very good at the best of times; I’m afraid it degenerated badly after this entry, so I can’t make heads nor tails of anything else I wrote yesterday.)

And thus are you privy to the genesis of my new novel. What an honor for you!

Of course, I imagine some of you are saying to yourselves “Why doesn’t the poor knucklehead just write the novel already? We don’t need all these trifles! It’s a waste of time.”

To which I must reply -- indeed you DO need these trifles, as do I. Having written several novels in the past, I now conclude that process is as important as product. Report the process in detail, and the novel will practically write itself.

In fact, I just now figured out what ‘frot mishmaw gpoel’ means . . . so I gotta go to work on it.

Tune in again tomorrow for more literary illumination.

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An email response from a professor at BYU:

I just figured out who you remind me of, at least in your literary product: James Joyce, especially in Finnegans Wake.

Or to do it more in his style:

littery product, Jimmy JoyceJoyce - especialement in Finnegans Wake I just figuratively outed hoo, hoo you hoo remind me of the most at lees tin yer

And the email response from a friend in Hawaii:

No Marilyn.  Hmmm.

I like those stories because the subjects seem more human and real, though humorously strange.  Maybe your fiction will be the same.