Is it any surprise that an author’s blog goes dormant, becomes moribund? Not really. I’ll do my best not to treat myself too harshly, though. I have been working, even if the fruits of those labors are not yet ripe.
For about a year, from the fall of 2019 through the fall of 2020, I was doing very well on the writing front. I drafted one novel at the beginning of that stretch and set that project aside to cool (necessarily in that case) while I embarked upon a new feature screenplay and then later in the spring another novel manuscript. It is that second novel that I am still working on now, well into the revision process. For me, this is the slog, even though it’s one that I usually welcome. It’s difficult, but I don’t mind that it is.
When I was writing my dissertation, and I know I’m not alone here, my favorite form of productive procrastination was to format the document repeatedly. Dissertation formatting requirements are notoriously, absurdly strict. At Ohio State in the 2000s, there was an employee in the graduate school who seemed to relish the opportunity to pull out a trusty ruler when a student arrived with her (then required) hardcopy manuscript. She would wield that ruler like a scalpel, looking for the slightest deviation from accepted tolerances. Virtually every late-stage grad student I knew at that time held their breath in those seemingly interminable moments. I did, too, but I was pretty confident that I had done it well enough to pass inspection. That’s how I would waste time in the latter half of the writing process. It slowed things down, but it did have a pay off.
That’s where I am now. I think quarantine fatigue and end-of-democracy fatigue and absurdity fatigue have brought me to the point at which I find it well nigh impossible to concentrate on the elaborate structure of a novel, even though Above and Beyond is not a lengthy novel. I know the kinds of substantive alterations that I need to make at this stage, and yet day after day I find it all but impossible to do them.
So I don’t.
But I don’t do nothing. What I have been doing is the detail work, cleaning up the manuscript I have, remaining familiar with its contours, its shiny bits, and its rougher surfaces. This cleaning up shouldn’t happen now, in the best of circumstances. I should be making the changes that require heavy equipment that beeps when you back it up. I should be knocking down whole wings and hauling away rubble to make room for needed renovations. When all of that is over, it would be the right time for the fine detail work and then the clean up.
And yet, there is something to be said for momentum. I need to keep going, and I especially need to keep the story and the words and the world in my head. Picking it all up again weeks or months after dropping it entirely feels like an insurmountable feat. So, I’m doing whatever I can not to put myself in that position. A new semester is underway, and I am teaching only one class. I have the time to work pretty much every day, and I have the energy. I believe that I can get this manuscript where it needs to be by May. That’s my goal. I’m writing it here so that you and Idris Elba and I can keep me honest.
