It’s no secret.
I’ve left my readers wanting. Months of no news. A disgrace, or something similar. Willful negligence, possibly. It’s not even as if I haven’t been writing. I’ve done all the hard work, I just couldn’t be bothered to post. I should be arrested for something. Loitering? Malingering? I don’t know.
I was reading through my Journal entries yesterday and thinking, these are good enough to be posted. People read all kinds of shit on the internet, don’t they? And, in addition, which is what the ‘and’ is telling you, I’ve been told that a media presence is essential if you ever want to publish a book. I trust whoever it was that told me. Thanks for that tip.
The problem is – don’t look so surprised, there’s always a hitch, a rub, you know that – the problem is this, I don’t have much to write for the general public. Or my readers. It’s been something I’ve managed to lament in most of my Journal entries, because there isn’t much else. I don’t go out much, I barely look out the windows. And this was even before the pandemic. Everything that happens to me that I find at all interesting does all its happening in my head. Even that is not much from day to day. Well, except when I have to write about it in the damned Journal. Suddenly I have to invent things. Reminds me of writing a novel.
On the novel front, as much as it has a front since it certainly doesn’t have a back yet, things are progressing. I can say that because this is my Journal and I can put any kind of shit in here that I find amusing. I do think that it is actually moving forward, from the front to the back. Am my mixing my metaphors? Here is how I eventually managed to force a progression, I split the novel in two. Paradoxically, that has opened up a range of possible paths for it to move along. Even more paradoxically, or counterintuitively, or obtusely, the second part of the book, which I suppose we can now call a sequel, will be the easier book to write. I say that with confidence for two reasons. One, it’s further in the future, and two, I’ve had the story of the second part well worked out for a while now. I’m sure there are more reasons but I’m quite exhausted already. The first part of the story has always been awkward because it seemed unnecessary, and yet it’s the part I really wanted to write. By now I also want to really write the second part, sure, but…
I have now also invented a story for that first part, so I can legitimately write a novel. Invent, novel. And it all sorted itself out since November last year. I have a consternation of new characters and a gloriously fecund world to build. ‘Fecund’ is a shit word. Don’t use it. Not in conversation, not in your book.
This is like one of those conversations where you’ve already said bye but for some reason you still find something to add. This entry should have ended neatly with the previous paragraph, but I still have a couple of words to write to get to my word count for the day.
So, this new world is in fact terraformed, but not completely so. It is in the last stages of the process. A jungle world where it rains pretty much all the time. The colony ship is forced to land on the planet and it sustains some damage, but the cryopods are intact. The colonists are reanimated according to a masterplan, but not everyone is enamoured with this plan. Also, one of the colonists has a secret. Of course, I made all that up. Word count done.
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