Before I wanted to be a millionaire entrepreneur (but after I wanted to be a juggler) I wanted to be a writer. There was a phase where I trained to climb the tallest volcanoes and BASE jump into them, yet the idea of writing remained in the back of my mind, and even during my practical deliver-postal-mail-for-forty-five-years-and-retire-with-a-great-pension period, I couldn’t shake the desire to scribble a few silly thoughts onto paper and call them a story. So, unemployed and bored, I once again returned to my writing aspirations, which partly explains why I haven’t done any writing. On this blog, I mean—so allow me to catch you up.
In May I worked on two short stories with only limited success, one story spawning some seven different versions, all bad; in early June I completed a first draft of an entirely different story about a horse on a trampoline; a week later, invigorated by the trampoline tale, I completed a first draft of The Portraitist, my longest story to date (about 7,500 words); around the same time I tinkered with something about a spaceship crewed by TV-loving robots; late June I began working on a novel. (That’s all true, too.)
The novel is loosely based on my short time as a Senate employee, although by loosely I mean not at all. The son of a late Senator is appointed by the Governor to serve out the remainder of his father’s term and is thus charged with passing the bill that will solidify his father’s legacy. Joining him is a cast of ridiculous characters who make his every move pretty funny—at least in my head it’s funny. Progress was initially quite slow, as I morphed the story from butterfly to caterpillar to donut, but now that I’m set on a firm course with a detailed plan, things are just as slow. The good news is I’m about 17% of the way to 100,000 words (or an average novel size), and my plan has me finished with the first draft March 1.
The first anniversary of my job-quitting is nigh, and although it looks to the average person that I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing in three-hundred-and-some days, you now know for real that their presumption was accurate.