I was standing in the shower the other day, well not really the other day, more like two years ago when my brain did something that I really did not expect. It came up with an idea for a book. I was following a thought train, as often happens when you have nothing else to do but wash, when I jumped from experimental alternative energy sources to a fabulous idea for a book. I repeated the idea over and over in my head (at least seven times, that's how long it takes me to remember stuff) and then when I finished my shower I wrote the idea down. I took me about 30 minutes of writing to get all the ideas I had down on paper. I did run into one stumbling block, I could not figure out what the motivation of my antagonist was. "Do not bother me with fiddling small details, I'm going to be a Novelist!" I thought in hubris. A day or two later, I was regretting my words. Then a few days later the motivation hit me and there was another flurry of writing. Since then I have written seventeen chapters. I think I'd like to follow the example of David Wellington's serialized publishing model, but I have some reservations on that point.
Now, I would never dream to consider myself a writer, but isn't there an old saying that everyone has at least one book in them? It might not be a very good book, but I digress. So, after finishing a section (two or so chapters), I asked DocMaureen to read it to see if it was any good at all, anything worth wasting a significant chunk of my time on, or was I just fooling myself. After the longest few minutes of my life (save for the time DocMaureen had to have an emergency appendectomy) I got my answer. In the spectrum of goodness mine was the equivalent of.... toilet paper. Soft, there when you need it, and useful for wiping your @$$. Not really, she was much more gentle, but that's how it sounded to my sensitive ears. She followed up with "But I've read published books that were worse than this," which made me feel a little better. I've since learned that one must develop callouses on their heart when exposing it to public scrutiny, go figure.
Since then, more than two years have passed, and I have written many more chapters, in fact, I have just finished the book. The only problem was, that tight ending I had planned? Yeah, that didn't happen. I realized halfway through the climax chapter that there was no way I could end the book as I had originally planned. It simply wouldn't work. Then the unthinkable happened, the story told me what to write, not the other way around. I had always heard of characters in a story taking a life of their own, the writer loosing control of them, etc. I had thought that was nonsense, a form of self aggrandizement to make the pretentious feel better about themselves. I mean, I MADE them, who were they to tell me what to do? Any of you Kurt Vonnegut fans will probably see the connections to Breakfast of Champions in this inference. If I ever offended any fledgling authors out there by stating this point of view, I humbly beg your forgiveness and mark myself an @$$. Get the tar and feathers.
So, now all I have to do is find some poor schmuck to edit it, polish it, edit it again and we'll be ready to go. Go find someone who wants to publish it, that is. I've heard this can be monumentally hard to do. Especially if it is deemed that the genre you have written in is not "the next big, hot thing".
Whether it is paper or electrons, I have news for all you Sci-Fi /Action /cyberpunk /Anime fans out there. Anyone want to read a new book?
