And I'll be you thought this novel was dead. Well, so I did I quite honestly. For a long time parts of it had been inaccessible to me and I still find working on it emotionally draining. But in the last few weeks I've regained it and have been reading through and editing the chapters.
The main problem now besides overcoming very unprofessional personal hangups is connecting the other stuff I've written in the meantime.
For over two years I've had lots of ideas for this story and originally projected it as resulting in something like a 650 000 word story. That's...a lot. Now I think it could be decidedly shorter. I don't really know if that's a good thing or not, we shall see. In any case, it won't really become clear for some time. The nearly 40 000 words I have written I can say I am mostly pleased with and the main challenge now besides actually moving the story forward is deciding exactly how much is needed to fill in the gaps I've left in connectivity. This is the first major work in my entire life that I've actually written out of sequence and so far I'm finding the experience quite difficult. There really is something to be said about the wisdom in plotting. Yes, I have plotted this book to a certain extent - beyond any extent to which I've ever plotted anything else - and yet, it's still not really straightforward plotting. It's more like holding ideas in my mind and then writing them down without any clear idea of how to make them all fit together.
If you've forgotten what V World is supposed to be about it's basically my attempt to do something like King's The Stand (go on and laugh; I'll wait) only with vampires being the major plot element and a uniting force for many different characters who start out having nothing to do with each other. Eventually I hope to change the landscape from normal twenty-first century life in North America to something pseudo post-apocalyptic only not quite that far. You know - a lawless world full of anarchy, dead people and vampires (and a few other super natural elements thrown in for good measure). I know what you're thinking, assuming you have in fact, stopped laughing - "a tad ambitious, no? Particularly for you, Mr. Unpublished Author." To which I respond: Absolutely. At this point in my life, ambition can only be a good thing, even if maybe I am somewhat out of my league.
I've got a head full of madness, a pretty decent laptop and time on my hands - the perfect tools for such an endeavour, I would think. Sure, talent and a better work ethic might help too but perhaps these things can develop over time. I think what held me back previously in those areas was a problem in attitude - I figured time would be required to hone those abilities but I didn't seem to grasp that didn't mean empty time where I just waited around for things to happen for me. While intrinsically I believe I always knew what it would take to get myself going I think I probably shelved such rationale while instead clinging to ridiculous hopes of perhaps one day simply waking up and realizing I now possessed the talent level and work ethic to proceed. I hadn't forgotten about hard work and sacrifice; I'd just decided to trick myself into thinking there were shortcuts past them.
Now I stand on the precipice of something truly significant. Something that will help me evolve as a writer. Whether that means success as in finishing the novel and actually having it published and finally embarking on a career as professional writer or just finishing the novel and understanding finally how it all works now in addition to maybe also understanding myself a little better too, I don't know. (Feel free to congratulate me on that ridiculous run-on sentence - I've already given myself a little pat on the back for it) But now I do know that, to paraphrase Hamlet, "The novel's the thing". Lately I've repeated this mantra while trying to remind myself that there's a lot more going on besides that and that any breakthrough with V World still only really represents one step on my road. Then I bury that because I am anything but a big picture guy, put my head down and write.
Special thanks are in order to three certain people who all in the past few months, completely separately and each in their own way, encouraged me to continue on with this book. I doubt any of you knew at the time how much your words resonated with me and shook me out of the state of doubt and defeat I'd attached to V World. So I'm telling you now: Thankyou.
V World - I should really think about a new title, shouldn't I?
