The satisfaction of completing a long project: the novella
I’ve been slowly working on a novella/novel for the last 4 or so years. Or, I wrote a version that became more of an outline back then, and after 2 major overhauls, the last one just finished which added almost 10,000 words, it is finally just about ready to go out. It is a good feeling. An accomplishment. I’m definitely very happy to hopefully have the major work of my first long project done. I did kind of steal an idea for the formatting from the novel I just began, of telling it in short vignettes, which worked because it was already formatted like that with only an extra break to indicate a time break. OK, that’s probably more than you needed to know, but I just wanted to share, and offer the suggestion of vignettes to people who may also be struggling with formatting their own novels. It’s fun, and if you have any time breaks after something particularly poignant, by having that as the end of a chapter, meaning your reader has to turn the page to read anything else, and in that break they’ll be thinking a little bit longer about what just happened, which hopefully will ingrain your words a little deeper.
After the break, there’s one of the couple very, very short chapters pulled from the middle of my book, “The Smiles Are Killing Me.”
happy hour
I got over it. Or I stopped thinking about it, at least. I went back out to a bar that afternoon, enjoyed the national holiday of Happy Hour to the best of my ability, and forgot I even had a class a few hours before. I forgot what day it was, and couldn’t remember if I worked that night, and couldn’t remember why I should care. I did decide that crickets don’t chirp, they squeak. Like loose floorboards on their rusty nails. Birds chirp. Crickets sound nothing like birds. That’s bullshit. That’s what matters, making sense of the world. And the coked out ranting of Robin Williams with my special slur-slant.
Viva La Happy Hour.