I started writing July 23rd, 2021. First draft was finished on December 11. Then I took a few months break, trying to forget enough so as to make it a fresh read, and then started drafting again from April until July. It took four drafts to feel right. I published it October 21, 2022.
This wasn't my first time drafting a novel. The first was during the start of the COVID lockdowns in March of 2020. The novel has remained in the first draft. It's outside my range of experience and knowledge. It will likely remain in draft form.
I can't write on things I haven't experienced. When I say can't, I don't mean as if due to a creative issue. I mean that I need to feel a genuine engagement with my writing. If the fiction travels beyond my experiences, then it becomes rootless, and I cease to feel any truth in it.
I use the word feel a lot when talking about writing. It's a sensory, emotive, activity. The intellect only forces the senses to obey the laws of language.
As with all my writing, this novel was made randomly, hazardly. Though, it's managed to fit a narrative. Effortlessly and efficiently.
Many people have confronted this phenomenon. Where a story uncontrollably forms out of the simple linkage of characters to time and place. A universe of instances and circumstance, at first broken and unshapely, becomes tooled to symbolic form by whatever dream-maker lives in us and finds expression through us.
The publishing of this novel feels like I'm losing something.
I lived with it for nearly a year. It became a reference for my experiences, a justification for my decisions, a frustrating obsession, both fun and boring, joyful and miserable.
Now, I lose it so as to share it with others.
And to free myself by doing so (hopefully).
If you like travel literature, existentialism, painfully crafted prose, psychological enigmas, then give it a go...
Available on: https://books2read.com/u/31D1w6
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