This entry is almost certainly going to be a little long and hard to follow. It will probably contain a fair number of dropped words and typos, too. It’s 2 AM on Wednesday morning, and I just finished about half an hour ago. I know that I’m not going to be able to sleep for hours, so I figured that I might as well get all of this down.
I just wrote the first draft of a novel. I began it on May 31st at around 2 PM. I just now finished it. That seven and a half days contained one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life. I’m not saying that it’s some kind of impossible accomplishment. I mean, Stendhal wrote the Charterhouse of Parma in 52 days and we still read it 200 years later. That is an accomplishment. In SF and Fantasy, given the number of books some authors put out, I think it’s not an uncommon skill to be able to put down 10,000 words a day of first draft.
Nonetheless, it is not something that I had ever imagined I would be capable of doing. It was an experience that was not only incredibly intense, but also one that I was not really looking for. It was something that came upon me almost like some kind of miracle. Now, normally when miraculous, ecstatic experiences come upon me, I don’t write about them in this blog, because they’re not only incommunicable, they’re also kinda off-topic. But this is a writing / book blog, dammit, and so I think it might be of interest to document a writing miracle.
I don’t normally talk too much about my writing process, but this experience has given me a lot of insights into what I do. These insights gradually spiraling into a massive blog entry. The blog entry is pretty good, but it’s also five thousand words long. There is no one in the world whose writing I like so much that I’d read a five thousand word blog entry from them. If Tolstoy had a blog, and he wrote, “Further acquaintance with this topic caused such an intense ferment in my spirit that I was impelled to write an online essay totaling some five thousand words to examine the stirrings of my soul”, I would still click back on that. So I am splitting this entry up into seven or eight entries that I am going to post over the next few weeks.
Anyway, if you want to know what the book is about, then I have just four words for you: Vampires In High School.
Sure, it’s more complicated than that. The word vampire never appears in the novel. They don’t suck blood or fear the sun. But that’s not what vampires are about. Vampires are about sexiness. And my novel is about preternaturally sexy creatures who like to have sex with high schoolers. It’s also gay. And an alternate history. And a work of science fiction. But mostly it’s a vampire novel. Normally I’d be ashamed of that, but….it’s not like I spent eighteen months on it. I wrote it in eight days.
I’m normally pretty tight-fisted with details about my unpublished works (because I figure there is a good chance that if they’re unpublished, they’re bad) so I don’t think more plot details will be forthcoming. But you won’t need them for the posts that follow.
Next: How This Came To Happen