I’ve written a lot of bad books. Usually, I knew, while I was writing them, that they were bad, but I continued writing them anyway, because that’s what people tell you to do.

Now I am writing another book. This novel is crazy. Seriously. It’s like nothing you’ve ever read. It’s a science fiction novel, kind of. But if I was to try to sell it, I’d sell it as a literary novel, because it’s not an adventure novel. It’s very interior. Has very little action. Not much overt conflict. And it has a strange nonlinear structure wherein all the chapters overlap with each other and layers of character are slowly revealed as you read through it.

I’ve been worrying that it’s not that good. Which doesn’t feel amazing, because this is the farthest I’ve gotten in a novel since last summer (right now I’m at roughly the halfway point of this book). Today, though, I read through what I’ve written so far, and I have to say that I enjoyed it.

Still, though, I’m not feeling that pure molten inspiration that I usually feel at this point in the novel-writing process: the feeling that something else has taken over and that the book is proceeding automatically.

Maybe that’s because the parallel structure means I’m constantly having to make decisions that I wouldn’t need to make in an ordinary novel (today I made a decision about the book that is so crazy that I can’t believe it). Or maybe it’s because the book isn’t very good.

For whatever reason, though, I’m not entirely sure about this book. But I also don’t want to abandon it. This is new territory for me, in terms of novel-writing. But that’s par for the course. The experience of writing every novel is pretty different.

Anyway, this one might have to wait awhile, because I just got back the line edits for ENTER TITLE HERE, and I have to turn those in by May 6th.