As some of you know, I conceived of the idea of writing something resembling a full-length novel last summer, and have been toying with it ever since.
My first ideas were based on the story of Princess Lu, as outlined elsewhere in this blog. There’s a tremendous amount of backstory to the few things I’ve actually taken trouble to write down, and I personally think that it’s all very interesting, but it exists almost entirely in my imagination. Unfortunately, the stories and bits of dialog that I have in my head often turn out to be like those wonderful pebbles that you find at the beach: they don’t look so wonderful after they’re taken out of their environment, dried out, and set out for display.
The parts that I wrote down were not very well “reviewed”, if I may use that term loosely, because they failed to hold anyone’s interest long enough to make it through the first ten pages, as far as I can tell. I ended the last installment on a cliff-hanger, and expected to hear from people eager to find out what happened next–how will Princess Lu escape from the perils she faces; alone, dismounted, most of her kit destroyed, nearly unarmed, hundreds of miles from the nearest settlement, with some large creature racing at her? Well, she’s apparently on her own, because nobody seems all that interested.
There’s also the story about Joe-who-doesn’t-get-tenure, but I decided that was too interesting and complicated to be done piecemeal.
There’s also the story about a large, built-in-desperation spacecraft sent on a mission to meet some aliens at a nearby star system. The interesting (if I may be so bold as to use that word) aspect of this story is that it takes place in the very near future, and therefore uses technology that we would, for the most part, be able to find down at CostCo and/or Electric Boat today. It takes years to get there, and stuff like that. No faster-than-light travel, no magical technology, or anything unreasonable. The problem with that story is that although I have a great middle and dynamite end, the beginning is missing. I don’t know how to get the story started.
Around Christmas I thought about writing about driving across the country (without actually making the trip, unfortunately). I settled on this idea and worked on it for a while. I was getting into some deep insights about what it means to be a person like me, living in a time like this. You know, the usual mid-life crisis sort of thing. I thought I was making progress, but two events derailed the entire process.
The first was that one of my friends is going through the process of trying to get his own novel published. He has a lot of experience with writing, and writes much better than I do. He has fans and followers. His blog has more readers in a day than mine has had since it started. (My only regular readers are Google and Bing, and a few other search engines I’ve never heard much about, as far as I can gather.) And yet, despite his experience with writing, his popularity, and his impressive determination and amount of energy he’s putting into getting published, he’s having a difficult time. He’s making progress, but it’s taken a long time already, and there’s no telling how long the rest of the process might take. It’s pretty clear that you can be a good, ambitious, and hard-working writer and still have a hell of a time getting a book published. That makes my prospects look pretty thin, because I trail far behind on each of these qualities. Therefore, I concluded, if I’m going to write a book, it better be because I think the process is fun and enjoyable. I should write for myself, not for a publisher who will never exist or an audience I’ll never reach.
The second event was that I got a copy of “Inherent Vice”, Pynchon’s latest, for Christmas.
Pynchon is an acquired taste, or perhaps a communicable disease. Many people find him too difficult to read, or his sense of humor too odd or offensive. I also find him difficult to read (I can’t get very far into “Mason & Dixon” and keep stalling out after the first book, or chapter, or section, or whatever the hell it is, of “Against the Day”) and it’s certainly a fact that there are no good people in Pynchon’s world. Everyone has a flaw, or two, or a dozen, and Pynchon pulls no punches. The cops are bad, the villains are prosperous, the heroes do a lot of drugs, engage in casual sex, drive under the influence, order disgusting things on their pizza, don’t exercise regularly, and never floss. I love it. It’s what Wodehouse might have written, if Wodehouse had grown up in post-war California and done a bunch of acid during the 60’s.
The reviews for “Inherent Vice” are a mixed bag. The most positive ones say something along the lines of “It’s not Pynchon at his best, but even so he’s a better ride than pretty much anyone else” and the negative ones say things like “another incomprehensible mish-mash from Pynchon.” Sam Anderson of the New York Times Review of Books, didn’t even bother to write a review of the book, but instead wrote a two-page essay outing himself as someone who never liked Pynchon and can’t understand why anyone else possibly could, half implying that Pynchon’s popularity is probably due to some sort of self-perpetuating academic hazing ritual that forces everyone serious about literature to endure the ordeal of reading Gravity’s Rainbow. (I kept waiting for the punch-line because the structure and rhythm of Anderson’s essay is almost a perfect, although perhaps unwitting, parody of the story of Pointsman and Mexico from Gravity’s Rainbow, but it never came.)
Personally, I don’t care whether any particular person likes Pynchon, and am not going to try to convince anyone to read his books. My only desire is that enough people continue to buy his books so that his publishers will continue to offer them to me. I enjoy Pynchon. He makes me laugh. That’s really all I want from a novel. I’m sure Anderson wouldn’t like Wodehouse either (he doesn’t like things that are overly lyrical, or when the characters have silly, made-up names, or when the plots rely too much on serendipity), but I will make careful note of his reviews in the future. If it turns out that he doesn’t hate every book written by a living author, then I’ll just buy the books he hates, and I will thank him for his guidance.
So reading “Inherent Vice” made me rethink my plans. If I’m going to write a novel, it’s not going to be serious. It’s not going to be dramatic. It’s going to be funny, the characters are going to have silly names, there will be more serendipity than average, and nothing will be resolved. It’ll be fun to read. Otherwise, it won’t be fun to write.
So, where to begin? I watched from a safe distance as my friend upload his novel onto authonomy.com, and decided that might be a good place to get my novel in front of new eyeballs, assuming I ever write anything. There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of novels there, with an active community of readers, and perhaps if I upload my work there someone will stumble across it. It’s as good a plan as any.
One restriction of authonomy.com is that work must be uploaded as a .doc file, or .rtf. Neither is a particularly attractive choice. My learned opinion of .doc is that life is far too short to ever use any editor that produces it, especially Word. My opinion of RTF is not much higher–even the people who wrote RTF in the first place consider it an abomination and a sin against formatting–but at least it is a documented and markup-based standard, sort of. What this means is that it’s conceivable for people to write translators from real markup languages (the sort of things that people actually use for typesetting and writing and things of that ilk) to RTF without losing all of the goodness. Some of the goodness must be sacrificed because RTF is not as rich and expressive as real editing software–the sort of thing people use to write books, not church newsletters and memos that go straight into the recycling bin–but some remains.
I found a translator that turns a format I like into RTF. It works sufficiently well to produce output compatible with authonomy, but it has one large flaw. It ignores my selection of fonts, and always uses Times Roman. Now, there are worse fonts than Times Roman, but those seriphs don’t look good on the screen, and the kerning is awkward. I want a font that is easy on the eyes.
So I wrote a program that changes the fonts in an RTF file to be what I want them to be. That’s the sort of thing I do. It’s no big deal. Sure, I could do it by opening the RTF file in some RTF editor, select all, select a new font, and then save, but that would be work. Too many steps. I’d get it wrong every once in a while; better to let the computer do the repetitive stuff.
The only question is what font to use? There are so many, and so many opinions. But in the end, one font stood out from all of the others.
My book will be in Palatino.
That’s right. My book will be in Palatino.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten.
The software is ready and the font face has been chosen. Now for the hard part.
