Okay!\u00a0 Time to wheel out the horrible failed novel project.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been promising to do this forever and, next week, it\u2019ll begin.<\/p>\n
The project began in 1997 while I was working for an Associated Press-owned company, performing tedious editorial bullshit from nine to five in a lonely office out in Landover, MD.\u00a0 The company was in a converted warehouse, and my office was at the end of a maze of corridors, everything around me feeling temporary and feeble.\u00a0 There was no human interaction, just the occasional encounter with a janitor or an IT guy, so I spent lots of time online chatting with my friend up in Baltimore.\u00a0 He and I cooked up this plan to write a screenplay about three college guys \u2013 Daryl, Martin, and Azizi \u2013 hired by a mountain resort to be winter caretakers, like in The Shining<\/em>.\u00a0 While the hotel was malevolently haunted, our three heroes were generally unimpressed.\u00a0 Daryl was violent and crazy, taking on the ghosts when they appeared.\u00a0 Martin was moody and sensitive to the ghosts, and Azizi simply couldn\u2019t see the ghosts and obsessed about soccer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My friend was a fuck-up who couldn\u2019t deliver copy, so I finished the screenplay, hated it, then spun it out into a novel called The Contract<\/em> in 1999.\u00a0 As usual, I left it unfinished.\u00a0 Though I couldn\u2019t shake Daryl, Martin, and Azizi.\u00a0 I wanted to try and do some justice to the characters battering around in my head, so I took them and applied the same sort of formula:\u00a0 Three college guys generally unfazed by the apocalypse.\u00a0 The title of this new novel was Mir Descending<\/em>, and I started it in early 2001 after reading about the killer space bugs on the Mir space station, which began a controlled re-entry and burn-up in March of that year.\u00a0 What if those mutant space bugs survived and turned people into zombie monster whatever things?\u00a0 Easy enough!\u00a0 So I feverishly set to work and it, too, went unfinished and ignored.<\/p>\n By 2003, I had two half-finished novels sitting around and was still haunted by these characters, so I returned to Mir Descending<\/em>, struggled with the fact that it was now dated and silly, and decided to remove the Mir paranoia and make the apocalypse something more vague.<\/p>\n I was working then as much as I do now \u2013 several jobs, and always on the run.\u00a0 In the brain death of commuting, I settled on the working title Judgment Day<\/em>.\u00a0 I threw out the screenplay, The Contract<\/em>, and Mir Descending<\/em>, and started fresh.\u00a0 No distractions!\u00a0 The challenge \u2013 write Judgment Day<\/em> through to the end, no matter what.\u00a0 If I got stuck, then I\u2019d either punch through or gloss over.\u00a0 The point became less about writing well and more about just finishing a project that wasn\u2019t The Boble<\/em>.<\/p>\n The result was 370 pages of utter crap.\u00a0 And\u2026it\u2019s still unfinished.\u00a0 I cheated.\u00a0 I wrote a little epilogue and left it open with a trilogy in mind.\u00a0 Though I did go so far as write the first 50 pages of the second book.<\/p>\n By 2004, Judgment Day<\/em> had gone through nine edits.\u00a0 Still with little improvement, but I was crazy enough to send out sample chapters and a synopsis to publishers.\u00a0 That was, mostly, a lark.\u00a0 Something to do to distract me from writing.\u00a0 By the end of 2004, I put the novel into a cobwebbed corner of my harddrive and moved on.<\/p>\n In the screenplay, and the first two attempts at a novel, the characters were pretty basic.\u00a0 Azizi was the comic relief and the Doubting Thomas, Martin was the sensitive one, and Daryl was the violent one.\u00a0 When starting Judgment Day<\/em>, I decided to open up with the most dynamic of the trio, Daryl, and the story eventually morphed to be from his point of view.\u00a0 As a necessity, he and Martin switched roles.\u00a0 Martin became the warrior and Daryl became the sensitive sort.\u00a0 Wildly pushing through for an ending, do or die, inflicted quite a few changes to the characters\u2026and cured me of my need to write about them.\u00a0 Judgment Day had left my consciousness by 2005, when I started publishing real writers and real books.\u00a0 As I launched into the foolishness of publishing, I didn\u2019t have much time at all to think about my own writing.\u00a0 Now that I have my wits back, thanks to miracle cures and the transition (or death?) of the publishing industry, I\u2019m shocked to look back at my writing and realize that I have tens of thousands of pages of really embarrassing stuff.\u00a0 Thank god for Greatsociety.\u00a0 If it wasn\u2019t for this page, you\u2019d never be able to laugh at me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay!\u00a0 Time to wheel out the horrible failed novel project.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been promising to do this forever and, next week, it\u2019ll begin. The project began in 1997 while I was working for an Associated Press-owned company, performing tedious editorial bullshit …<\/p>\n