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March 07, 2006
Is there ever a best time to start anything, A Novel
I started my novel last Sunday. I had the house to myself and everything went splendidly. Good clean prose, I said to myself. At least, until the day after. This one has been waiting in line to be written and is flowing out the keyboard. However, this month is so busy with the family business that I have been pressed into service. I'm finding it hard to write with two hours sleep, after that initial Sunday. But I'm committed to pushing words around without missing a day. I am looking forward, however, to my usual writing schedule.
The excercises that I invented are working marvels for the long form. It is harder to pull everything together and I have paper everywhere. Wish I had a laptop. But then I'd have to sacrifice the latest and the bestest!
My first novel does take me away from time to time. I discovered last week that I had a repeated chapter. The software InDesign works well to pull my completed manuscript together. The version I use is fairly buggy and I need to update it soon... and I will. But it is way better than Word which keeps changing my formatting at will. Most people might not have this problem but as a designer, I have various different fonts that float around everywhere. I've set up styles and named them etc but they don't behave the way they should.
I like to use a particular font for a body of work. With my first novel, it was American Garamond. But I'm now over that and I'm using Americana. Of course, when I send stuff out, I change the entire thing into something conventional like Georgia and this does well for web transmission. But never Times New Roman. Just looking at that font makes me dry up. I like Futura as well. I enjoy picking up books that are set in an unusual but readable type. And I like the way certain publishing houses like Knopf layout their books. Zoetrope All-Story, the magazine, sets the stories in unusual ways--there is always an invited guest designer in every issue. Black Warrior Review that I read for the first time some months ago, was also a treat to hold in the hand, and look at, before getting into the serious business of reading. I can tell from the cover art if I'm going to enjoy a book and I'm rarely wrong. I'm so good at this that my husband sets me onto the library shelves as if releasing a hound to the scent of good fiction.
And I saw, while surfing, a few weeks ago that Frederic Busch had died. And was saddened. Night Inspector was a fabulous novel. There is something about his writing that is so intense.
So that is it for now... tomorrow, back to the novel but first, I'll have to put in a day's work. Soon, I'll have my perfect writing days back. Also, I'm turning off Comments for the duration of my next novel first draft.
Posted by girija at March 7, 2006 11:36 PM