"One Hundred False Starts"

"'Crack!' goes the pistol and off starts this entry. Sometimes he has caught it just right; more often he has jumped the gun. On these occasions, if he is lucky, he runs only a dozen yards, looks around and jogs sheepishly back to the starting place. But too frequently he makes the entire circuit of the track under the impression that he is leading the field, and reaches the finish to find he has no following. The race must be run all over again." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald 

This pretty much describes my fiction writing career to this point, and it's the reason for this blog. I'm an attorney who's written thousands of pages of legal documents, yet I'm convinced that if I could write 300 pages of meaningful fiction, it would mean infinitely more, even if it's only ever read by my closest friends and family (and even that only out of a sense of obligation).

For a decade-and-a-half, I've kept various journals, logs, and commonplace books with various ideas for short stories, novels, songs, and screenplays. I've written first drafts of several songs and short stories, but have never returned to revise and improve them. I have a few fairly detailed outlines for screenplays sitting around, but I've never fleshed them out into an actual script. And there are four files sitting in my Google drives representing beginnings of four different novels, but all have stalled before even a full chapter is completed.

I've finally hit upon an idea that I think I can carry through at this point. It will require writing at lunch, at night, and on the weekends, but my goal is to complete 70,000 words by the end of 2016. I will have to push much further through the writing process than I ever have before, but I believe I can.

The purpose of this blog is threefold: (1) to help provide momentum and accountability in completing my first draft and revisions; (2) to create a record of the process and stats to assist me in future projects; and (3) to provide information and motivation to others who may be attempting their own part-time novel projects. Of course, I'm going to have to be mindful that it does not become just another distraction and time-sink drawing me away from working on the actual novel.

I will not be sharing much specific information regarding the novel, only the process. I don't want to spoil it for potential readers, and, as Fitzgerald opined, "I think it's a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it's finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again."

The novel will be set in a past historical period in a location familiar to me (the Midwest), and it will involve the retelling, with some subversion, of a classic mythological story in that context. The prideful side of me would like to classify it as literary fiction, but I imagine it will come out closer to young adult (not that there's anything wrong with that).

If you're here reading as a friend or family, thanks for your support. And if you're a fellow aspiring writer, I hope in my experiences, struggles, and successes you can find something that helps you accomplishes your writing goals, as well.