Sex, Drugs and On The Dole

The last time I was unemployed I wrote a novel. It wasn't written particularly well. I invented a country which rang incredibly false on re-reading, which isn't exactly surprising, as I'd never invented a country before.

My characters were...all right, I suppose, but the story hung off two immensely strong characters who made all the connections, motivated everyone else and generally saw to it that stuff got done. Everyone else, whilst definite characters of their own, well, they were a bit passive. And the first lead central male? So brainless and niave as to be unbelievable. AND I started him out based on me.

One week I was feeling a bit lonely and on one particular evening in the book three couples had nights of passion in three different locations. It wasn't wrong that this should happen, naturally. People have sex all the time, but that they all got it on at the same time, on the same night, and they all had to have morning-after scenes more or less at the same time...creating a little more than a mental frown and a raised eyebrow in the reader.

I went back and inserted chapters to give other characters a background, an extra edge of reality...how our twisted and meddling drug baron pulled himself and his ugly wife up from the streets, the moment the two main female protaganists met in a bar in Peru...

In the fullness of time I couldn't make up my mind how to end it, so I wrote three endings, all of which are now lost.

As a whole it was very patchy; too loose. It had no integrity, and it would take a near full re-write to give it that. I had more or less been developing a style; learning to write, as I started and carried on. And as I carried on, I liked more and more of what I was producing; churning out. I was slowly grinding my way up a learning curve. I hit the difficult decision for the endings and all of a sudden I got a job and I moved to Hatfield.

I'm not expecting to be unemployed very long here in New York.
Uh, let me rephrase that.
I hope to be employed soon, here in New York.
That's better.

Anyway, the point being, seeing as 'tis the season of NaNoWriMo and all that jazz, I thought to myself, why not take everything I learned before, and just sit down and do it again, better this time? Not the same story, but to start to write again? After all, I know I can do it, or at least produce the required amount of words to tell a reasonable yarn.

So yesterday, trying to avoid the myriad temptations of Krissa's Mac and after going through my daily job-getting routines, I sat down at the kitchen table with a pad and a pen.

I'm sitting looking at what, depending on whether I look at it with an egotistical or reasonable hat on, is either four pages of the best introduction to a novel I can write right now, or four pages of pretentious, nonsensical drivel, three and a half pages too long.

The trouble is, I can almost see both simultaneously, like trying to see both sides of an optical illusion - both the candlestick and the faces, both the young woman and the old crone - but it is making my brain hurt. The two sides are stretching my ambivalence between wanting to crumple up the pages and start again, or charge on with a strong chin and produce more stuff which, as I've already said, could be drivel of a pretentious and nonsensical tilt.

I may yet branch out into an homage to 'Spot the Dog' for simplicity's sake.