Pregnancy

 

 

I’ve been fretting for some time now that, although I write for four to six hours five or six days every week, I’m not making the progress on the novel that I would like to.  With Word 2003 set at a 12 point Times New roman font, I had only written, or seemed to have written around 230 pages after some one and a half years of work.  It is good work, but it seemed to me that there wasn’t a lot of it for the time invested and I began to feel depressed and rather hard on myself as a lazy slacker.

 

Then my dear friend Kevin reminded me that book length isn’t determined by number of pages as shown by Word for Windows, but by word count.  And when I applied the word count utility, the novel I’ve written so far is no 230 pages but near twice that in length.  Needless to say, I am very, very pleased with myself and take the title of slacker Prince as a badge of honor.  The truth is, I’m kicking ass novelistically speaking and am probably between three quarters and four fifths of the way through my first draft.  The second and third drafts, I expect, will go very swiftly as I already have a pretty good idea of the alterations which need to be made before the book is totally coherent.

 

But even though it turns out I’m writing an ox-stunner rather than a slim volume, there is still a certain amount of suffering involved at this point.  I began to feel this about seven years into my first book, “The Apocalypse Hilton”.  I describe it as a feeling of wanting to give birth when I still haveanother trimester to go.  I have all these characters and situations and they want to be in a published book, not next year sometime and certainly not five years from now, but today or tomorrow.  In fact, I think I feel, as much as any man can, the way a pregnant woman feels when she thinks to her unborn child: “Damn it, baby, I’m tired.  ARRIVE already!”