Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Psst. . .

C’mere.

I’ve got a secret.

Promise not to tell?I’ve kept this under my hat for a bit, partly because I don’t want to jinx it, but mostly because I wanted to make sure it was “a thing” before I spoke of it publicly.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve posted about my efforts to jump-start my long-languishing “next novel” project. I’ve written about putting an end to the research phase, about scouting historical locations for the book, and about writing up character sketches.

This novel has been started and put aside about a dozen times. Once each year or so I’d pick it up, reread my outline, go over my notes, and usually produce some sort of stillbirth of an opening paragraph for which I had little enthusiasm and even less impetus to continue.

This year, however, has been different. This year, in addition to the above activity, there was some substantial progress. In May, I tossed out the names I’d been working with. In July, I tossed out the whole backstory of my main characters. And in October, I visited a local spring that’s been bubbling up for millennia, and which cemented in my mind the atmosphere for a large section of the book-to-be.

Admittedly, none of this work was actually writing the damned novel, but it was all a definitive step in the proper direction. (After such a long creative drought, I’m giving myself “atta boys” for any forward progress.)

Which leads me to my secret.

Chapter One is complete.

Not only is Chapter One complete, but as I was typing up my longhand first-draft, I had a feeling I haven’t had for a long, long time: this doesn’t suck.

Usually—almost invariably—my opinion of my work-in-progress is that the writing sucks, the plot is stupid, and that no one will ever want to read it. This time, for some reason, I feel different about it.

• Going over the opening scenes, I like how it sets things up. My attitude probably accounts for this, rather than the writing. I fully recognize that the first and second drafts are going to be crap, but they contain the raw resources from which I’ll be able to build something finer, later on. That’s good enough, for now. It doesn’t have to be—in fact it positively cannot be—good at this point in the project.
• As I have been reworking the outline to accommodate all the changes I’ve made, it doesn’t sound stupid to me. The fact that I’m working in a new genre is likely a major contributing factor. Writing science fiction, historical fantasy, and alternate history, I was painfully aware that I hold no degrees in relevant subjects. I’m just a guy who’s curious, and I always felt like a poseur in those genres. With a shift to literary/historical fiction, I don’t have to be an expert; I just have to be observant. The characters in this book are not exceptional folks caught up in global events; they’re just regular people experiencing the real-life drama of unusual situations.
• I fully accept that the probability of this book being accepted by a traditional publishing house is vanishingly small, and that I’ll most likely have to go the self-published route again. The logical outcome would be that my readership will be in the dozens or hundreds, certainly not in the thousands, and would definitely not achieve “bestselling” numbers. That’s the reality. I’ll play the publishing-house odds, of course, but at this point I don’t really care if it’s only read by a few indulgent friends. I just want to write it.

The most telling factor of continued progress, though, is the writer’s corollary to “The Love Formula,” as spoken by Peter O’Toole in the movie Creator. In the film, O’Toole’s character is advising a young man on how he might know if he is “in love” or not.

“Add up the number of times that you think about the lady each day. Subtract from the total the number of times you think about yourself each day. If the remainder is more lady, and less yourself, then it’s love.”

The writer’s corollary—at least in my world—is to take the number of times you think about writing the damned novel, subtract the number of times you complain about it. If the remainder is more writing than complaining, you’re in the correct frame of mind to continue on and finish the book.

I’ve been thinking about writing this book a lot, lately. And, as O’Toole also says in that movie:

What’s so very neat about this particular formula, is that “a lot” plugs into it beautifully.

k