The fourth of July and four days into July Novel Writing Month. Four days of staring at a blank page wondering what font I should be using to write my novel. I settled on Verdana. I prefer sans serif, but it's not as overused as Arial.

Now that I have font selection settled, I have to figure out what the novel should be about. I suppose I could brainstorm, but I've decided to dredge up one of my older short stories and repurpose it as a novel length story. The particular story I had in mind was originally intended to be a multi-layered tome of symbolism like Moby Dick, except the source of my ambition was the epic poem, Jerusalem, by William Blake.

The main character in Jerusalem is Albion, who takes on several different allegorical layers of meaning, including:

• Historical and geographical, where cities represent different parts of Albion's body as well as other people.
  
• Religious and sexual (Blake goes on a good bit in many of his poems about how religion represses human sexuality. I'd read somewhere that he and has wife had been found reading Milton's Paradise Lost to each other in the nude.)
  
• Political, where Blake draws on his mythic characters from other poems that embody the American and French revolutions.
  
• Psychological, where the fall of Albion is seen as a mental illness.
  
• Visionary, where one mythic character struggles with another in a fight over artistic creativity and vision
  

If you ever wanted to read the poem, I would recommend getting William Blake The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)
After you have read the poem and found it completely impenetrable, you can read the notes, which go into more detail than I have in this post.

In my short story the main character would have been Utnapishtim, the Noah of the Sumerian Gilgamesh myth. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that he would have been the landscaping for the story. Like Albion in Blake's poem, Utnapishtim would be both a person, reminiscing about the time that Gilgamesh fellow visited, as well as physical locations that would provide the setting and backdrop for a science fiction story. The protaganist for the speculative fiction story would be a lesbian detective named Fisher (not that I have any standing to convincingly develop a lesbian character). Unlike Blake, where the layer was allegorical, I had intended to make it a surrealistic, where the characters were actually climbing over Utnapishtim's liver and through his gut. Also, rather than a mental decline, Utnapishtim would be in physical decline and bedbound. This would be unfortunate for Utnapishtim, being immortal. I had also gone so far as to dig down into specific events that occur in the Blake poem and tried to mirror or allude to them in my story.

So my brilliant idea is taking this story that I could not complete as short fiction and make it the basis for my July Novel Writing Month novel—looks like old habits are hard to break.

I could explaining this gobbledy-gook and how it could possibly become a readable story, but I feeling a bit hungry. I am going to fix myself a turkey pot pie, and then I might get around to writing something.