Unpublished Guy's July Novel Writing Month Progress
I already exploited a loophole to rewrite a portion of one short story to meet the novel writing objectives. My thinking at that time was that if I manually rewrote the text then that should count as new words. Now, I am not sure if I need to make that distinction. After taking a second look at the FAQ, I decided that it wasn't necessary that I manually rewrite my existing writing. The FAQ addresses using an existing novel for the July novel. It doesn't say anything about short stories. If I asked for clarification, I would probably be told that existing short stories don't count to the word count any more than novels do, so I don't think I will ask. Instead, I will write with a mindset of blissful ignorance. After considering this, I feel quite free to append as many short stories as I can.
Append like crazy is exactly what I did yesterday. I appended a short story that riffed Invitation to a Beheading, except it was about a man visiting the dentist. Another appended story featured a surrealistic tale of two drug addicts and was loosely based on the lives of Jim Morrison and Pamela Courson if Jim Morrison had been a professional clown. Yet another: the story of a paper mill worker with Huntington's disease. I also added a bunch of descriptive scraps that I had been hanging onto, including a paragraph describing a stone fountain and another of a foot. After all that appending, my word count increased to 13,871. My dramatic progress was brief, however. Today, the word count plummeted to 9819 as I slashed and edited in order to stitch up my Frankenstory and screw on some neck bolts. I might have made more progress with my editing and developing some of the various plot lines in the story, except I got hung up on this one paragraph. I kept revising and tweaking it for eleven hours, deleting words, adding the deleted words back, adding new words, deleting new words.
The first draft of the paragraph:
A new movie has just begun; steam rises in the reflection of an eye and swirled and whirled in majestic humidity. Then strange symbols stream across the eye, parallel to the close-captioned words that appear, letter by letter, at the bottom of the TV. The symbols are not from any alphabet spoken by people today, although, they resemble the cuneiform I had known when writing first began. These symbols are a nonexistent computer language, imagined by some TV writer. The images, the words, the voices roll over me in layers, like sediment; each layer buries me, divides my mind from my body, and I feel my body fossilize.
The paragraph I finally ended up with:
A new movie has just begun; steam rises in the reflection of an eye and swirled and whirled whirls and swirls in majestic humidity. Then strange symbols stream across the eye, parallel to the close-captioned words that appear, letter by letter, at the bottom of the TV. The symbols are not from any alphabet spoken by people today, although, they resemble the cuneiform I had known when writing first began. These symbols are a nonexistent computer language, imagined by some TV writer. The images, the words, the voices roll over me in layers, like sediment; each layer buries me, divides my mind from my body, and I feel my body fossilize.
By the end of the month (now only days away), I will hopefully have drafted a novel along the lines of the Tales of Scheherazade or On a Long Winter's Night a Traveller, which will be incomprehensible and convoluted, making Kathy Acker an easy read. Several continuity issues still exist. For example, several different characters now share the first name, "Dresden."