I finally sucked it up and started doing what I’ve known that I needed to do for weeks: rewrite the ending of the novel. Not edit, but actually rewrite. The process is like, well it’s excruciating. Imagine that you were an artist and you painted a painting in, say, the year 2000. Let’s say that painting was a portrait of a girlfriend you had at the time. Now, let’s say five years later, in the year 2005, you no longer had that girlfriend, that instead you had a completely different life with another woman, and that in fact you were now married to that new woman, and had a child, and really didn’t want to revisit the relationship with the other, more previous, woman.
So, stick with me here, it’s 2005 now, and some art dealer from New York pays you a buttload of money for the portrait of the ex-girlfriend, and you’re really happy to have the portrait of the woman off your hands, and some extra spending money to boot. But there’s one catch, and the catch is this: you have to make some changes to the painting. When you agreed to give the dealer your painting, you sort of waved this off as inconsequential, but now that you’re staring at this portrait of your ex-girlfriend, you suddenly realize something that you hadn’t thought of before–YOU DON’T REMEMBER WHAT YOUR EX-GIRLFRIEND LOOKS LIKE. You burned all your photos of her to stave off your new wife’s jealousies, and there’s just no way you can paint her unless you, well, unless you see her again.
OK, you see where I am at now. There are problems with visiting ex-girlfriends. For one, the ex-girlfriend surely doesn’t look the same, she’s changed, so when you redo the painting it’s going to be all f***** up, and for two, if you get too close to the ex-girlfriend, divorce, amongst other things, awaits.
Now, to tie things up, here’s what’s happened to me. You see, I was having a very hard time getting into the ‘space’ of the novel in order to rewrite it, so what I did was, I revisited the thing that caused the novel in the first place, this online game called Utopia. Now if you know me, you know that online gaming is my alcohol, once I’ve started drinking from it I can’t stop. My every thought, even when I’m not online, is the stupid game. So here I am, back in the ‘space’ of the novel, and it’s working, I care more, I’m writing new pages, but my wife, she’s going to f****** kill me, because every spare moment I can possibly muster, I spend down in the basement playing Utopia, rather than cleaning the house, or changing the diapers, or walking the dog, or any of the other myriad of things that a responsible parent and dog owner should be doing…