So the release of World Leader Pretend has been pushed back to the Winter of 2007. Yes, I am chagrined. However, because I am a small fish in a very large ocean, and because I fear being eaten by sharks, I will hang out amidst the kelp until they come with the dolphin protection team and let me swim. (Holding back… holding back…)
So that’s all I will say…
I’ve been working on VMP of late, and it’s been, well, a bust. I kept writing pages, and more pages, and more pages, and the plot, well it went nowhere. I was up to 575 and I wasn’t any closer to the end then I was at 300. Anyone who’s ever written a novel before and run into a snag as massive as this will know how depressing it is. You’ve written almost 300 pages of garbage, and at an average of 20 pages per week that’s about 4 months worth of work (4 months!) and now you have to throw it away. You want to take a gun to your head. It’s awful. Why did you do this? Why are you a writer? You could have made a million bucks, or contributed to world peace, or had a love affair, or at the very least enjoyed yourself and your wife and your family, but instead you toiled over some pages that you now have to throw away. So your down, and your depressed, and you think of a lot of ways you can escape, like chucking it all and moving to the big island of Hawaii, and then, one morning, you wake up and look at your damn novel that you fucking hate and you know you can’t throw away the whole thing, you have to fix it… so, you make an outline, and the outline, it grows, you spend days, weeks on the outline, and then one day you wake up, with your outline in hand, and OMG you have to start writing again. It’s painful. It’s awful. Oh wait. Oh hey. That was good what I just wrote. I can do this! I can save this! I have new ideas! I can use some of what I wrote. I can use it here! I can use it there!
And then, there you are, back on page 300, starting over again, hoping, praying, that the plot you outline doesn’t unravel on page 575 again. (And the thing is… it probably will)