Get back, Joe!

So grad school brought back the book. There were approximately 7 grad schools applied to by me. If you imagine the worst hand you can be dealt in Texas hold-em' poker, then you should have an idea of how many of those grad schools accepted my application. Oddly enough, the only schools that accepted me were the ones to which I did submit an excerpt of my novel as part of my portfolio.

At any rate, I ended up at Sarah Lawrence, which was generally a good time, although there were a few hiccups along the way.

Most of my time at Sarah Lawrence was spent working on the novel. This is how that worked out. In the second semester, I got just about 90 pages deep. Of these 90 pages, approximately 23 remain in the current version. The third semester was probably the most productive. With the help of Mr. Ernesto Mestre-Reed, I had a very productive semester and eclipsed the halfway point of the story. And that's where things started to go downhill.

After that third semester, I ran into a problem, and that problem was this: I decided that it makes far more sense to rewrite 1/2 of a novel over and over and over and over and over and over and over (get the idea yet?) and over and over and over and over (sure you do) and over again, rather than just finishing a stupid full-length rough draft. So there. And that's what I did. And that's what I've been doing. For a long, long time.

I got some good stuff out of those re-re-re-re-re-re-writes, don't get me wrong. With no small amount of help from a World Champion Ultimate Frisbee player (that's David Hollander for those not in the know). But the fact of the matter is, the writing, once I left the comforting confines of grad school, made me want to smash my face into things with extreme abandon.

Listen, it's time to end this prelude. Here's the long story shortened: I started the novel, I put it on hold, I went back to it, I wrote a bunch of it, then I kept writing the same thing over and over until my soul was ready collapse in on itself and pull me down into the shadowy pit of Hades. But now I'm feeling better about it. Much better. Why? Mainly because of this book. I must say, it was inspirational.

Now, here we are. I'm back in the groove. I'm three chapters deep again, and from here on out, I'll try and talk about the day-to-day issues of writing. We'll see how it goes. But all that is for next week. For now, let's drink until our hearts stop: