Someone turn my chapters into a novel
So, it's a writing day over at the house today. Soren has joined us, and the three of us are sitting at the diningroom table working on our various theses. A.'s is on how one can see "whiteness" using the photography of Tina Barney. S.'s is on why and how melancholy characterizes the way we approach history today. Both of them are finishing M.A.s in modern art history, theory, and criticism. (That should probably all be in CAPS since it's the official title of their degree program.)

My thesis is a novel about an American scion who gets caught up with the Russian mafia during the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. My M.F.A. is in Creative Writing.

In preparing to write, I began going through some old material that I thought I could reuse. In fact, I have tons of old material, and curiosity got the better of me: how much old material, exactly, did I have? Or, as a metric, how many pages have I thus written for this novel? I often quoted a figure of "over 500", but it's always been an estimate.

So I counted the pages. All pages are Courier, 12-point, double-spaced. Because of the volume, and because I'm not exactly doing a scientific study here, I counted all cover pages as a page (there are only a few), as well as counting partial pages as a complete page (at the end of a chapter, e.g.).

All totaled, and not including typed notes or journal entries about process or direction or synposes (I have more than a few) or one-pagers, since November 30, 2004, I have 564 pages towards this novel. I'm on the 5th draft.

IMHO, instead of wasting my time, sitting here and writing more pages, I think I'm going to go to Craig's List and place an ad, "Will pay money to put my chapters into novel form." Then, instead of shovelling money at my M.F.A. program, I could just pay an editor to do all of the work for me and publish the novel instead of graduate.

I think it's a great plan.
- posted by frank crist @ 7:03 PM