My Ego, A Sleazy Hollywood Agent?

I'm going to admit something I might later regret admitting, but that's the beautiful thing about confessions, you do them spontaneously and then later reap the consequences. And though, I could go in and edit my confession if I felt the need, I promise not to do that. This is not one of those confessions that could make anybody but myself look bad.

The novel I have just begun writing--and no, I'm not talking about the one I most recently finished a draft of, which pulses at me on my harddrive daily, waiting to be revised--but a brand new one...I think it is the one. You know what I mean? The one that gives you an endorphin rush, where you can't wait to write each new chapter because you're buzzing with the thrill of it all. The one you think about when you should be working, dream about when you should be sleeping, dash down future chapters for before you've written the plot points that come next because it's all being delivered like one great big needle to the vein of your consciousness and who are you to deny the high?! Yup. I just look at the title and swoon. My ego straps on leather pants, swaggars across the room, tips its sunglasses into the mirror and winks, saying, 'baby, this is your career-maker!' My ego has become a smarmy hollywood agent!! It would sleep with you in order to sell you its ideas! My ego has become this guy:












So if you've followed this blog, or know me personally, you must already have made the leap to--so when's she gonna crash from THIS one? There was a time, Jordan, when you were pretty jazzed about your last novel. And what about the two before that? You were downright cocky!

To which I reply: That was before an agent represented the first two unsuccessfully (I always like to point out that each novel saw less than 10 publishers!). That was before I learned what I needed to learn in each of those books--which still have the potential to be rewritten successfully when the time comes. That was before I realized I have to either wait for two relatives, maybe three, to die, or else significantly alter my characters in this latest book if I still want to have a relationship with them.

And actually, the truth is that I've really no idea when this one will be done, as in finished-in-all- its-drafts-ready-to-get-me-an-agent-again-done. I don't know when, and I don't feel like I can predict it with the same anal proscription by which I've written other things. Maybe this will be the novel that I work on for ten years. Maybe this will be that project that people stop asking about because they're embarrassed to have me answer rudely, "Maybe it'll be done around the same time that you win the freaking lottery, bub!"

I only know that it's been knocking at the door for awhile now. Banging at it actually, as if it has been running from an axe-murderer in a cheesy teen horror flick, even as I was trying to shush it so I could finish the other novel. And I'm glad I did finish the other novel draft, because when the time comes to revise and fine-tune it, hey, the template is all there, the blueprints more than sketched out.

I'm also glad to be letting this one through, because it feels like it contains all the ingredients that interest me, and for god's sake, there's even sex in it! And murder! And moody, symbolic dream imagery! And abandoned children! Whoopee!

JPR