Deadlines & Shit

Jay asked if he might have a ms of Wealth Effects to peruse by Xmas. Could happen, but the first six months of the year are typically when I get the most writing done. Why? Because my regular job has a huge seasonal flux that means lots of hours this time of year. Today I left after 'only' ten hours, but I've been putting in sixty hour weeks and we're not even into October yet.

This year has presented some other speedbumps, things outside work that have had to take priority over the book. The original plan was to have somethng agent-ready by now, and it's very, very, not agent ready.

Dunno about the Xmas deadline. I've been trying to get my central theme in focus. Hard to 'tell a story' if you don't know what it's about. I mean, I don't know how it ends, I've written several endings. Several beginnings as well. Experimented with stylistic approaches, changed POV, changed names, changed the amount of cultural white noise and back story I want to include, etc.

But the 'what's it about?' question, I've fucked a lot of the book up by changing my mind about that. Partly the victim of my own hubris: any theme sounds dumb and obvious after a while. 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' while it has sub-themes in it, is really about choosing freedom even if death is the consequence. 'The Magic Christian' is about how the amount of money you have might change the impact you can make on the world, good or bad, but it won't change your fundamental nature.

'Underworld' is a hard book to pin down a single theme, but it's the invisible connections of society, the secrets we keep, the parallels we live out. And since it came out prior to 'Cosmopolis,' and DeLillo spends so much of Underworld telling stories that center around refuse and waste, I have to wonder if he wasn't poking a bit of fun at himself when Richard Sheets interects that 'There are books about shit.' Some of the best sections of that book deal very directly with shit, both fecal and opiate, and if you extend the meanings of the word, there's the trash disposal, the universal need to get rid of waste, to hide it, make it secret, deny it. For that matter, lots of people just refer to the stuff as shit. No one is referring to fecal matter when they say, 'my shit is ruined!'

But thanks to some fellow travellers in Write Club, I think I have a better bead on my theme. Dunno about Xmas, but I'll get this shit together.