The Oubliette

I've changed the title of the novel I'm working on from The Box to The Oubliette. Sounds pretentious but it's what it's.

The old title was one of my favorites when I came up with it before beginning the book. It happens like that for me. I think of a title and then the story or novel comes, and the whole thing's taken a different direction and that road was leading more and more away from The Box.

I had 143 pages finished when I sat down to work on it last week. When I got up after a four-hour session, it stood at 90 pages. The entire fabric changed in that session; I've never had that happen with any piece of writing.

Once those pages were cut, I decided to set the 90 pages aside and use it as a well and started over at page one. So now I'm on page 21 but the road to the end is so much clearer. I have a renewed interest and, with this as potentially my seventh novel written, I'm getting more comfortable with the form. Never thought that would happen, if I'm being honest.

I wrote ten or so short stories while finishing my last novel, The Old Invisible and I struggled to keep those under 15 or 20 pages. It was like I was a horror writer sending in solicited stories for anthologies. Ever notice those things are 20 or 30 pages each? It's a thing. But that wasn't my goal.

I wrangled it back in and now I've had a handful of stories published over the past four maybe five months, so I'm glad that I didn't get permanently suspended and left with the knack for only writing novels. Also, I finished several others besides those recently published to include in an upcoming new story collection.

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If The Old Invisible and this one, The Oubliette, were to be published, I'd be sitting on seven published novels compared to four short story collection and one collection of prose poems. I do have a fifth short story collection that will appear from Cowboy Jamboree in May called Fallujah Boy and Other Stories, which will bring the story collection total to five, so I guess I'm keeping pretty good pace in both forms.

Sounds like a lot of bragging. Maybe it is, I'm not sure when I search my heart of hearts. But I can say this: I don't talk to anyone in my everyday life about even being a novelist or short story writer or prose poet, an author. Not at all, ever. It makes this little space I've pecked around in since 2009 important to me in that way.

My readership here is small, intimate, with zero engagement, much the way it was in October 2009 when I could only offer text because I wasn't savvy enough with blogging to even know how to link text to other websites, etc. Or, for that matter, paste photographs. Being here, writing here, feels like 2009 again, when it was all new and exciting and I was far more unknown than I am now. And I'm not saying I don't want engagement, I'm only saying that sometimes it lifts some of the constant awareness a published author keeps balanced across their shoulders.

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“We’ll never survive!”

“Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.”

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride