What, you all think about things other than reading and writing?

Ahh, here again in my little room in this profound space of darkness wavering like fire.

Right?

Hello, dear readers. We should get together for a card game soon.

This novel...Oh, this novel of mine. I'm reading maximalist novels these days. Recently finished Gaddis' JR and Eco's Foucault's Pendulum and now reading the second book of Karl Ove Knausgard's grand set of five novels My Struggle.

I do not write these kinds of novels. But I'd like to write one. Just one, not many. It's outside my comfort zone by continents, so I want to push there, precisely because of this.

But I'm not good enough to do it, unfortunately. Still going to do it, just not well. 

It seems...crazy?...It seems crazy to commit that amount of time (it took me four years to write my first published novel Brown Bottle before it was put out in 2012) to something that cannot turn out good. There's some reasoning to it.

I'm well into my publishing career...Wait, check that...I'm far on the other side of my publishing career. When you're 49 there's an occasional mind check you have to do. I'll be 50 in April and my health has been failing rapidly for the past five years. I'll only be able to write a few more books that have something to say, and then it's writing for the honorable sake of writing, which is great by me. 

I have one book slated for publication in May and another completed novel in my publisher's hands now. There's two books, if they publish the novel. So those few books left with something to say is possibly already 33.3 percent in the bag (I think...I recall some grade school teacher saying that was the percentage on a third. But I'm disgusting at math).

The third book will certainly not be the big novel I'm going to write. The Oubliette will not be the one; I can say that with confidence. It's going to be short, likely right at 200 pages. So the maximalist novel will be the last one I write. 

Pretty fatalistic, I know. It's what it's, though.

/

“We’ll never survive!”

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

— William Goldman, The Princess Bride