My final guest post is up at Thought Catalog. It's called: "I Hate the Holidays."
I hate the holidays. Not like, “Oh, I hate the holidays,” and then I go do it anyway. I mean it like, I do not do it. When the girl at the bookstore the day after Thanksgiving asked me, “Did you enjoy your Thanksgiving?” and stuffed my new copy of U-Turn: What If You Woke Up One Morning and Realized You Were Living the Wrong Life? into a bag, I said, “I abstained.” I put a lot of emphasis on that last word, abstained, to be clear: I do not imbibe. The girl looked at me all pained and perhaps sort of sympathetically embarrassed. Then I smiled, and took my book, and left.
I spent a good part of this holiday weekend working on revising my novel. It's about a federal agent searching for a missing porn star. I'm about a quarter of the way through the revisions.
This time, I'm doing a few things differently.
a) I found that I kept going back to the beginning to revise, and I also found the prospect of completing a novel daunting, so I broke each part of the novel down into a small section. Most of them are the length of a piece of flash fiction or a short short story. Each one has its own document. This decreases the likelihood you will go back and attempt to revise from the beginning. So far, it's working.
b) Generally, when writing, the head is what gets in the way. Now, when I'm writing, I empty my head and don't think. I let some sort of emptiness or higher connection guide the writing and the revision. This seems to be effective, as you eliminate internal debate, and you allow the unconscious to steer the creative process. The ability to do this is aided by meditation and being a content-generating machine at my day job.
c) The novel will be short. Probably 100 pages. That makes it either a novella, or a noveltini. I made up that last word. The idea is that you read it in one sitting. Because who wants to read more than 100 pages anyway?
Next week, I'll be reading at Five Things, where five readers read five minute stories based on a theme. The theme is dysfunctional families, and I'll be reading a story about over-sharing holiday cards.
Every so often, I go back and look at these photos. I don’t know why. They’re so weird. Who are these men? Why did this one guy think it would be a good idea to wear a wig and a fake mustache? To hide his identity from the camera, sure, but why the Parisian waiter ’stache? And what about the other guy? He looks like his name is Robert, and maybe he lives in Sunland, and he overheard two guys talking about this at Lowe’s, and he knew he had to be there, that he couldn’t live the rest of his life knowing about this but not having done this, and his wife, Doris, is playing bridge with her friend, so what does she care?
