No 58-Hour Writing Spree–Yet.

Circumstances have conspired against me and I won’t be sacrificing 58 hours of my weekend to writing the great American novel. My schedule has gotten a bit difficult on multiple fronts and I won’t be able to swing it.

However, I still want to give it a shot. I’m purusing the calendar for a semi-open weekend, and I hope to get it in between now and the end of June. If I put it off beyond then it probably won’t happen. Thanks for everyone’s comments and support. When you’re committing to such a crazy idea, it really helps to have some backing. So I hope everyone gives Jeremy a boost, a man with more guts and possibly more free time than I. Of course Jeremy won’t be trimming lilac bushes this weekend, so you can imagine who’s having more fun.

I have some kind of love affair with books, and this whole writing for an entire weekend idea just thrills me. The other night we went to Barnes & Noble for no particular reason (like we always do) and I just loved looking at all the books. Sometimes I wish I could get paid to just sit around and read books. I get paid to do that now, but it’s really crappy pay. I wish I could get paid boatloads of money to just read books, to the point where I would literally read a book a day. That’d be awesome. I have such a curious nature and a thirst for knowledge that there’s so many books I want to read. Yet I have so little time.

And adding my own book to the pile is a dream I constantly go on about. I’m currently stoking two little fiction fires, one of which I’ll probably butcher with my upcoming 58-hour writing spree. Putting off that spree gives me a little time to let the ideas simmer and figure out which one I want to tackle.

The first idea has been with me longer, and is basically a teen drama. It involves a couple teens struggling with love, faith, acceptance, life — the litany of things teens have to deal with. The teen years can be so dramatic, and I really empathize with those years. There’s so much passion, and everything is more important than it really is.

The second idea came to me while driving across the country, and it’s a much different novel. It’s basically a home-grown terrorist story, which is kind of weird because I half expect the FBI to come knocking on my door. The idea started because after 9/11 I thought of way too many ways a terrorist could inflict mass panic and death. I won’t publish those ideas for a lot of reasons, but they really made me think. This story basically involves a Fundamental Christian taking his beliefs to the extreme. It’s going to involve a lot of explosions, conspiracy, sex, and that open-road, drifter mentality. A lot of this story is going to come from the many miles I’ve driven between Detroit and St. Paul. This idea isn’t as well thought out, and I already know the biggest weakness is in making my “Fundalet” character unsympathetic and typecast. That’s easy to do, but it makes for a boring story. I need to find a way to make people (myself included) really care for the character. Of course feeling sympathy for a psychopath is never easy. Seems like there are probably a few movies that do that well.

So those are my ideas. Hopefully I can subject them to a 58-hour butcher job soon.

3 thoughts on “No 58-Hour Writing Spree–Yet.”

  1. And the difficulty is if you have people care for the psychopath too much, the readers may begin to idolize him and desire to be like him. That’s freaky.

  2. Why have the antagonist be a Christian? There are lots of people who feel strongly about (fill in the blank) and could be written in any way you needed to write them without their motivation being religious.

  3. I guess I didn’t explain the full details of my story idea (because I’m a greedy bastard who doesn’t want anyone stealing my brilliant ideas), but it’s very obvious as to why the main character/terrorist needs to be a Christian. It’s a distinctly religious motivation and wouldn’t work otherwise. And aside from my plot being built around that, I think it’s an interesting idea to explore. Religious motivation and fundamentalism is all around us (whether it’s Christian or Muslim fundamentalists) and on a less extreme level people wonder how much of an influence religion should be. And for people who don’t have religion as such a guiding influence, I think part of them wants to understand why.

    So that’s why the main character is a Christian. I’m not trying to rag on Christians or even fundamentalist Christians in any way. It just happens that my particular idea needs to work that way.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *