I wrote a novel this fall. Well, I wrote the first draft in the fall, and then I revised it—sentence by sentence, all the way through—six times during the winter. It's my first novel. It's finished.
So now what?
Last week I sent the sucker out to a publisher's first book contest. Since then I've been harried by doubts—which I try to choke down like so many meatballs rising in my gorge after a heavy Italian meal. When I wrote the first draft it was more than 50,000 words long. Now it's less than 50,000. So I look at it and think, Is it too short to be a "novel"? The events occur over the course of five days, and the whole narrative is told from the first-person p.o.v. of a 13-year old boy. Structurally, therefore, it's clearly a novella. But a long novella? Does that make any sense? Who the hell will publish this abberration?! And so on.
I'm starting to write another novel this month. It will be longer. Last February (2006), I quit my so-called career lecturing in American literature to become a full-time writer. Desire trumped fear. Actually, my adoring wife (spouse, life partner, etc.) pushed me to take writing seriously and quit wasting my time in "real" jobs. I listened to her. Now I start work at 8 AM and write until she gets home at 4:30 PM. This has been going on for many months, and there ain't nothin' in print yet, y'all. Maybe I should stop using words such as "ain't" and "y'all" in my query letters.
Perhaps I'll teach again after I have a few manuscripts in the rejection rotation. I don't know. One thing I realized: I loved, absolutely and without reservation, the feeling of putting this first novel(la) together. John Gardner said one does not write merely to publish, but for glory. Well, ok, I feel good about the thing itself. The funky architecture of it, how obdurate it now seems—as if the story always existed in just that form. It's a peculiar sort of glory, and it's utterly insular—though better than spending your days masturbating in a dark room. Someday, at least, you can show people the results.
