Pink monkey lighter

That's just one of the many things I stare at while trying to formulate thoughts in the writing process. If you saw my pink monkey lighter, you'd want to steal it. It's that fucking cool.

As an added bonus, it scares the holy living crap out of my devil-cat Neo whenever you flick its little monkey arm to light it. (Trust me; if you knew Neo, you'd think it was funny, too, rather than a sign that I'm a budding serial killer who likes to terrorize small animals.)

At any rate, I just spent much of my evening setting up this blog to chronicle the internal process of crafting a novella. I've never written a novella, at least not on purpose. When I was a kid, everything I wrote would probably have qualified; my stories were usually between 30 and 100 pages long, but they were written long-hand on college-ruled notebook paper, so there's no telling exactly how many words they may ultimately have been.

Since college (winter, 1988), I've written two lengthy fantasy novels: one (Under Galga) that grew out of one of those early adolescent novellas and took me eight years to complete; the other (Anamnesis) that sort of burst out through parthenogenesis over a period of three months when I first started taking Wellbutrin. That second book has been a thorn in my side ever since because it means so much to me; I feel an obsessive obligation to get it published, and I'm terrified that it never will be. Since August of 1998, after finishing that first, manic draft, I've revised and rewritten Anamnesis about six times, finally sending out query letters to agents this spring. After receiving nineteen rejections (two thoughtful passes after requests for sample chapters, plus seventeen xeroxed form letters informing me that they were too busy and important to bother insulting me more personally) and one deafening silence of total disinterest, I've decided to write a novella.

After reading an article in Writer's Digest (which I've now misplaced) about an author who had received dozens of rejections on his novel until he wrote a novella in the same world and submitted it to a magazine for serialization, I decided to do the same. Hence the preceding entries in 37.2 Degrees detailing my haphazard thoughts in trying to pre-plot the thing for a change from my usual pattern of letting the characters use me like a Ouija board.

My goal for The Devil's Garden (the working title) is a novella of 25,000 words, or approximately 100 pages. Since I began writing last Monday on my week off, I've written 60. This is about the pace in which I wrote Anamnesis, its sister novel. I haven't been able to produce like this since I gave up working on the Anamnesis sequel in September of '98 for fear I'd be making all the same mistakes and never get either of them published. Knowing that this is an experiment has taken away that anxiety.

There is nothing like the high of being so full of words that I can't write them down fast enough.