So How's It Going?

A recent commenter asked how things were going with the novel, if I was still writing it. The truth is, I haven't written a word in about 10 days. Why?

Well, there was the trip down South, for one, where I discovered that ex-lovers are ex-lovers for a reason, especially when they vote Republican and support the Cuban trade embargo, and that apparently, I've got a sexy vibe, if one can believe drunken Carolina Panther fans.

There's also the fact that there was rampant idiocy in the forums of the NaNoWriMo website, which I've bitched about thoroughly, so I'll drop it. But FYI, if you don't know the difference between "a" and "an," you probably shouldn't be writing a fucking novel.

::stepping off soapbox::

And then there's my sense of having read too much. I love literature, I have a Master's Degree in it, actually. I love literary theory. I love dissecting and even occasionally disemboweling literature, especially the Modernists. I'm just a Modernist in a PostModern body. And where is there room for Modernists this day and age?

It is my quandary about Modernism that has me stalled, because for all my technical experimentation that I've done in my 6,600 words, I fear that my style does not fit my subject matter. That my actual story line is too pedestrian for verbal wizardry and the kind of mind-fuck Modernist strategies that I'm ripping off from Virginia Woolf and Faulkner and such.

So, there's an incongruency there that bothers the hell out of me, and I don't know how to transcend it, because I'm wedded to my stylistic adventures, but I suck at theme and plot... as did the Modernists, now that I think about it.

I guess, considering that "plot" was never high on the to-do list of any self-respecting, anti-Aristotelian Modernist, I should simply forge ahead with my explorations of character and hope that one day all of them actually talk to each other and do something.

Then I'll have a book.

It just won't be the one that's due on 30 November.