Week 23 of 2019 – 27 May 2019 to 2 June 2019

Goals

Reading

• Goal – 102p / day, or 714 / week
• Achieved – 785/707 – Success!

Writing – I Remember

• Goal – 7 / week
• Achieved – 6/7 – Failure!

Writing – Small Projects (Fragments, short stories, etc)

• Goal – 28 minutes / week
• Achieved – 0 minutes/28 minutes – Failure!

Writing – Large Projects

• Goal – 42 minutes / week
• Achieved – 1 hour 29 minutes/35 minutes – Success!

Getting myself out there

• Short story reviews – One (Seven total for the year)
• Submissions – Two (Twelve total for the year)
• Rejections – Zero (Five total for the year)
• Acceptances – Zero (Zero total for the year)

Commentary

I am pleased with how much I read this week.  Much of it can be laid at the feet of Rachel Cusk.  I finished her wonderful Outline trilogy this week, rereading the first two books, and read for the first time the third.  I think on balance the first book is the strongest, and then the third, and then the second.  The repetition throughout the books works well.  Cusk has found a melody which holds up to different interpretations.  All of this is good.

So often, though, I feel like this kind of autofiction is also endless fiction, both positively and negatively.  At its best, I want to read a thousand, ten thousand such pages.  At its worst, I feel like all of those many thousands of pages will be identical.  She says a few things at length, and says them well, but the drifting feel where nothing happens means that you really could write a thousand pages and have nothing happen.  I don’t know.  The summarised version of my argument here is that good writing is good, and bad writing bad, which is reductive, meaningless and unnecessary.  And yet. It’s the same with Knausgaard, who really did fill thousands of pages with meandering nothingness.  Is it because seeing our own banal thoughts on a page provides comfort because it implies that we have kindred spirits in the world?  Perhaps.

I wrote no short fiction at all.  Hard to get myself out there if I am not plugging away at that. I didn’t even crack a notepad or pen in that space.

I wrote almost enough I Remembers.  I need to write 7 / week to keep abreast of the time as it passes, and more to catch up.  Oh yes – my memories are stuck in March 2018, which means I look back through my photos to jog my memory of what happened then, and thus I see a lot of pregnant-wife photos, but my March 2018 self did not know I was having a daughter and knew nothing also of her personality or her name.

I did spend a good chunk of time working on the larger project, which I have given the working title of ‘Woes’.  It’s coming along well enough, I think.  I increased the word count from 2,795 to 4,864.  I don’t have an explicit word count each week, or total desired word count as yet, but it’s nice to watch numbers go up.  I think we can all agree about that.

I am starting to develop a feel for where this piece is going.  I find that 5,000 – 10,000 words is the danger zone for me when I haven’t got any planning in place because I start to just add random words and scenes in without any thought to cohesiveness.  I suppose there is an argument that a first draft shouldn’t aim for cohesion but for feel, and that matters of tightening can be attended to lately.  And in this I broadly agree, but if I have really no idea in which direction a novel is headed then I will invariably just rewrite the plot of a novel I admire.  And we don’t want that!

This week my aim is to start eliminating some of the placeholder TK texts I have throughout the work, and to develop enough of a framework that I can get beyond the 10,000 hurdle.  Once through that I hope it is smooth(er) sailing.

Of course, I have started reading Patrick Modiano this week, and now I want to be writing a gauzy fiction/non-fiction memoir about memory and loss.  Of course!

And that was my week of failure.

Each week I aim to provide an update on the Journal of Failure.  These reports are intended to provide an impetus for me to achieve as much as I should/more than I do, and also to provide a further ongoing record of my life, as it is.