88mph

Where we're going we don't need time. Well... time in the linear sense of the word. I'm a measly five-and-a-half thousand words into my JulNo novel Utopia Ltd and I just want to shake it on its head to make all the change fall out of its pockets. I know for a fact that when I write it I will be starting at a different point in time. I just don't know where. At the moment, everything feels on the whole, too linear. When I finish the draft, I'm probably going to cut the story and print it in chapters and do a massive reshuffle of things.

When I first thought of the idea for this novel I wanted to write it about what goes on inside my head, the main character going through an identity chrisis works through his issues which are not too dissimilar to my own. While this may be interesting enough, I did what I always do when things sound like they might put my readers to sleep (my readers, lol), I chuck a bunch of fucking guns in there and see what happens. To make things exciting.

Now it feels like I've got two narratives going on in the one novel, and it's my goal to weave them together. The primary one (primary being more immediately identifiable) is the events of the armed robbery and the rather exciting [insert spoilers here] that follow. The secondary narrative is the one mentioned earlier, the main character's internal anxieties and identity struggles (as externalised through the presence of his psychologist) and his working through that.

I feel like the more I think about it, the more it changes and evolves and grows, and, to some extent, the less capable I am for writing the crazy fucking thing. And now I'm wanting to start at the end and toss the reader around like a ragdoll throughout the jumble of events that occur, giving them a chaotic, yet progressive journey as to how things got to be so out of proportion. I'll get there eventually. I'm actually hoping that once the draft is done, and once I cut it down to chapters and mess about with the ordering of events, I can treat the chapters more like short stories and brush up on the draft, edit through as if it were essentially a novel of short stories.

Fingers crossed I can get into a rhythm where the following forty-four-and-a-half thousand words just click into place. It's definitely been an interesting challenge going into July with minimal preparation (November last year I had character descriptions, locations and whole chapters mapped out before I started officially writing).