“‘A burning map. Every epic,’ my friend Jack used to say, ‘should start with a burning map.'” Vellum: The Book of All Hours, by Hal Duncan. Page One.
It is November, and it is far to long since you and I last spoke. It is November and I am doing twenty things at once; National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), college applications, this column, and Stat homework. I am a multi-tasker of epic proportions. I am doing all those things while watching Chuck, and eating a sandwich.
None of these things are being done very well. Even the sandwich eating is in poor form, one handed while I hunt and peck type with the other. The fillings are trying to fall out, committing sandwich-filling suicide, jumping from the safety of being stuck between two slices of bread. Sandwiches should be treated with a certain respect, and I am failing.
FYI, NaNoWriMo is where people try to write fifty thousand words in the month of November. I finished it last year, but entered December with three strong fragments going in different and not a coherent whole. Even something incoherent and complete may have been a better outcome, but it was fun, enough that I decided to give it another go. This decision was made at two in the morning on October 30th, while I had a terrible cold and was mildly medicated. It may have not been the world’s best idea.
I have basically given up on this year, but refuse to admit defeat before the month’s over. God only knows what type of Hail Mary miracles are lurking on November 29th.
Something I learned from last NaNoWriMo is that I should not be allowed to attempt anything too epic. The most salvageable section of last year’s mess was some sort of Swords and Sorcery Fantasy epic that I was very poorly equipped to write, being a person who does not often read Swords and Sorcery Fantasy. It was way too epic for me. There were some swell ideas, but the whole world was too big, and the plot was all over. I was trying to do too many things at once.
This is something that happens a lot. My authorial tendencies tend to run true to the rest of my life. I think that most people’s lives must be like this. It is the twenty-first century. No one ever does only one thing at a time. Such restraint is quixotically simple. There are very few things that deserve all of your brain power.The situation reminds me of Wonder Boys, the novel by Michael Chabon which was later adapted into a movie. Wonder Boys is also the name of the main character, Grady Tripp’s work in progress, a follow up to his best-selling book that he’s been working on for the past seven years. It was the epic tale of the lives and loves of the three Wonder brothers and their families. It’s bloated past two thousand pages, and still isn’t halfway to where he imagines it’s conclusion. In the movie Tripp is asked why he’s writing it, and he said, “I couldn’t stop.”
About a year ago I read Vellum, and Ink by Hal Duncan, which together make up The Book of All Hours, and it’s about all I thought about for a month and an half. It was bad enough that whenever I opened my mouth some nonsense about Jack, Puck, and Sumerian mythology to the point where my best friend resorted to violence as classical conditioning to make me shut up. She will probably pinch me for including it in this column. It basically broke my brain, and I mean that in the very best way. It is epic.