luxuries

I don't know why it feels like a luxury to have the time and inclination to write, or to sit on the porch smoking a cigarette, thinking about what I've written or what I'm going to write. I had a little bit of a dry spell over the past few months; a dry spell, or maybe a germination period. But in the last few days I've gotten through chapters eighteen -- which needed a complete rewrite -- and twenty-five, which was pretty much good to go. The reason I skipped the chapters in between is because I'm working on the story chronologically now, and it feels much better. I was bogged down on chapter sixteen, so I put it aside for the time being, moved onto seventeen; but that one was written, so I moved onto eighteen, which is the next installment of the "NYC" storyline. Twenty-five was the next and last of the NYC storyline (with a total of four). And now I'm back to nineteen, which is part of the "Houston" storyline.

There are seven "storylines" running through august chagrin:

• diary (5)
• road (4)
  
• childhood (5)
  
• nyc (4)
  
• houston (4)
  
• letter (5)
  
• performance (5)
  

I put quotes around "storyline," because not all of them are actually stories; I'm thinking here of the performance art pieces that are sprinkled throughout. In fact, every storyline is sprinkled throughout. But not every storyline is the same length (the parenthetical numbers indicates how many parts each storyline has).

I was trying to write everything in the order I see it appearing in the novel, but that meant I was jumping onto a different storyline every time I finished one, and that was making it unnecessarily difficult on me. It's a lot easier to write through each storyline because I'm more familiar with the characters, am more able to be in the head of whomever the narrator is (that changes according to the storyline as well -- Sheesh!)

Admittedly, it is a very clever format, but it just kind of came together that way; I didn't really set out to make a novel-puzzle, but it would be more confusing, I think, were I to lay it all out chronologically. I guess we'll all see, in the end. S has been reading over the first draft and seems to think it flows quite nicely, so for now he's my best and only real judge.

Some of the good news is that I'm up to chapter nineteen (I'll get back to sixteen later), which means I already have at least three parts of the first four storylines under my belt, so I just might make my goal of completing the first draft of this monster by November 1, which is the three-year anniversary of the month I came up with the idea and started writing notes and an outline.