novel writing

OK so I haven't written on this bloglet for a while. I was planning of course to get back to this novel and maybe I still will, eventually. Plays and film writing got in the way. But I decided again to figure out when and how (soon, I hope) to write a novel.

The current plan is to put this one aside again and write something new from scratch. And the reasons are this: This is a complicated story. A story I've been trying to write for a long time and I'm not sure yet I know how to write it. I started to write it as a novel 7 years ago. Then I discarded it. I wrote 50 or so pages of it as a play but never finished that either. I thought for a while it might be a screenplay. Then I started writing it as a different novel and stopped writing that too, as you see. Part of the problem is that it is a story about God and I don't know what I think about God so I'm having a hard time writing. Is it a story about how God can be many things or about how God is nothing? I'm not sure because I'm still not sure where I stand on this whole God issue. So the novel will remain for the moment unwritten. And it will wait until I figure some stuff out and read some more about religion and feel I can properly capture what I'm trying to capture.

But that does not mean I have given up on writing a novel. Oh, no. I plan to write one soon and I think I know what it's about and I think it's loosely based on the 8 minute play I wrote for Ars Nova titled Bill Clinton about the 20 something guy who writes a book called Runk that becomes a hit.

When will I write this? Why in my spare time, between finishing the play I'm writing, writing the second act of the dog play, rewriting Searching and Temporary Everything and plugging in a couple new (but not yet written) short plays for Old Fashioned Cold Fusion. But first I have to do a rewrite of that screenplay that's been sitting there aching to be fixed and of course there is the day job. And the commission. But I plan to and hope to write this thing and do so in a somewhat timely fashion. I'll let you know how it goes.