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Writer's pictureTaylor Burns

Journal of a Novel #2

Updated: Dec 9, 2020

20/7/20


As predicted, I haven’t been keeping up with this. After 2+ years of saying, if not everything I wanted to say, then at least as much of it as I can wrench out of me for now, before the next book, after transfiguring all my faults into the novel in the search for some empty word like authenticity, or truth, I haven’t got much left in me for this, whatever this is.

Also as predicted: one blog post on a poorly-designed website did not reach the places and people I thought it might, when I stayed up late last Monday and decided to draft some doggerel in the hope that some agent or publisher might find it on Twitter and love it and take it on. I know I said that that wasn’t my main hope, that this was for myself, for the sake of my brain, which is currently alternating between happiness and hopelessness more furiously than it ever has before, but who I am kidding?

The book, the teetering manuscript full of every part of my life, both true and false, experienced and fudged, that was for me. As close to therapy as I’ll ever get. This, this is more associated with the empty air of words and phrases I hate, words like ‘exposure’, ‘profile’, ‘online-presence’. Granted, not all of this is necessary; there are writers out there with no information about them other than their books, which is of course the dream (the work and only the work). But as I said before, I’m impatient and irascible — will do whatever it takes even if what it takes is cringing myself out with this here journal — lacking the composure to just say to myself that the words are written, that all there is to do is breathe, and wait. And yes, on the one hand, I can wait; have waited my whole life, so what’s a little while longer? On the other, I’ve waited my whole life, and it only feels like more of it passes me by as I sit here refreshing emails and wondering just how far down someone’s inbox I can be (the stuff I have sent out has been buttressed by referrals — i.e. some authors I’ve been in touch with and who have liked my shit have kindly told their agents to expect an email from me, which they [the agents] are ready to welcome — so I don’t even want to know what it’s going to be like when the first batch of inevitable rejections come through and I have to slide into the slush piles).


Again, not a dig at the process, per se — if anything it’s encouraging that people take so long when reading a submission, or something. It just feels like ‘the hard work starts now', a sentence which a few people in the know have said to me but which still doesn’t sit right. Surely the hard work was the writing of a full novel, to some kind of standard? The rest should be easy, inevitable. I guess my main gripe with this, clueless cunt that I am, is that for some people I think it has been easy, and will be again. I am loathe to name names, but when I look at the background of some of the novels of the moment, I just can’t imagine the author(s) in question sitting desperately at a desk, waiting for a communication-cum-lifeline. Maybe I’m being unfair, mind, and my powers of imagination are just completely sapped, sucked bone-clean by the book.

If anything, at least this keeps me writing, then, which I haven’t been doing much — rather editing, trying to turn my awkward table of work into an elegant chair, my days comprised of moving commas (commas everywhere, like gnats), deleting my darlings before restoring them, inserting clauses for texture before realising the clause was crap in the first place. Who the fuck cares?

Anyway, I’m back at work now, exposed to the virus in the name of coffee and bottled water and rip-off protein shakes — and all for peanuts, of course. If anything, it will keep me moving, I guess, and time away from the novel of my life might be a good thing if it allows me to return to a more normal aspect of it.

In the meantime, I’ll try and get on my job, which, when it isn’t a laugh with the lads I work with, cores me out like a melon-baller, and read my books, especially the William Styron stuff I haven’t got round to yet (though I’m also reading Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, an obvious masterpiece), which isn’t much since I recently took to Styron in a way that only happens a few times in your life, when you encounter an artist whose work hits you hard in the solar plexus. Naturally, I started with his depression memoir, Darkness Visible. Long before that, I sensed my own darkness visible on some vague immaterial horizon, and while my book has in some way brought it on, it’s also the only thing that keeps it at bay.

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