King Lear

So there's this old writer joke, not unique, that when I meet someone and they as what I do and I say, I'm a writer, and they say, oh, would I have heard of your work? I say, that depends... have you heard of "Moby Dick"? (You can insert whichever big "classic" you want there.) Get it? It's funny because 99.99999% of writers are not famous enough for some dude (it's usually a dude) at a party to have heard of, and when one takes that fact into consideration, the question becomes rather a rude one; one might imaging replying to this cocktail-clinking interlocutor, if you'd heard of my work you probably would have already... heard of my work. lol? 

Last year when the pandemic started, in the initial weeks of shutdowns in the US, a lot of writers and creative people seemed to get this impression that a pandemic would be like time "off" of regular life—time to get shit done and catch up on creative projects, I'm not sure why people thought this, I think it had something to do with denial and also the cult of productivity under capitalism in America but anyway, during that time there was this quote going around on social media that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was in quarantine (for, like, a month) during a plague year in England. The implication being "...and so can you!" I found and find this to be ridiculous line of assertion for a variety of reasons, but long story short: since spring of 2020, anytime I think about my novel-in-progress, in my head I jokingly refer to it as "King Lear." Sorry, Moby Dick.

So I left my job at the end of December, and my plan was to take a couple months off and work as hard as I could to finish this draft of "King Lear" before jumping back into full-time work as a freelance editor. Yesterday, I did. I finished "King Lear." So officially, I guess, I wrote my own King Lear during quarantine? Yup, that's me, exactly like Shakespeare, we are basically twins, I say to my conversation partner at the cocktail party in my head. 

The truth, however, is that I started writing "King Lear" years ago. It's been... longer than a decade? I think I started writing the initial iterations of the project in a journal while my partner and I were bike camping across Europe for six months, and that trip was in 2010. I recall writing trying to write 1,000 words a day in a sort of analog, on-the-road version of NaNoWriMo; we were in France, and every night in the tent I would ask my partner to count my handwritten words for me, but I made him do it backwards, so he couldn't read my raw prose. This lasted maybe 2 weeks. I have been working (on and off) on the idea that started in the tent since then, so technically the first "official" (read: mostly all there, novel-shaped) draft of this novel took me me ten years to write. And the second, the one I finished yesterday, took three months. During those three months I worked about 50 hours a week on the book, not earning any income during that time, and there are all kinds of privileges and life choices and prior preparations and potentially unwise decisions that made that possible for me, and also it was really hard and I worked my ass off to make it happen, and I am taking today off. 

This is not a craft lesson or an inspirational story about productivity. I have no tips. I have nothing to iterate here that other wiser writers have not said a million times before. I will spare you any "a year into the pandemic" musings; I will not use a generalized first-person-plural in this email. Mostly I just wanted to say that I just finished a draft of a book that I have been carrying with me (figuratively and literally!) for a decade, through the publication of two other books, several jobs, a years-long health crisis, leaving the city I once thought was my forever home, multiple wildfire evacuations, and a pandemic. With books, finishing a draft is always the first step in a whole new process, and it takes so many moments of "done!" before a book is really "done," let alone published. But I do believe it's important to celebrate big intermediary culminations along the way, because in the publishing business those moments of glory don't last very long. So:

I am "done" with a book draft! Take that, Shakespeare.

Now, back to work. 

-m.