For the past several weeks, I've been working on a novel.
This is very momentous for me, as I'd not done any serious fiction writing in many years.
And there's a reason for that.
Part of me has always enjoyed creative writing. And at one point I aspired to be a published novelist.
But eventually, I stopped writing, because it wasn't fun any more. I developed a lot of anxiety about what I was writing, and whether people would like it, and I wondered if it was worth it.
This time around, I tried to develop a fun way of doing things. I did a lot of pre-writing. A lot of fun pre-writing: thinking up of a lot of scenes and characters.
And that made actually writing the novel a LOT of fun, because I didn't have to make everything up from scratch. Things are just rolling along. The last time I wrote a novel-- about the year 2004 or so-- I had to confront the terror of writer's block, and of hurrying up to think of a scene to fill the space to get to my next chapter. It made for really bad writing.
And in the spirit of keeping things fun for me, I've decided to publish my first drafts. Ernest Hemingway once compared first drafts to excrement. And I think he was right. But, if you like my excrement, that works for me. If my writing has given you any measure of enjoyment, my job is done. It makes no difference to me whether I write like crap or like a Nobel Prize winner.
I would like to preface my novel by saying that it's set in the near future so that I didn't have to be completely faithful to present day facts. It also serves as a kind of warning.
And I would also like to say that there is a bit of coarse language. Yes, people swear sometimes in real life, and I'm okay with representing that.
And about the title: it's hard to think of a good title. This one will suffice.
So without further ado, here are the links to the first three chapters of my novel.
Harry and the Human Rights Violation:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
