In June, I threw out everything that I had written on my novel so far and started fresh. At the time, I had been thinking about the book and dreaming and fretting over it for more that three years. Less than a year after we were married, my wife told me to sit down at the kitchen table and start writing already. Eighteen months later, I’d managed to eke out 50,000 words, about 160 manuscript pages. I hated everything that I’d written.

I kept forcing myself to add pages for a lot longer than I should have. Last April, a little more than a year ago, I decided to quit. Silently. I didn’t tell anyone that I wasn’t writing my novel any more. In fact, I’d hardly told anyone I was writing a novel. I let it sit there, abandoned. I didn’t think about it.

Then in June, as I was walking to work one morning, I had a new thought. A new way of getting into the story. Though I hadn’t been consciously working on the book for three months, subconsciously I must have been doing something. I opened Notepad when I got to my desk and typed the first few sentences of my new draft. And after that, I kept going. A little bit at a time, with a few pauses here and there when I got stuck. Yesterday, I passed the 50,000 word mark again. With the exception of two very brief passages, all 50,000 words in this draft are brand new.

(I read an article about Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union that mentions, as an aside, that Chabon wrote and abandoned a 600-page draft before starting over and writing the manuscript that become the published book. He’d already won a Pulitzer at that point. If even he needs to start over once in a while, I feel like I’m in good shape.)

Unlike last time around, where 50k got me less than a quarter of the way into the story, this time I’m about 2/3 through. If I keep up my current momentum (again thanks to my wife, who gave me an only-half-joking ultimatum about when the first draft should be finished) I’ll get to “THE END” on June 10, (approximately) one year after I started. I have my fingers crossed. It will be exhilarating.

And so it goes. Aimee thinks that Noah is loath to make phone calls, to try to find some higher-ups to stop the hospital bills long gone to collections. She is perhaps right, he at least admits to himself, at night when he sits on the couch in his pajamas alone. It’s true that Noah, in his own twisted way, is only prolonging things only trying to at least keep that small shred of connection to the old man open. His flamboyant efforts to keep the collectors at bay aren’t real at all, but are only a pathetic cry for help, an invitation for them to send more and more and more.

So it is that one August day Noah, after a long dry afternoon watering a scraggly field of corn that has not and never will produce fruit, comes into the house and asks Aimee to make her phone call. And she does, and calls her friend Rachel, whose father is close friends with Congressman Barnes, and afterwards when Noah calls the hospital asking after next bill he is told that everything is taken care of, there is no balance owed, and he can please go on with his life now.

At least he tries to do that. But still each night he comes in from his studio (sometimes a little drunk) and sits alone in the basement, listening to the creak of ghosts moving through the house, and wondering what his wife is thinking of in the upstairs bedroom, his old bedroom, while he waits alone downstairs among the dead man’s things.

Three weeks since my last update. A lot has happened since then — some intense discussions between characters, an action scene. I’ve also (finally) figured out some of the motivations of my main character and (also, finally) outlined the rest of the book so I know at least where I’m headed.

I’m aiming now for 80,000 words, which I’ll probably overshoot a little, but I know that the first 10,000 words or so are very formless and meandering and will probably suffer heavy cuts when I get to my first rewrites. But I’m heartened by the realization I had the other day: not only have I passed the halfway point, but I’ve figured things out enough that I’m confident I’ll actually FINISH the darn thing.

That is some serious progress.

Keep writing the same scene over and over — oh well, it seems to be getting a little better each time.

If God came down to visit them while they kneeled before the altar, would any of them know it? If God came down and spoke to them while they poured their hearts out to him, would any of them care?

Robin Sloan launched his Kickstarter project on August 26 with 4,500 words. By November 18, 84 days later, he had a stack of boxes filled with the printed book.

Now, granted, Annabel Scheme is a 30,000-word novella and not the huge beast I’m working on. (I passed 40,000 words the other night.) On the other hand, 84 days from start to finish is pretty impressive. I’ve been working on this book for more than a year now — beginning in October 2008, when I first sat down and wrote the three paragraphs that now open what’s currently the book’s third chapter.

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I thought that filling a novel would be hard — how will I ever fill that many pages? — but now I see that’s not quite true. There are limits. I can’t describe everything, because if I don’t focus in enough there’s not going to be much room for a story. If I keep writing 1000-2000 word scenes, then I can only have 30 or so in my novel. That really limits things. If I get too introspective, include too many elements, that really hinders me by making the whole thing too daggone long. So what I really need to do is be more judicious.

Or else write a 200,000-word monster and hack it down to size later. Both options seem daunting.

Yesterday’s word count topped 35,000, which was nice. I’m hoping to make it 36,000 today.

Yes, it’s true that it’s National Novel Writing Month. I guess I’m sort of participating, since I’m writing a novel in November, even if I’m not playing by the official rules.