Ambition To Squint

Goodbye October. And Hello National Novel Writing Month.

I’m going to try my hand at it again, and hopefully get past the few hundred abortive wordfarts I managed last year. I think my problem — one of them anyway– was that I attempted science fiction, and I started to panic that I was being derivative, or Pynchonish, or Dickian, or Varleyesque, or Pratchettical, and so I started reading too much Pynchon, Dick, Varley and Pratchett in order to stave off simulacrism, and therefore stopped writing altogether.

So.

This time around I’m just going to do a little piece about a clinically depressed almost-forty-year-old bald guy who works at a coffee shop / art gallery in the city and doesn’t know what the fuck to do with his life yet.

Sound familiar?

At least I’ll have material.