Somehow, 11,880 words doesn’t sound nearly as impressive as 23.7%. Don’t ask me why.
This is, without a doubt, the most disjointed excuse for a novel that I’ve ever written. There are flashbacks. There are parallels to current events. There’s a guest appearance by Anderson Cooper. (Anderson, I apologize for dragging you into this.) And the plot is, at best, thin. But unlike my “real” work, I don’t care and I’m not going to obsess over details. Details and editing are for National Novel Editing Decade, because this thing is going to take at least that long to polish into readable form.
As I said in a conversation earlier today, I have no illusion that I’m writing the Great American Novel. But there’s something liberating about writing for myself, for pleasure, in a style that is vastly different than the one that I use in my everyday work. It unlocks dormant corners of my brain. This can’t be a bad thing.