Back on Track

Just in case anyone missed me during the past six or seven weeks, I was busy. First with summer holidays, then with a massive work combo of September deadlines. I also finished a novel, as someone with extremely keen inference capabilities might have guessed from the feature image already. Although finished is perhaps a bit of an overstatement.

It’s been over one year and a half since I wrote the first word. In the six months that followed, there were ten false starts that would easily provide enough material for about four novels (atrociously crappy ones as I luckily came to realise). Then I wrote the first real draft from scratch in a manic three month rush, only to grudgingly set upon a seven-fold rewrite quest. And now that the roller-coaster of appalled frustration troughs and vain expectation highs has slowed a bit, I’m rather lost. The reason is that I don’t know how could I possibly discover and fix any more horrendous faults in the manuscript. So I sent samples to a few select literary agents. That should give me a pretty objective assessment of what the book I wrote might be really worth.

And while I’m waiting for the flurry of rejection letters (or rather languishing dead silence), I could as well try and resume writing the other, less fictional gruesome story here. Why? Because I’d better finish what I started in the first place. But I also can’t wait to switch to slightly more cheerful topics than deconstructing my madness, such as:

• the truth about the doomsday potential of recent AI advances,
• the looming environmental crisis and what to make of it before our planet is as good as dead (with our precious civilisation probably calling it quits long before that),
• harnessing suicidal depression as means for unprecedented personal growth,
• or dissecting the embarrassing weaknesses of my writing (those that I have learned to identify so far, that is).

So stay tuned for the days and weeks to come!