A novel this year

A note from the first chapter

I’m going to finish my novel this year. I’ve been writing it for a long time, twisting it around, dismantling and re-mantling it. I’ve pushed it through wormholes and moved it in time. I’ve changed names and settings and motivations. I’ve imagined it wearing different clothing then stripped it and dressed it again.

But it has always had, even before it was a novel, the same truth at its core. It is a story that I need to tell, a story that is a part of me.

Sometimes I go looking for it in old photographs, like the one where I’m standing with my friend Marsha on Second Avenue wearing a black velvet ribbon around my neck or the one where I’m in black tights and Docs in the middle of the summer, my arm around someone in a Reese’s Cup costume, or the one where I’m dressed only in an oversized plaid shirt, leaning against the radiator in my kitchen in Brooklyn, plastic 2 liters of Diet Coke at my feet.

I search the face of the young woman in those photographs, looking for the story. I already know the story, but I want to see what she knows.

Last night, I was working on the first chapter and realized the narrator had shifted tone completely. I kept going. I just kept letting the words to come through my fingers, dance onto the glowing screen.

I’ll sort it out later.

This is the time when I open the gates and allow whatever is on the other side to come out.

I am going to complete this novel this year. Even if it’s the worst ever written in the history of writing. I owe it to the woman in the faded photographs stacked up in shoe boxes on the top shelf of the wire racks in my storage room. She had something to say. This year, she’s going to say it.

Stay tuned…