Written: Wednesday. September 1, 2021.
Today wasn't very eventful. I ended up sleeping again in the afternoon, and now I've got this energy that I'd rather be having in the morning or in the early afternoon, rather than at night and until the wee hours set in. I'll probably end up sleeping at around 3 am again.
I focused today on making a word file of the full-length novel that I wrote 2 years ago. Can't believe I started writing that way back in 2019. I finished the whole thing in 2020, and sort of stopped writing anything after that. I had written about 10 or so short stories, before going on the hiatus that I'm in right now.
I managed to finish transferring all of the 52 chapters in that one word file, and the end result is 230 pages and a total of 91,920 something words. Impressive. I would've never thought that I reached above ninety thousand words on that pile of shit. And, believe me, it's a pile of shit, but an impressive pile of shit. It's definitely one of the worst things I've ever written, but I'm proud of it cause it's the first thing that I've ever finished writing. I would've guessed that my total word count was at around 85K, but apparently I've written more than I anticipated.
And this story is basically a first draft. It'll stay as a first draft, because I'll be writing a completely different iteration of the story after I'm done reading through the first one. I'll take notes on the various things that ended up being good about the story, and I'll scrap the parts that didn't make sense. A lot of the things in the story make no sense, because it's just sort of a cluster-fuck of things that I happened to put in the story, regardless of whether or not it would make sense.
The basic premise of the story is that it's about these high-school teenagers discovering an alien artifact that landed somewhere in their village. These aliens arrive on earth, specifically where the main characters are, and start hunting them down. After that part of the story, I sort of went haywire and decided that the aliens know how to transform themselves into humans, or at least end up looking like humans because of the Earth's oxygen levels or bacteria found in the air or something. The artifact actually came in different parts, and is scattered around the same village, and once each part is merged with the other, this extraterrestrial techno-thingy with a mind of its own starts coming to life. At the beginning, the alien machine doesn't remember what it is, but as more parts merge with it, the machine sort of gets to remember its purpose, and starts acting weird. Eventually, the alien machine turns evil, and the teenagers and the aliens hunting them down decide to team up to face the alien machine.
While all of this is happening, one of the main characters—who is honestly just based off of a fictional version of myself—is secretly hiding the fact that he's been having this recurring dream of the world on fire. A dark being haunts his memories, while a person from his waking life (who he's got strong feelings towards) is also haunting his dreams. All the while, his dreams have also shown him alternate versions of the things that end up happening in the story. He's seen all of it happening, but initially thought that it was some sort of deja vu syndrome or something. As the story progresses, you find out that everything actually has happened already. It's just that we're seeing a reset of these events. A convoluted time-loop involving coming of age teens, genocidal aliens, and a metal box that talks.
Yep, that's my first ever finished story for you. And keep in mind, the rules that I set up for the writing of this story were as follows: I had to write a chapter once a week, for one whole year, and I couldn't change things that I've written in previous chapters. I just have to keep on going until I finish the 52 chapters (because 1 year is equal to 52 weeks). A lot of stuff can happen in a year. I was reading different kinds of books while I was writing this down, watching different kinds of shows and movies, and all that stuff. So it's not a consistent mindset. I didn't solely work on this story. I did other things, which is probably why a lot of other things sort of found its way into the story as well.
But I think, at the core of the novel, I would say that it was about me trying to retell a version of what happened in the past. Or at least a very campy, very exaggerated version, that totally deviates from the source material after paragraph one. There wasn't a road map. I just sort of let my inner thoughts and feelings seep into the story.
It's got a lot of sci-fi elements involved, which is obviously a reflection of the genre I'm most familiar with. It's got a little bit of fantasy, since I think I started reading the Wheel of Time while I was in the process of writing the story. It's got time-shenanigans involved, cause that's my favorite sub-genre of Science Fiction. And it's got characters who are very loosely based on the people I hung out with in high-school.
I honestly want to print the whole word file out, but since it ended up being 230 pages, I might as well just make it into a PDF and read it from there. The second iteration of the story will still probably follow the same beats, since that's the point of this epic story.
What it is now is already part of this never-ending saga. But it's only one variation of the same repeating story. My ultimate goal with this story is to never publish it, until I arrive at a version that is truly satisfying. It's sort of this play on the process of writing a story, as well. You don't stop changing things until you've reached the final draft.
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