Critical Death Theory, Second Draft: 6.7% complete.
Best wishes of the season to one and all! No white Christmas here, alas. I’m sitting at my usual coffee shop, staring out through the rain at Edinburgh Castle. Plenty of precipitation: none of it of the white, fluffy variety. It’s at times like this that I miss Pittsburgh – and Chicago. Although, I don’t think they’re doing any better than Scotland this year, I have many happy memories of walking dogs through Christmas snow in both cities. These are memories, of course, in which the bone numbing cold has been edited out!
I have been comparatively inactive on the writing front since finishing the first draft of Critical Death Theory. I’ve been writing an essay for MIT Press and was thinking of turning my mind to a new project when I got struck down by the man cold. When it comes to colds, I am not one of those people who can “power through.” I find them completely debilitating and spend at least a couple of days lying around feeling sorry for myself. Even after the worst is over, I lack the energy to write anything, which is my excuse for taking three times as long as I should have done to finish the essay, for making zero progress on the new project, and for the complete absence of a blog entry until now. You can interrogate me as much as you like: that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Now that I am (more or less) recovered, I have started on the second draft of Critical Death Theory. Starting on a second draft is, for me, an exercise in barely managed terror. I know I’ve written a first draft but I have no idea if it’s any good. All I did was write down what came into my head as I followed the rough guide of an outline. Whether it makes an actual, half-coherent story is quite another matter. And what if it turns out that I’ve forgotten how to write? What if the whole thing is a dumpster fire from beginning to end? How can I possibly fix that??? It’s thoughts like these that crowd into my head as I open my laptop for the first day of revision.
Fortunately, although Critical Death Theory still requires work (it took me two hours to revise the first page), the bones of it look pretty decent. My writing is as good or bad as it ever was, so there is still a fighting chance of turning out something that the mystery lovers among you will enjoy reading. And now that the terror of Day One is over, it’s time to settle down and enjoy the process. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.
The best Christmas present I could ever hope to have.