Finished My First Novel Today

I finished the first draft of Sons of Sinners today. It's a wonderful feeling. I was pumped up on adrenaline all day.

I've got a long way to go on this journey, but the first leg is complete. Next is months of revision.

At The End (first draft)

There it was again. He lifted his face to the cold morning mist and looked out along the dock. Grey waves lapped at the barnacle-encrusted pylons that anchored the pier. The end of the dock was shrouded in fog. He’d heard something down there. A strange, distant howl, like a large boat. He stood, a heavy coil of wet rope in his arms, and he listened. Only the rhythm of the waves came back to him.

He turned sharply as a gull cried out just above his head. It looked down at him from atop his boathouse.

He scowled at it. “Damned thing.” He shook the coil in his arms. “Git.”

The gull cocked its head, watching him. He grumbled and threw the rope over his shoulder. He stepped into the boathouse and pulled a chain that hang from the ceiling. After a cold moment, the fluorescent lights flickered into life with their familiar ringing. A small boat occupied most of the shack. Barnacles and seaweed clung to its underside, an unsightly reminder of the hard days he’d had. In his younger days he would have cleaned the boat every week, but now his body was too bent and worn for such work. Fishing was all he had the energy for anymore. Anything else was beyond his capacity. Besides, no one paid him to clean the underside of boats. He could put off cleaning the boat as long as he damn well pleased. He didn’t answer to anyone, not even entropy.

Firm in this resolution, he hefted the wet bundle of rope into the boat. His back creaked with the effort. Today was going to be a long day. He couldn’t sleep the night before, and if his back was any indication then tonight would be very similar. He needed to rest. He worked himself too hard, he knew that. Maybe he’d only stay out for a few hours today. Call it off early and take a well-deserved nap. 

A deep, almost subsonic bellowing came from outside.  He turned in alarm to the open door. The sound lingered, like a fog horn. It was closer this time. After it quieted, he stood staring at the doorway. Cold wind seeped through and caressed his wrinkled face.

What was that? There hadn’t been any barges in the area for many decades, and certainly not this close to shore. And besides, the sound was far too throaty. He licked his dry lips and stepped out the door and back onto the dock. The thick fog surrounded him, blinding him to everything in the world aside from twenty feet of dock and shoreline around him. Another cold, silent wind rushed at him from the water.

His eyes focused on the unseen end of the dock. He waited.

And it came again: a raspy, desperate howl that he heard more in his bones than his ears. It gargled like a drowning man, and faded out like a hissing scream. The sound was definitely coming from the end of the dock, he was sure of it. He suddenly felt very alone, more than he ever had. There was nothing except the fog, and the strange howl.

The gull cried again above his head. He ducked as if he’d heard a gunshot. “Christ,” he whispered. He looked up to the bird. It cawed again. He frowned. He hated the things. Always had. But the seabird’s calling brought his mind back into focus, and grounded him in reality. He sighed and scratched his grey beard before walking towards the end of the dock.

Within a few strides the boathouse began to vanish into the fog behind him. To his surprise, the continuing call of the gull comforted him. It told his subconscious that the boathouse, and the shore, were not far behind him. As he moved forward the shed was gone.

All he saw was grey waves, the wet dock, and the fog.

The cry of the gull accompanied him as he reached the end of the dock. He stopped, a little perplexed. He wasn’t sure what, but he had expected to find something. Instead the wooden planks and pylons just stopped. The vast sea spread out somewhere ahead of him, into the infinite greyness. He saw nothing in the water. Just waves and seaweed. He grunted in discontent and turned around.

He walked a couple yards into the fog and came to the end of the dock again. He stopped short of it. He blinked in the mist. Was his mind this addled with age? Had he not realized he’d turned around twice? The idea of senility frightened him, and he pushed it down, refusing to think about it. He paused for a moment, glancing over his shoulder to see that the edge was indeed behind him, and marched forward.

He was suddenly aware that the gull was no longer calling.

In a few steps he came again to the edge of the dock.

His heart began to race. His eyes flew across the wood at his feet, seeing the same pylons and the same planks he had before. Everywhere around him the fog watched him, silently, patiently. He snorted out a raspy curse and turned around.

And he was at the edge again.

He spun around and saw the dock extending the opposite way. His limbs shook. His breath was heavy. He ran forward through the fog and, to his horror, came to the edge again. The same lapping waves. The same endless sea. Fear wrapped its tendrils around his heart, telling him Yes, Grover. You Are Mad.

In a panic he turned and ran the other way without looking.

His right foot stepped into the air, and suddenly he fell. The cold waves enveloped him hungrily.

Words that make no sense!

When I write, I start to view the world that I’ve created through the eyes of my characters. My stories rarely mirror real life, in terms of universal laws. After some time, when the world has been properly established, I start to think of what the world I’ve made truly means for the people I've filled it with. In the long run, I mean. Not just the immediate consequences of the events of the story, but the fundamental truths that my characters have to deal with.

That doesn't really make much sense. Here, let me try it another way:

When I craft a fictional world, I first begin by deciding how it is physically different from our world. Is the technology different? Are there alien beings? Do supernatural forces interact with people in meaningful, important ways? Once I've established this, I begin writing.
Pages and pages into my stories, I inevitably encounter a philosophical or spiritual problem that needs addressing. Let’s say, for example, I've established that demons are real in my world. One of my characters stumbles upon a ritual site in the basement of an abandoned apartment building in Harlem, and he sees the man he’s been tailing sacrifice a goat to summon a demon. What does that imply about what happens to my characters when they die? Does that mean there’s a Hell? And if so, does that mean there’s a God? Is there an all-knowing force that arbitrates whether my characters suffer for eternity or not?

Eventually I settle on Yes, the presence of a demon means there’s a Hell. No, that doesn't necessarily imply that there is a God, but people do have souls, and souls go somewhere when a person dies (probably Hell).

I’m rambling a bit.

My point is that I establish a metaphysical order to my stories because my narrative demands it. I start to envision the cosmology of these worlds and the position of humanity therein. My thoughts get so wrapped up in the whys and hows. I always write as if every line will be subjected to intense scrutiny by any possible readers, and so my universe needs to make sense.

But when I’m take a break from the story, I tend to have my lenses still attuned to the fictional world. I look up from my desk and I start to wonder why our universe, the one we are forced to live in, doesn’t make sense.

Because it doesn't, really.

At least that’s the thought that I always have. I turn that scrutinous, skeptical gaze to reality, and I start to get dreadfully frightened of what I find.

These last few weeks I’ve really felt that old familiar sting of existential nihilism. I can keep the specter of despair at bay with my writing, the people I love, and electronic entertainment, but in my idle moments my mind drifts to the thought that none of this really matters.

None of anything matters. We do what we do from day to day to keep us going, but in the backs of our minds, as we toil away at work or watch another season of Breaking Bad, the monster lurks. When we look up at the stars and see the impossible vastness of the universe, how little we matter really strikes home. Sure, on a personal level, you’re important. Maybe even on a local level. Heck, maybe you hold a relatively important job, and if you were to suddenly die then thousands of people would be distraught and/or also dead. But in the grand scheme of things, time will heal the wound of your passing. The people who mourn your death will die, and then no one will cry for you. The machine will keep moving.

That’s why we’re all so concerned with our legacies, I think. Whether it’s good or bad, we all want to leave an imprint on the world (no matter how fleeting that imprint may be). This is why I’ll never understand those people who give up their careers, their lives, and the people who love them to go off on a globe-trotting journey of self-discovery. If you've destroyed your legacy, then why do you even keep going? You’re like a neutered dog, only you don’t provide anyone with companionship.

It doesn’t matter if I make a lot of money. It doesn’t matter if I’m happy. In a billion years the sun will explode and all our faint radio waves will disappear into cosmic vapor. We’re all utterly insignificant, and powerless to change that.

At times I find this disturbing. Horrifying on a very deep, deep level. But other times (and this is the trick, I think), I find it wonderfully freeing.

None of anything matters, so who gives a fuck? We’re all just burning flesh, so who has the right to say what I can and cannot do?

My time as a living human being is of an unbelievably short duration on the cosmic level. The fact that I am what I am, that I am who I am, is so miraculously unique. 99.999999999% of the matter in the universe is unthinking and inert, and I’m lucky enough to be from the tiny bit that isn’t.

There is no God. There is no purpose to anything. No greater purpose, no destiny, no fate. Colossal, unstoppable forces work across the universe completely ignorant of the existence of humanity. Stars burn forever in the endless void for no reason. Entropy is constantly eating at the edges of life, which, frankly, is fighting a losing battle. It’s every property of the universe versus the childlike stubbornness that is organic life. Eventually entropy will win. It, like every other bleak outcome of existing, is inevitable.

The universe is uncaring, and it’s natural forces wick energy away ceaselessly. There is such a ridiculously tiny window in the span of time and space for me to exist, and yet here I am. The fact that I live day to day surrounded by people who love me, healthy and happy, is so astronomically unlikely.

And it’s because of that that I am happy. In the real world, outside of fiction, we are completely alone. We will eventually be crushed by the onslaught of the universe’s apathy, and we will blink out of existence like we never happened.

But for right now, we’re here. That’s what I love about us. Even when we all know that we are destined for oblivion, we still love and sing and create art and bake pies. I read somewhere once that human beings are possessed with an incurable optimism. We’re the only animals that can look into the abyss and say “oh shit” when we see nothing stare back. But where a rational intelligence would start committing mass suicide and hurrying the inescapable, we instead say “fuck it” and go paint pictures of sunsets.

I think I had a point somewhere in there, but I lost it.

Also I’m pretty sure I started this out talking about writing. How did I get away from that?

In any case, we’re all doomed, we all know it, and yet we continue to love each other. That’s why I love my life. The universe says it shouldn’t exist, but it does anyway. I love the spinning rock I'm on, and I love the people that infest it. I love. We all love. That's what defines us. As a species, we’ve created a new fundamental force in the universe. And it's our strongest weapon in the war against entropy.

Here’s to us, happy aberrations.