When people ask what I do, I don’t tell them I’m a writer; I tell them I am writing a book. I do the dishes every day and I make dinner every night, but I don’t call myself a dishwasher, and I certainly don’t call myself a cook, so it seems a bit fraudulent to call myself a writer.
If it was in the cards that I would follow this book with Shannon Novel #2 and Shannon Novel #3, then maybe. Never say never, but unless they can clone me, I simply don’t have the time or dedication to put into another book. I have ideas about how I could get that elongated novel-writing career to happen without me actually writing the books (that doesn’t entail using AI), but I’ve put them in the file called “None of this matters unless this current book is any good.” I’ve got a lot of ideas in that file, but they languish for now. Because the entire plan now is to get the current book in shape. How I am or am not writing Novel #2 isn’t in the current plan.
The plan is everything. My life is a series of plans, otherwise known as Five-Year Plans. Me and Stalin with our five-year plans. And just like with Stalin, mine never work out either. But we make them anyways. At least mine don’t include killing millions of people.
About 20 years ago, I had a plan to write a novel. The short of it is that it took the passage of several five-year plans to actually sit down and start writing. In 2017, the day finally arrived when I sat down and wrote word one of my novel. The years in between hadn’t been an entire waste — I had managed to write a book and a half of another book in the interim, just not the novel.
Before I wrote word one of the novel, my plan was to write a trilogy — Book #1 set in Ireland, Book #2 set in New Orleans, and Book #3 set in Montana. Boy, did I have plans. Then I sat down to write.
After four years of putting pen to paper, I had written a quarter of Book #1. Yikes. Quick math: 4 x 4 = It was going to take me 16 years to finish writing the book. That’s a lot of five-year plans. At the rate I was going, there was not going to be a Book #2 and #3. There simply wasn’t going to be enough time.
Instead of 16 years, it only took 7.75 years. That was the good news. The bad news is that then came the editing, something I was blissfully unaware of during my 4 x 4 calculations.
The new five-year plan? I don’t have one. Let’s see how this year goes. I’m optimistic.
Hard to choose just one from Joni Mitchell, but here goes …
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