Erring on the Side of Caution

About five years ago, when I first started this blog, my intention was to bang out about five hundred pages of quasi-me stuff/ and quasi fiction. I was seriosuly giving thought to writing my second novel.

My first was a graduate school project, and I did sell one short story from it--but that was a long time ago. Actualy the short story came first and inspired me to add on another 200 pages. I never submitted it. I probably tossed it long ago.

Anyway, I was going to try to give it a go again. A novel.

I had read once in a Granta magazine interview that when asked about his process of writing a novel, Philip Roth said that he banged out about five hundred pages without stopping to edit, revise, look back or give much thought to where he was going with plot, setting, characters, all that jazz.

Then after getting his five hundred or so pages, he'd retreat to some quiet place with a yellow highlighter and scrutinize what he'd written for sentences that he thought had a breath of life in them.

He told the interviewer, that if he was lucky to find maybe twenty or thirty pages worth of sentences that would point him in the direction of his next novel.

That was the original inspiration for blogging. Bang out a lot of pages--don't look back.

I now have well over 500 single spaced pages, about 350,000 words, and about 2 million characters with spaces.

Time to grab the yellow highlighter and find a quiet place.

Why now?

Precedent.

About five years ago, give or take, I went to Kuwait to accept a position that had opened up mid-semester because someone had resigned. It was an emergency fill-in position at a place called "The Gulf University of Science and Technology", or "GUST", with the promise that "If you help us out and fly over here to take the job, we'll offer you a ticket, housing and at the end of the term, a two-year contract."

I flew there. While waiting to meet with some people in personnel, I found a free computer in their library, and toodled around with a poem called "Gust". Hammered it out in about fifteen minutes, then posted it. I may still have it somewhere in this blog where I've now batched downloaded every past post and saved them in Word.

I remember a line in the poem about "on a gust of decision and indecision. . ."

A few weeks later, someone at work found the blog, probably someone Googling for dirt, found the poem, and forwarded to management. Management thought I was slamming them and their fine tertiary institute if higher learning. They especially zeroed in on the "decision and indecision" part.

I tried to convince them it was a poem, more about me, about other ex-pat ESL teachers, thisESL teaching business and travelling, all that, but they weren't buying it.

I was not offered a two-year contract based on that poem and and found myself stranded in Kuwait working for the next year or so in a business English institute waiting for a more permanent position elsewhere. That was a rough year.

It has recently come to my attention that co-workers have found the blog, and though the comments about the writing have been complimetary, I ain't taken any chances.

So, this is my first post of a revised Past Imperfect.

Today, I took my car to the service station and had it washed.
Yesterday, I homed four cats.
I'm going to eat an apple now.
Tonight I will have green tea at sunset

I have borrowed from a friend the complete first season of the Simpsons and plan to watch it with commentary.

To celebrate the rebirth of this blog--I'm going with Arial font for a fresher look. I may even redesign the lay-out. The coffee stains are stale.