For the last year or so, I’ve been covertly keeping a combat sports/culture blog on Substack called Fight Pizza. It was fun while it lasted, but I’m about done with it; it was largely something for me to do during quarantine time. As I’ve finished up that project I went through the posts to see generally what it was all about and it occurred to me that it was basically a novel’s worth of words. I gotta say, that irked me a bit! By forcing myself to post once a week for 13 months I wrote a novel of material about MMA and shitty king-fu movies! Why the hell do I have such trouble maintaining my focus with fiction?
I mean obviously fiction is a little trickier writing, but even if I managed 2/3rds of that it would really be something. The point is the words are doable. In fact, they were done. The other benefit is maybe the blog format curtailed my need to constantly tweak and fuss that I have with my “important” writing allowing me to really get some material out. So a further madcap idea occurred to me: what if I devote that time and energy from Fight Pizza back into what is supposedly my real “calling” as a writer?
When I was living in Sri Lanka five or so years ago, I wrote a story called WINTER that was later published in the U.K. lit mag Shooter Magazine. In the intervening years this story has bounced around in my head and gotten more of a backstory and more of a frontstory and just more. In Hong Kong (where I moved after Sri Lanka) sitting in a flimsy plastic chair in my hovel/shoebox, I spent a bit of time fleshing out some of these ideas and it became a larger project tentatively called SEASONS. Since then (two moves - two new countries - better apartments), not much has happened with the project.
One thing that has occurred in that time is that I have reflected on my writing career and what I have written and why I have written it and etc. and I weirdly remembered a story I had forgotten and/or blocked out from an undergraduate fiction workshop at NYU. For my story one week I turned in a bunch of pages of basically straight fantasy. Very Narnia, but with crack smoking. I got absolutely demolished. The teacher (realist drunk white dude short story/screenwriter) was a total asshole about it. At that point - a connection I’d never made before - I pretty much stopped writing any sort of “genre” fiction and went full “literary.” I believe this story WINTER and the world it spawned were the beginning of my starting to correct that overzealous focus.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about lately is whether or not I still really consider myself a “writer” and I guess the answer is yes, because, well, I write. It’s like the scene in David Cronenberg’s film version of Naked Lunch when Bill Lee holds up a pencil as proof that he’s a writer. So I suppose as I continue into the next phase of my creative writing practice, I will try to repeat what I managed with Fight Pizza: regular words on a regular schedule. Perhaps Substack will be the answer to my problems of motivation and perfectionism.
The plan now (as it was with F.P.) is one post per week without fail. Sometimes maybe more. One difference is that I already have a fair bit of material written for this project so I will have to figure that out - I don’t want to just repost old stuff as the point of this exercise is generating new words on a regular basis and far too much of my “writing” nowadays is just repurposing old shit. Another difference from F.P. is this is a narrative and exists in a certain order so I guess I have to try to post it that way, though it may be difficult at times. I will also resist the urge to go back and change and/or edit something once I have posted it, maybe save typos. It’s meant to be a serial novel and I will charge ahead serially until I reach the end. Then I can go back and forever tweak word order and commas.
So there it is. Welcome to Seasons, an apocalyptic SFAF serialized novel-in-progress by Erik Wennermark. Sign up now to be updated as I post.
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If you’d like to read some of my other stuff, have at it. Till next time, on a regular non-varying basis. ✌