Novel Writing: The Halfway Halt; or, Alexander in Valley Forge

National Novel Writing Month is over - the buzz is gone, a bit, I'll admit. It doesn't help that I took four days off writing to go back to my alma mater, where I watched a performance of a show that I helped write, and received accolades and cheers from everyone I know and everyone I don't know. Nor does it help that I spent all four of those days in a perpetual spin cycle, lack of sleep, excessive sake bombs, excessive drama, excess of excess. My ex had to text me on Sunday to remind me that I called her the C word. Which is kind of embarrassing. I think every man secretly wants to call a woman that he hates the C word at least once in his life - in that secret part of our mind that lacks conscience and social grace - and I did it, and I don't even remember it. I also lost my jacket. My three piece suit is ruined.

And I didn't do any writing. Getting back in the saddle is hard - even harder, because I'm at the halfway point and I'm experiencing serious doubts about my ability to close the deal on this novel.

This is an all-encompassing motif of my life right now - reaching a halfway point and just stopping:

-After promising myself and my devoted facebook stalkers that I would finish Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" before 2008, I have reached just past page 500 (out of just over a thousand), and now can't bring myself to read it. I've carried that book in Hawaii, through my senior year, to Chicago, to Moscow, to San Francisco. I was reading it last Christmas - can I finish it before this one?

-My second or third week at McSweeney's I came up with the idea that I would write an epic treatise on Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series, which he wrote over the course of 30 years and which runs throughout his entire career - he brings in characters and themes from other books, he writes himself in, all that jazz. I sped through books 1-3, reading every moment I had - on the bus, at home with the TV on silent, in cafes. I read with an analytical mind - I haven't done that in a long time, and I never was so emotionally invested in it (if you pick up any of my old books from high school, you'll find me underlining random words just for the sake of underlining, because it seems like the right good honest thing to do). I sent in a proposal to the Believer editors - this on the trail of my earlier proposal, shot down with love, to interview David Thomson. They didn't want it. I got a form email, telling me with cheer to "send more stuff whenever it strikes ya."

It was the "ya" that did it to me. Although cursed with anxieties that my shrink and I are only beginning to understand, I am also blessed with an advanced sense of pride. I demand respect. I demand to be referred to as a "you," except by my friends, and then only in conversation, not email talk. (Watch the Believer editors find this blog and fire me.) So I stopped reading - right in the middle of the 4th book, with the three longest books still to come. I couldn't finish. I couldn't close. I began to see what a failure Stephen King was, what a failure "The Dark Tower" was, what a failure as a human being I would be if I wrote an amazing essay that elevated "The Dark Tower" to the status of American myth. I would be like Truffaut and Hitchcock - taking a wonderful piece of low art and calling it high art. I should read only Cormac McCarthy. I should cry tears of blood over "American Pastoral."

-At this point in my internship, I know everyone, I've done work for everyone, good work, I've broken through the initial glass ceiling. And now I can't find it in me to go to work. I need a real job, I say. I need real money.

I blame winter.