Novel Excerpt

I spent a lot of time on the opening lines of my recently finished novel, but looking back on it, it seems almost certain that I'll scrap it all in the second draft. It just seems so scream "YOU ARE READING THE BEGINNING OF A NOVEL!" without providing any actual introduction to the story and sets up plot points that the reader will only get to at the very end, long after most of them have forgotten the exact wording of the beginning. That said, I'm still proud of it and want it to be available somehow, so I'm posting it here.

Notebook #1

[It is an spiral notebook with “pre-calc notes” on the front cover, more carved than written. Most of the pages are water-stained, so the lines blur to make the bottom half of the page a pale blue color. Despite the title, the content jumps from math to literature to history with little discernible pattern. The notes are meaningless without context, and mostly unintelligibly written anyway. Clearly the notebook has endured a number of boring classes, sometimes half the page is taken up with doodles: stick figures slaughtering one another, tiny mountains, various weapons, or just random dots and squiggles. The artist had great variety in subject and some level of imagination, but no artistic talent. This continues for the first fifty four of the eighty page notebook, and then…]

June 18, 2013

I’m going to try telling the truth for once. 

It’s a novel concept, I know, but my philosophy on this part has always been based on the assumption that no matter how much I lie to other people, somewhere in my mind there’s an unabridged copy of everything I know. That’s not the way it’s going to be for long, though, if the previous example holds. Pretty soon a big chunk of last year will be one huge missing scene, and the scar under my left eye proves that I can’t even forget on my own terms. So I might as well remember while I can, so I don’t fill in the blanks on my own later on. Because no matter how bad the truth is (and it’s pretty damn bad), I trust my imagination will do worse.