As you might have guessed by now, as was bound to occur, I have generally given up on the novel. My last bit of writing was done on my birthday, back on October 30th. I sat in a Panera Bread, sucking free wifi, somehow managing to hammer out about a thousand words or so. And then, beyond that, nothing. A ceaseless void. Any attempt to put more words to page in the days that followed have all ended in despair and darkness.

I know what you’re thinking already. “Nathaniel: you have the attention span of a gnat.” And that’s true. I won’t argue that. But in this case, it wasn’t my attention that was being diverted. My brain is simply not capable of functioning properly past 9pm. At least, not in the sense of being forced to focus long enough to craft a reasonably sound and cohesive novel. After I get home from work, eat dinner, play with the boys, enjoy a bit of conversation with the wife, perform necessary household functions, and then get the children to bed, I finally get some time to work on fiction. And by that time, my brain has, more often than not, decided to melt within my cranium into a worthless puddle of goo, not unlike so much oobleck.

(Realize, by mentioning all of those things that occur prior to the small-ish bit of novel writing time I am afforded nightly, I am by no means discounting those activities as unnecessary, wasteful, or tedious. That’s just, you know, life, and I make no apologies for that, nor do I regret it in the slightest.)

So, once again, another bit of something tossed to the backburner. It’s probably for the best, as after 10,000 words, I don’t know that I was really generating something that other people would really care to read. I’ll have another go at it at some point, I can practically promise that. Once I got into the full swing of writing, I was so habitually proud of myself at actually shifting gears from wanting to write a novel to actually writing a novel that I can’t leave that feeling behind for very long. In the meantime, I have around eight to ten short story ideas that floated into my head while working on the novel that ended up as backburner items, themselves. Since short stories generally require far less concentration to work out (at least, that’s been the case for me), I may have a go at getting a few of those crafted while I lament the early grave of my first novel writing attempt.

For now, I’ll probably come back to the blog a lot more often. I’m not as into the tech scene as I used to be, for a great many reasons, but I’m sure I can find a few morsels of information that will interest my neglected blog audience.

Blaudience? Nah. Nevermind.

Oh, and before you ask, because I know some of you will, I assure you, precious reader, that the fact that Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World for the Wii has been strategically placed in my sidebar recently had absolutely nothing to do with the neglect of my novel. Truth. I had stalled in the writing of the novel a full two weeks before the game was even available. It has since gently and happily filled the gaping void, to be honest, and will likely do so for quite some time, thankfully. Because if I can’t get my own stories documented, I might as well enjoy someone else’s.

Despite how much my wife will mercilessly mock the characters.