Progress on my first novel in five years…

As I might have mentioned a while back, I've decided to start working again. This old machine has got to get revving or it's never going to get anywhere! To much time has been flying by. Time wasted. As I might have mentioned, I'm back to work, this time on a book.

The book is called "Vampire Society". I started writing it sometime in 1998 and set down the last few words without finishing it towards the beginning of 2000, just before Rosa and I split up. For two years, I agonized over it because - and I say this only because I am assured that you are fully aware of my deep and suffering modesty - it's painfully well-written. Every word added had to be just as good. Every idea had to hold true.

Shockingly, they were and they did and it was shockingly well-written when I printed it up and started reading it a few weeks ago. All told, it held about 60,000 words. I took those words and hacked and slashed my way through it, changing quite a bit, molding it to allow continuation after all this time, and adding another 1,500 words before I even continued the story.
So, you're probably wondering just what that story is.

Well… it's the story of you. And of me. It is the story of us. All of us. Our whole, damned society. Told as through the eyes of two unusual souls - one a black young man adopted by white parents, the other an hispanic girl raised alone by a struggling father but with a confidence ignoring that - this novel delves into the ethics of consumption and the everyday crimes of the modern world. What happens when an entire nation, an world strives for nothing more than to consume all it can? That is when you have a Vampire Society. Without question, it is thus far the most profound philosophical novel I've written to date. (I'll leave to you how meaningful that statement is.)

Now, I have about 20,000 words to go until my projects 80,000 total. This is actually short of my standard 100,000 but only because the culmination of the book is in a final essay. The point of this essay, having spent 80,000 words examining the crimes of the Vampire Society, is to delineate a workable solution for the Vampire Society. In other words, having written a book about what's wrong with the world, I will then tell everyone how to fix it.

And I don't know which is scarier, the fact that I would put myself in such a position without knowing what I'm going to write… or the fact that I'm sure I can write it.

I'll keep you posted.