(Until looking over my tag just now, I had this impression I had said almost this exact thing before, but it looks like I’d only done so much more implicitly and reservedly than I remembered, and anyway not recently, so … )
I really get a lot of value out of it when other people read Almost Nowhere and say things about it. I would be really happy if more people did this.
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I’m pretty nervous about feeling like I’m begging for attention and validation here, cf. the way I started off this post with the parenthetical above and even now am derailing it anew with this sentence.
In particular, I have this intuition that “when I do things that people actually like, they become self-advertising” – I didn’t have to write posts like this about TNC, or for that matter about my own nonfiction effortposts here, and if I want a comparable level of interest in AN then (the line of thinking goes) I should just keep writing and making it as good as possible, and “if I build it they will come.”
However, AN is really in a somewhat different situation than those other things. It is a relatively long story – I can imagine it being 2x the wordcount of Floornight by the end – that I am creating very slowly over a number of years, with more care and deliberateness than I’ve applied in the past.
I feel confident that I will complete the whole thing within (to set a goofy upper bound) the next ten years, but I expect it to take at least another 1-2 years, possibly more. I know it’s hard to get people interested in a WIP, or in very piecemeal occasional updates that don’t build an exciting sense of momentum. I know people want to read complete things, and “read it when it’s done” might still be the best option even though it means you’ll be reading it in (could well be) 5 years when you and I and the world are five years older and god only knows what’s happened in the interim. Just, that’s what that option looks like.
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And I realize that was an uninviting downer of an advertisement inasmuch as it was an advertisement at all, so here’s another one.
The reason I make posts like this is that I’m extremely proud of Almost Nowhere. Like, distinctly prouder of it than any other creative or quasi-creative thing I’ve ever made, as far as I can tell.
I can’t say it’s strictly better than my previous novels, since they’re all doing different things and can’t be usefully compared like substitutes for one another. But when I re-read the earlier novels, there are parts I like and parts I don’t, there are things I cringe at, places where I think “ugh, I took the easy road” or “oh, I feel bad about this chapter, should I skip it?”
Yet when I re-read AN, as I do every so often, I just feel this sense of pure glee over the whole thing, even parts I wrote 2 or 3 years ago: I like each chapter individually, I like every character and plot thread and theme and verbal motif, I like virtually every sentence. It feels like what I imagine an actor or animator might feel watching their own demo reel, curated to string together only the peaks of their output without anything else. I’m inordinately pleased with what I’ve done here. (Admittedly some of this comes easier with something incomplete, as endings are uniquely hard to pull off for writers in general and me in particular, but still.)
So, if you tend to like things I like, much less things I make, you might really like this one. FWIW.