B O N D P H O N E.
Words and pictures by Chris Lamb.

The first week of Nano was spent staring at an empty screen, or staring at a wall, or figuring to hell with it and going to a bar instead. The thing that I was going to write - typical blend of truth and not-as-truthfully shot through the wanderlust serendipity of the derivé - just wasn't cutting it. I'm by no means tired of writing about myself, just tired of giving those experiences away to characters. That in itself is a bit misleading, so let's try again:

I found myself reaching a point with fiction where I wasn't making up stories so much as putting down things that had happened to me and making up names to protect the innocent and dreadfully, dreadfully guilty. I still think the best fiction requires just enough truth to pull the reader in, and still write with that in mind. But I was losing the joy of fiction, and in so doing losing the passion that first brought me into writing: I like making shit up.

So I scrapped the Derivé thing, and instead went with a line that stuck in my head while in a bookshop on the Upper West Side: "Theseus and the Missus." I don't normally think in what sounds like od Belle and Sebastian lyrics, but it was enough to send me in a different direction with the novel. So rather than writing something that wanders around New York and talks about girls alot, I'm now writing something that, well, does all that, only with a bit of Greek mythology thrown in. It's about break ups, and revenge, and drinking, and plays with whether or not any one can get away from what they are, particularly when they're a character in a story that's several thousand years old. I don't know why I'm doing it, other than the idea appeals to me and I like the characters so far. My wordcount is sort of ambling along (I'm somewhere in the mid-20,000's, but haven't really checked in a while) and I have no aspirations of reaching 50,000. But I'm writing, and I'm enjoying it, and Ithink that means a little more than putting my pile of words up against a high schooler's Buffy/Hermione slashfiction to see who's is bigger.

(Speaking of - word counts, that is, not unspeakable wrongness - Hannah, how you doing on yours?)

I don't intend to post the regular thing, as my fiction is so far behind everything else I try to write that it wouldn't do for it to grow up in public just yet. In the meantime, though, I'm lifting an idea from writer Harry Mathews (more gushing, I'm sure, later) and starting each writing day with tweny lines about anything. "Twenty lines, genius or not" for the sake of getting your fingers moving and your mind over the start of day hurdles like cripping fear and thoughts of absolute failure. Those I will be posting, and the first one should be posted just above this shortly.