What I will be doing this weekend: Writing my paper.
What I would like to be doing: Writing my novel.
What I feel in regards to my novel: Trepidation mixed with excitement.
Why that is:



Well, let me give you an overview, and that will become evident.

In mid-September, Lauren Goodman, a high school senior, murders her boyfriend Andrew Green. For some reason it's Our Hero, Alyssa, their classmate who nevertheless barely knows them, who relives that day over and over. Gradually she becomes convinced that to return to her normal life, she has to not only prevent this murder but discover the truth behind the mysterious death of Madison Goodman, Lauren's little sister, some six years earlier.

Fabulous.

Sounds great, right? The time-loop element throws a supernatural twist into what otherwise would be a pretty standard mystery novel. Doesn't sound bad at all. Seems like it could be easily shelved with a couple of similar paperbacks upon which the name of the author is written as large as the title of the book and there are tiny pictures of like knives or guns on the spine.

Except that the book is actually, secretly about the fickleness of God, and the way our parents fail us or we fail them, and the difference between familial love and romantic love, and the way love never disappears, just goes quiet. It's about sacrifice. It's about searching for meaning in a world that's ultimately random.

Which, uh, makes it a bit of a harder sell.

Not least because I'm going all Peter and the Wolf on this shit, establishing a motif for each of the characters. So far I have:

ALYSSA, pretty but 6'2, who heard that if you have nothing nice to say you should say nothing and consequently went pretty much silent. Listens a lot. Represented by the moon.
ANDREW, fun and energetic and ambitious, a filmmaker whose ambition it is to bridge the "ass-class divide," bringing high and low art together, making it perfectly respectable to have mud-wrestling werewolf women in an art film. Represented by earth.
LAUREN, high-strung and sad-eyed and quietly frantic, pretty, got in early-admissions to Pomona. Easy to dismiss as just some psychotic stalkery type given how much she clings to Andrew, but actually quite a lot more. (How, I can't say; I still need to figure her out.) Represented by water. I have this line I really like, speculating about the murder, that suggests maybe her motive was just to crack Andrew apart so she could see if she had a shape.
SAMANTHA, Alyssa's best friend, sort of, though they barely know each other and barely speak. A little cruel, a little blunt, obsessed with celebrity gossip, eloquent in her idiosyncratic way. Represented by the piano.
MADISON, Lauren's younger sister, who died when she slipped jumping on a bed and fell on a pair of scissors - or so it seems. In a bit of cuteness I'm probably going to scrap, she has a butterfly motif, since she's the representative of all sheer, random, shitty chance in the world.
THE GOODMANS, Lauren's parents, sketchy and suspicious and often hostile and self-pitying. Mrs. Goodman is a crane, Mr. Goodman a pine tree.
ALYSSA'S PARENTS, divorced. Her father is distant, while her mom constantly forgets that Alyssa is her daughter rather than her best friend. Their fractured relationship forms a parallel to Andrew and Lauren's troubled one. They're represented by fog and firelight, respectively.
THE DOCTOR, who's at the center of the conspiracy that Alyssa constructs to explain what she knows. He's the snake in the garden, an evasive, sinister, perhaps Mephistophelean figure who actually turns out to be just sort of a sad, and lonely, and guilty. I might go for a snake motif with him. I was toying with a sun motif, to place him opposite Alyssa, but now that I'm thinking about it I don't really like that. Snakes it is!

The book is going to be largely episodic. There's going to be the overarching plot of what-did-happen, but the main focus is going to be on Alyssa discovering and connecting with each of these disparate people in a way she never managed when she wasn't, you know. Caught in a time loop.

So here are my major reservations:
-THE SETTING. Quasi-literary semi-mysteries featuring outsiders investigating the in-crowd in high school are hardly unheard-of. Even the supernatural twist to it hardly makes it stand out.

-THE PLOT. Uh, not to spoil, of course. But Alyssa basically builds up this whole ginormous conspiracy, involving cults and sacrifice and layers upon layers of lies - only to discover that she was wrong and that, yeah, this was just a shitty happenstance. Nobody fucking likes an anticlimax, jesus. This all happens in the second part, and the third part is what seems like it's going to be an energetic forging-ahead from this total collapse, moving forward to prevent the murder and all that, but even so.

-...THE PLOT. Nothing happens. Seriously. What I have so far, a few thousand word? Nothing's happened. The majority is taken up with a discussion of the relative merits of saving Heath Ledger versus stopping the Holocaust. It's all just, I dunno, her wandering around aimlessly searching for epiphanies.


I think I'm gonna write it nevertheless. I dunno. I should give up on the thought of selling a book and just write a book, because it's not about the money. It's about the personal experience, and I think this could be a bit cathartic for me.

Plus, LOL time travel.