IN WHICH I REACH DEEP INTO MY BAG OF HILARITY AND PULL OUT THE SLIP OF PAPER MARKED "FRACTURED ENGLISH IS A SURE-FIRE WAY TO BRING THE LAUGHS!" OH I AM A COMEDY GENIUS

Part 20.

Tomorrow: More fun with Tim and Dave! Drew takes a peek at Joanie's Handbook!

NO SNAPPY TITLE

Part 19.

Tomorrow: Who knows? I sure don't!

THE CHRISTMAS SEASON IS HERE!

And look at the present I have for you:

Part 18.

Tomorrow: Joanie gets a stalker! Julian gets a job! Drew and Dick get better acquainted! Tim gets to know Dave!

DON'T GO TO THE MALL

Read Part 17 instead.

Monday: Meet Avery Barlow! Get inside Taddlington Taft's addled mind! Read from Dick's Handbook!

BE THANKFUL FOR...

The Boy in the Tunnel Part 16.

Tomorrow: Drew undertakes a little construction project and makes a startling discovery! Dick grows impatient! Tim receives an invitation! You cannot miss it!

THE PLOT THICKS

Part 15.

Tomorrow: That's right, we ain't taking a Thanksgiving break! While the tryptophan does its work, thrill yourself awake with our next scintillating installment! Ron and Kirkland have a meeting! Some people watch the meeting! One of these people is a brand new character you're just going to fall in love with! Learn more info about the hierarchy and power struggles of the Nine Dead Men (if they in fact exist)! Chet and Kenya are still on that damn balcony! Who will live?* Who will die?**

FIND OUT TOMORROW!!!

*Everybody.
**Nobody.

PART 14

The secret history of 79 Wintertree.

Tomorrow: Tim rides the bus! Dragan's skullduggery pays off for Ron! Julian makes a discovery (and just in time)! A squirrel looks at Chet and Kenya!

WE'RE BACK

Part 13.

If by some chance you're just joining us, start here and work your way up.

Tomorrow: the secret history of Room 79!

DER JUNGE IM TUNNEL

Part 12 here.

I'm up to 32,000 words of actual writing, which I think makes it the longest single thing I've ever written (screenplays are longer page-wise, but there's a lot of empty space on those pages). From where I'm sitting it's now painfully obvious that 50K words aren't going to cut it, and I can sort of see the plot running away from me, but I'm going to keep going and finish the 50K in November anyway. I think there is something here (feel free to disagree with me), but it's going to take a good bit of rewriting (and just more writing period) to find it. Right now it's all I can do just to get all the little people doing what they're supposed to be doing, and therefore I'm neglecting making it actually halfway readable. I'm introducing things and people that need to be set up much earlier, things aren't nearly as fleshed out as they need to be, there's no apparent theme or point in sight, and I'm already having to go back and change minor things that become problems later. Just for instance, in part 9 we first see Avery Barlow, who I called the Second of Nine. Well, today when I was working on part 18 I realized that that wouldn't do, because then I'd have another character called the Seventh of Nine, which is way too similar to the name of a Star Trek character, and I thought about making that similarity part of the story, but that's just a little too meta-lame even for me, so now I've gone back to part 9 and changed Barlow's title.

So anyway, I hope some of you are getting something out of this, because it's been pretty eye-opening on this side of things, if not exactly enjoyable in the usual sense of the word.

BOY, TUNNEL

For those of you who have been too "busy" to read The Boy in the Tunnel, here's the Reader's Digest version of Parts 1-10, as provided by Microsoft Word's Autosummarize function:


“I’m Drew. You must be Tim. Tim turned to page 149. As was college, Tim thought.
“You’re Joanie,” Tim said.
“You’re Tim,” she said.
“Chet. Dick.
“Our room, Dick,” said Chet.
Tim wanted to see Joanie again.

“Fuck,” said Kenya. Joanie-ization.” Joanie lightly smacked Tim’s arm.
Tim stopped it. Joanie’s laughter died.
The Wintertree Hall laundry room. Mary Rutherford room 237.

Camille pointed at Drew. Oh shit, Drew thought. Camille got into Drew’s truck.
Drew turned to Camille. “Drew...”
“Kevin?”
“Joanie.”
“Joanie.
“Tim and Joanie.”
“Kenya?”
Kenya left the room. Joanie? Uh, Tim. Joanie? Uh, Tim.

If you missed it, Part 10 is here, and Part 11 will be in this space as of midnight tonight.

YET MORE

Parts 8 & 9 of Le garçon dans le tunnel.

I'm probably not going to make more of these in-blog announcements for the rest of the week, but new chapters will be added every day, accessible from the sidebar. So keep reading, if you are reading, and keep ignoring if you're already ignoring.

As far as the writing goes, I just passed the halfway mark tonight, but it's becoming clear that if this book is going to be any good, it's going to have to be more than 50,000 words. I feel like I'm still setting things up, and reading back over what I've already written I think a good bit of it needs to be expanded. We'll see where it goes. I also recently read an article in Harper's by Ben Marcus taking Jonathan Franzen to task for his arguments against experimental fiction, and that has resulted in me toning down the chatty narration and trying to play with language more and reaching for the thesaurus every ten seconds, to what I'm sure will prove to be unintentionally hilarious results. I'm still so easily influenced by what I read (it might come as no surprise to some of you that I was rereading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again last week*); I guess part of this whole experiment is me trying to find my real prose voice.

*Look what Amazon just showed me: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. That's pretty exciting.

IT NEVER STOPS

Parts 6 & 7 of le novel fantastique here.

Also, we've made some minor alterations to part 1. See if you can find them!

PART FIVE

It continues.

That's it till Monday.

THE BOY IN THE TUNNEL PART 4

Yo.

THE BOY IN THE TUNNEL

Parts 2-3 here.

That goofy sci-fi interlude is probably the last one, unless there's a clamor for more. That's right, you can influence the writing of the novel as I'm writing it! Bet Nabokov never let his fans do that!

Also note that you can access all chapters of this masterwork over there on the sidebar. I'll be adding a new chapter every single weekday from now till December, so even if I don't do a big post like this about it, there will be new stuff for you to read or enjoy every business day.

Also, you are advised to watch America's Next Top Model tonight at 8:00 on your local UPN station. I hear it's quite entertaining.

End communication.

IT'S DASHED-OFF FICTION TIME AGAIN!

Hello fans. You might have been wondering why there weren't any updates last week. Or, more likely, you weren't. But I'll tell you anyway: because I am a glutton for punishment, I have decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month, an (international, actually) sort-of contest wherein the goal is to write a 50,000-word novel from November 1-30. The goal, and I can't say this strongly enough, is not to write great literature (as will become abundantly clear in just a moment). The goal is just to force yourself to write a lot. So far it's working smashingly, as I've kept to my 2000-word-a-day pace and produced over a quarter of the 50K words. Since there's not going to be much else from me in this space for the next month, I thought I'd go ahead and serialize the damn thing as I write it, with a bit of a lag between the writing and the posting, as I already have a week of backlog.

So, presented below are Parts i-iii and 1 of a novel that I'm tentatively calling THE BOY IN THE TUNNEL. I have no idea if it's worth reading or not. I'm just trying to crap this stuff out in time to watch Prison Break. If, when the month is over, it seems worth holding on to, I'll go back and do some serious revising. Otherwise, I'll be 50,000 words closer to getting all the bad writing out of my system. Constructive or even brutal criticism is encouraged, as is anal-retentive proofreading. And not that I'm expecting this from any of you, but please note the whole shebang is (c) 2005 Gardner Linn. Steal it and I'll cut you, plus you'll get laughed at for trying to publish such a crappy novel.

READ PARTS i-1 HERE!

(N.B. Parts i-iii were little random things that I wrote just to get something on paper as I figured out what the story was going to be. They relate to the main narrative, but they may or may not get excised later on. The goofy sci-fi interludes in particular seem destined for the cutting-room floor.)

Also, professional comic-book writer Joshua Hale Fialkov is doing the same thing (i.e. I stole his idea) with his NaNoWriMo novel, The Miller, so go check that out too when you get tired of my nonsense.