The Narcissist Has Moved

I've been writing and rewriting one novel for twenty years or more.  It's had at least five titles and has progressed over time from tattered scribbled yellow legal pads to typewriter to a word processor.  Then haltingly through three PCs to my Imac.  I have, in the past two years completely rewritten it on the blog, in full view, stumbling and fumbling my way through the puzzle that is an American family in extremis in a particular time and place.  It is personal.  And based on the comments so far, it is far too universal.  I began from one angle and then deconstructed it, peeling away to find ever greater complexity.  Now I've compressed the story, distilling it.  I began to focus in on a specific period of time, smaller, more intimate than the sixty something years of underlying history.

A month or a week ago I wrote a new chapter.  It was, like all lost writing, the best I'd ever done.  I know it has to be here somewhere, but I can't find it.  This loss was so shocking I began to move the book to Word to finish this incarnation.  So what you see here has now undergone another transformation as a Word project.  The title this time is The Narcissist.  I know that the last two or three chapters of the book are it's best.  I need to make the first three as good.  So for awhile, I'll be scarce here.  If you see me on Twitter tell me to get back to work.

PS  If you're reading the version of The Narcissist here, keep in mind that the comments you see refer to an earlier incarnation, when I was writing this family's history as a first person narrative on a very linear path.  And the book is thirty chapters long.  I think I have ten or fifteen up here.  But I always appreciate comments.  Without you this is all done in a vacuum and isn't half as fun.