I was actually asked a few times about the writing process in general. I make absolutely no claim that anything I do in terms of writing this book is "correct," or even any semblance of "right," but this is just my personal process. I know my friend, who is probably a far more serious writer than myself, has a completely different way of approaching things. For instance, she likes to seclude herself from anything positive and write in the most depressing environment that she can think of. She can also write, for the most part, whenever she has free time and in a variety of places. As for me, I'm very peculiar about how, when, and where I write. I generally only write on my home computer with music that I've listened to over-and-over before and, even then, I only write in 3-5 hour sessions once every few weeks (though, when I start a chapter, I generally try to pile as many sessions into a row as I can). Now, for the generic feedback that I responded to someone else with. As a warning, it ended up being a far longer response than I had originally intended... But what else can you ask of a bored, drunk writer?

The reference I made to LOST was a thinly-veiled insult at both the show at my own writing process. It's a commonly-believed theory that the writers of the show really have absolutely no idea what kind of stuff they're building up to, much less an idea about how they're going to end the show in general. The producers, in fact, have openly admitted that they have no ending planned whatsoever and are just discovering things along the way. I personally don't mind except when the show completely loses track of some of my favorite subplots by either giving a lame explanation or just dropping it off the face of the Earth without so much as mentioning it. As a specific example, the show was originally going to have Michael Keaton play the role of one of the central characters, Jack, with the intention that the character would never live past the series' opening episode. Though, what ended up happening, is that Matthew Fox filled the role and the character of Jack ended up being one of the series' most important and necessary characters, but that's neither here nor there.

My writing process is similar, to be honest. I started the book with an introduction which placed the unnamed character in a pitch-black room. He eventually got his bearings, found a light switch, and as the flourescent lights warmed up, realized that there was a crucified corpse hung on the wall opposite him (which he realized in the reflection of a dirty mirror). I was going to use this "vision" as the first piece of the book that would tell the reader that the narrator of the book wasn't all right in the head. I was building to the idea that the narrator suffered some kind of delusion which created the world of the end-of-the-world shelter and then created his own situations about people that would justify him killing them in his world... But being that he was just absolutely insane, the book would eventually switch to a real-world detective and provide his thoughts towards figuring out what was going on. Eventually the book would reach the conclusion that the main character was actually killing people in the real-world as we know it, and then so on and so on.

What happened, though, was that after I wrote the first full chapter (which wasn't entirely different from the current draft) is that I actually really quite liked the direction things were heading with the idea of a dystopian society created out of the necessity of human preservation after a potentially world-destructive nuclear war played out across the surface of the planet. I also grew attached to the main character (Adam); this attachment became especially apparent after some of my close friends read the early chapter and noticed that Adam had taken on a number of my own personality traits, conversational manner, and so on. Eventually I just completely redrafted the goals I was planning to take in the future and came up with a rough idea for where to proceed from there. Granted, I was completely clueless on what the central conflict of the book was, along with what the hell kind of ending I was going to be working towards... But I figured that would just come to me in time.

This project was originally started with my junior-level Creative Writing workshop class that I was taking from January through April, so thankfully I had a whole classroom full of students whose grade depended on reading my work and providing feedback. The things I heard back from on the first chapter (and especially the introduction) were... Less than stellar, to say the very least. I did a decent amount of restructuring and rewriting of the first chapter -- along with heavily simplifying the original grammar and language that were utilized -- and eventually my teacher said that it was one of the most single-improved works in the class. After I submitted the second chapter for workshop, the feedback was almost universally positive. Some even quite liked it, dare I say that some raved about it. Some people declared me as the most bold and imaginative writer in the surprisingly-talented class I had. I say this not to toot my own horn (though that was a nice perk), but because those were the comments that really convinced me to continue moving forward with the book. The change in comments, the obvious increase in people who actually loved the second chapter (in comparison to the first) told me that the changes I made in terms of overall plot, tone, mood, and writing were definitely a step in the right direction.

So, with Chapters 3 and 4 of the book, I have really started taking a step in deciding what the overall conflict of the book will be. I'm not going to reveal it, because that would be simply mean and uncool, but I'm fairly certain that it'll be far better than anything I had in mind from the start. So, while I look forward to continue working on the book, I highly doubt that the kind of free time that I had this week to start and finish a full draft of Chapter 4 is something that will be afforded to me often. Though, in general, the average turnaround from new chapter to new chapter is about three to four weeks, so yeah. There's that, I suppose!

you gotta recreate your misery