the mother of all impossible deadlines

Last night, I met my summer creative writing students -- a grand group, many of whom are taking the class to get the elusive "urban studies" credit (how do you make a creative writing class worth the time of a community college student? By making it one of the ways s/he can engage more deeply with his/her city). There are 22 of them, and it's going to be a dance helping each discover her own voice.

And next week, I'm back where I was when  began this blog: teachind Voltaire's  Candide, and rest of that impossible World Humanities class -- this time compressed into four weeks.

Not the best time to decide to finish revising a novel of about 600 pages. (The Suicide Project, of course. What else?)

But with the J-School bootcamp sniping at my heels (classes begin August 8, or approximately 72 hours after I teach my last class),, I'm loath to let this novel, which I had made my agent put aside "while I fix it," remain on the shelf for another year. So far I've only got 125 pages revised, but that was when it was a side project for which I had set no deadlines, subject to the more hysterical pressures of both teaching and journalism.

So here I am, back at this impossible book -- and trying to get most of the 400+ pages left revised in six weeks. It's still that point of view experiment -- but given that this is a text that merges fiction and nonfiction (I was under the influence of Milan Kundera when I conceived of it), it also makes me fact-check myself all over again. And to see what I can cut, what's not essential or even additive, what facts are turned prosey and dead.

And now, after warming up with Book I (San Francisco) and Book II (Rome), I'm today looking at Book III (Jerusalem). You can only imagine what a text that has so much to do with suicide, and a suicidal character that is sent on a business trip to Jerusalem, could include: and how the 5 years since I last worked on it have brought forth even more grist for that mill. But my job isn't to add more, not without taking away. And I need to not get sucked into the vortex of current Middle East politics, as much as my theme of collective suicide feels shouted from its depths.

I need to stay with Judith -- or rather, just behind her and to the side, as I work to open the narrative beyond her self-obsessed, hyperactive brain. I need to notice what she doesn't, and notice when the accretion of detail obscure the arcs of her discoveries. And I need to think about, but not say out loud, what it means now for a book whose frame narrative takes place in Vietnam (Judith's father is a vet) to embrace a sub-narrative,  that brings her down the Via Dolorosa, past the Dome of the Rock,  Al-Aqsa and  Masada.

Can I do this with approx 15 weekday hours and 12 weekend hours available each week?  Even with all the grading involved with 22 classroom hours a week? When I write all that down, it sounds patently absurd.

But I bet I can get much of the grunt work done on it -- get close enough that it'll be ready for careful feedback from my friends (and my agent) as I cast off for this entirely new adventure.

Will it cut into blogging? Likely, though I'm not likely to give up my chance to keep up the commentary entirely. 

Besides, I'm counting on you to spot  me.

I may post bits of the new TSP  on another blog: let  me know if you'd like to see. (I'm also going to start a journalism-school blog when the time comes: the title I'm thinking of is "Crayons to Chaos," if that's not just too Eminem.)

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[Olilikol]

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