What more is there for me to say, I’m
participating in NaNoWriMo again this November. It is the third NaNo
event I’ve done this year, as I did Camp NaNoWriMo in both April and
July. And like the former two, I’m doing a complete rewrite of an old
novel.
This month, it’s Twenty-four Hours
in Vancouver. There are a few
things worth nothing as I’m getting into this. First, I wrote the
initial story in November of 1999. It was, in fact, a story about 24
hours I had in Vancouver. I had gone there for a quick get out of
town, and since I was living in Portland, Oregon at the time,
Vancouver, British Columbia was not so very far away. I wrote the
original in a period of about 2 days. It wasn’t much of a novel,
properly speaking, being just over 17,000 words. It wasn’t even much
of a story. But I also wrote it 24 years ago, and things for me have
changed a great deal.
Since
I rewrote Exile in
July, Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver
is now the oldest manuscript I have. I think I always wanted to
rework it, but I never knew how. I think in the past, I thought I
would just have to go into it and work little bits out. But as I’ve
been in the business of rewriting old work this year, I have found
that it is a completely new thing. After all, The Cataract
of last April retained only the setting of the original piece I wrote
in 2001, and I didn’t even read the 1993 Exile
before I completely rewrote it.
The
process is completely different with Twenty-four Hours,
mostly because I have a very deep attachment to this piece. It was
some time over the summer when I realized what this novel needs. What
I decided, simply put, is that this novel is going to be about Sam
Foley. And if you don’t know who that is, fuck you, you should have
bought my novel Undertakers of Rain
before it went out of print.
See,
Sam was one of the main characters in Undertakers of Rain.
He was not the principle main character. And since all of my novels
are really one big story, I knew the main character in this one would
be Sam. Sam was not written until 2009, which was a whole decade
after the original Twenty-four Hours.
In an essence, like the last two I’ve reworked, this one is going to
be a completely new novel.
To get
ready for this, I reread the original Twenty-four Hours in
Vancouver. I will not lament how
bad it is. Thematically, it is not very good. It’s got an angry young
man rant. I was in a bad place back then. There is not clear narrator
outside of an I/me character. It goes nowhere. I don’t know how much
of it I’ll keep. For starters the original is written in first
person, and the rewrite is third. I also reread Undertakers
of Rain. I still like this
novel, and I’m grateful to have written it. I have a deep
understanding of who Sam is, and this new version of Twenty-four
Hours will really be a good
study into him.