Putting on my Judgey Pants

I was just looking through my computer’s files, and realised that I have fourteen unfinished novels sitting unloved on my hard drive.

Fourteen.

That’s a heck of a lot of shit I never finished.

On one hand it makes me depressed to think that I’ve started so many projects, even if it was just a rough summary or a key chapter, and then abandoned them.  But on the other hand it gives me confidence that at least I keep evolving and creating.  I don’t just have one story to tell.

Isn’t there some stupid saying about how everyone has a novel inside them?  To me that’s like Brian on Family Guy who is constantly writing his “memoirs” to the derision of every other character.  I might be putting on my judgey pants here but people who talk about working on “their novel”, with that particular self-important smugness you get in the educated, middle-class, pre-hipster generation, are by and large doing the written version of public masturbation.  In another decade they would have been writing bad spoken-word poetry, smoking pot, and telling each other, “yeah, man, that’s so deep.”  And in our current generation, it’s the trilogy that’s the new “it” medium for the navel-gazing prose-monkeys.

Seriously, why is everything a bloody trilogy these days?  Can’t anyone enjoy brevity anymore?  One well-rounded storyline not enough?  Because by and large you can practically guarantee that even with the best trilogies around you’ll love the first book, feel meh about the second, and then hate the ending of the third.

So have I told you how I’m writing my novel?  It’s, like, so deep, man.