So it goes.*

According to Kierkegaard, despair is the sickness unto death. Despair is also the writer's sickness, what Michael Chabon calls the Midnight Disease. It's an enterprise funded on confidence, that saps said confidence when you do it poorly. And when you do it right, more often than not nobody gives a shit.

I finished the second draft on Monday. It came in at 89,000 words and change, which is perfectly satisfactory (meaning I don't have to monkey with it). I've spent the last year on this, forsaking an awful lot of video games. The minute after I finished I was struck with two thoughts that absolutely leveled me for a day: the first chapter is shit and I don't know how to fix the first chapter and make it less shitty. That stumped me for a whole day.

It doesn't help that I've been reading Ian Rankin and Lawrence Block, masters of the kind of book I want to write, or that I've been watching the original British version of Edge of Darkness** and introducing my family to The Wire. In all cases that's crime drama taken to its summit. Anything less than brilliant looks rotten by comparison.

Anyway, I'm into draft three, and hoping to have it readable by the end of the Olympic boondoggle. The new beginning is sitting really well with me, and I know the areas it's deficient in (setting, which always fucks me up because I hate lengthy description) and problems (police procedure, which, surprise surprise, is actually pretty boring).

To get back to Kierkegaard (the second most famous melancholy Dane), the antidote for despair is to rest transparently, which is an indicatio of faith. Faith in what I haven't figured out, but half of writing--no, more like ninety percent--is a fucking slog. But it's worth it, even if it limits my Mass Effect playing time. You gotta do something worthwhile with the time you're given.

* It's a refrain from Vonnegut, who doesn't factor at all into this post. I just like the saying. It's better than those creepy Hunter Thompson acolytes who end forum posts with "Mahalo," isn't it? Or people who quote blocks of Bill Hicks comedy routines and pass them off as their own thoughts. I mean, by all means, steal from the masters, but don't, y'know, rape them.

**The British Edge of Darkness is in many ways superior to the film, though it lacks Ray Winstone and includes an uber-creepy scene where Craven finds his daughter's vibrator and gives it a sniff. Yes, you read that, and you can't unread it.