99 HEARTS: Infinite Attention

I was talking to a writer friend recently about the difference between writing short stories and novels. The biggest one, for me, beyond structure and plotting and multiple points of view and all the novely things that short stories don't get to play with much, is attention.

Writing a novel takes a really long time, and unlike a short story, a novel is too big to keep in your brain all at once. That makes novel writing a marathon for your attention span: memorizing and forgetting and rememorizing the relevant pieces of narrative and language, coming up with a brilliant solution to a structural problem only to check your notes and realize you came up with the same solution two years ago, looking back at previous sections and wondering what idiot wrote them.

I'm coming up on the end of a first complete draft of a novel I started in 2016, which at the time I saw as a side project inspired by the bite-sized lyrical structure of Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation. I was working a job that left me a lot of downtime and I thought I'd be able to write this novel-in-fragments in my slow moments at work (lol). Five years and two jobs later, I'm in the final stretch of a not-at-all bite-sized or lyrical 70,000-word manuscript.

Here's the problem: working parents don't have a lot of time.

It feels lame to complain about this, since I am lucky in all things—I have a great job, Clark is an easy baby, we have plenty of help, Lucy is incredibly generous and understanding about helping me make time to write—but that lack of time feels very constricting when you're doing something as time-intensive as writing a novel. In pre-baby life, I had time to focus on more than one writing project at a time. I even had the bandwidth to work on multiple projects, submit stories to journals, query agents, apply for fellowships, and still watch a movie at the end of the day. Now I have to chip away at my one monolithic project in the time I can steal.

The fact that as a non-parent, I sometimes told my friends with kids that I was "so busy these days" is hilarious to me now. Just a profound a lack of understanding.

It reminds me of this scene from Arrested Development, which I reference at least once a week.

But the bigger problem is that I don't have time to recharge the creative batteries. There's not a lot of reading happening around here these days, few films being watched, and I certainly can't commit to a TV show.

So, to help hold myself accountable, here are the things I'm going to treat myself to when I finish this freaking novel draft:

Novel research led me on a tour of 80s anime, starting with Noburo Ishiguro and Toshihiro Hirano's work on Macross: Do You Remember Love?—a beautifully animated but really uncomfortably sexist mish-mash of every anime trope you can imagine (transforming robots! heroic moppy-haired dudes! girls singing pop songs!)—and ending with an OVA series that's definitely going on my post-novel watchlist: Megazone 23, which looks like a teenage boy's fever dream mash-up between Japanese 80s motorcycle culture, Flashdance, and The Matrix.

I beg you to watch this trailer and luxuriate in its awful 80s vibes. "Get ready to go back," the narrator intones over a sweet synthy pop riff. "Back to a time when everything was perfect. The music was hot! And the girls were hotter! And a guy with a cool bike could get LAID all summer long!"

Please, typography doesn't do it justice, just go watch it.

I hope you're all vaccinated and enjoying a little bit more freedom, and I hope that you too are getting LAID all summer long, cool bike or no.

Until next time,

Ian