i noticed there's this horror film called 'jennifer's body' written by diablo cody coming out, and because she suddenly seems not only so prolific, what with juno and united states of tara and now this, but also along the lines of my unfinished stacks of creative variations, i looked up her old blog and found this awesomely encouraging and oh-so-'me too!' snippet from 2003:
The Book shall be conquered soon, this I swear to you.
I started writing The Book in 1999, when I was living in the Dodge Mahal, an ill-maintained college house so named because it was on Dodge Street in Iowa City. The Dodge Mahal was so squalidly kept that there was an overturned full-size Christmas tree in the living room. In May. I remember writing the first paragraph of The Book (which has now been so heavily edited that it bears little resemblance to those opening lines) and thinking "This could be something." Little did I know it would take me four years to write seventy pages. Seventy. 7-0. Stephen King probably writes seventy pages during his morning rehabilitative Pilates, and it takes me four fucking years.
The shocker is that I work on it often. I'm just so obsessive that I'll routionely rewrite entire ten page blocks. I'm never satisfied. I still think it sucks.
I have no idea if my back-assward labors will ever pay off. Today, for fiction by a woman to be considered marketable, it has to be about a sassy Prada-clad nanny/editorial assistant trying to find love in Manhattan. I don't think a slim novel about a bulimic high school physics teacher who's obsessed with amusement parks qualifies as "hot fic" these days.
I'm gonna finish. I have about fifty pages to go, so we're looking at, oh, 2005?
