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Beat Mega Man

I would love to say I skipped a week of blogging because my quest to beat Mega Man had so consumed me that I sat in an obsessive daze, eyes glued to my old TV, as I endlessly and repetitively reset and played over and over and over until I crushed Dr. Wily like so many ants…

…in reality, I just beat it about five minutes ago, on a single playthrough (and a shitload of continues). The problems I had with the occasional, old-school NES freezing or the “didn’t quite blow on the cartridge hard enough” artifacting didn’t affect me this time, so I just kept going until I won, and let me tell you: Wily’s castle is fucking impossible, infinitely more difficult than the big man himself.

In fact, the reason/excuse for my absence goes a little something like this: I have a novel, and I want to be done with it. I want to be done with it so I can get the ball rolling on that fake publishing company idea and iron out all the difficulties. Look at the date on that post — it’s been over a year since I came up with the idea, and all this time I’m mainly dragging my feet because the fucking thing isn’t done. So now that things with The Big-Shot Producer have basically broken down, what am I left with? An inconsistent reader job, a drawer full scripts ranging from half- to whole-assed, and a novel that I poured — and continue to pour — far too much effort into, to make it the best thing it can possibly be.

It occurred to me that I’m past the halfway point on revising and editing the novel. It’s in better shape than I thought (there’s one major section that I will rewrite from scratch, but otherwise it’s all just nipping and tucking and proofreading), so I just wanted to keep going on it as much as possible. But something else — even stranger and, perhaps, even better — happened, something that’s never happened to me before with my own writing. Look, I wrote this novel from about November 2006 to January of 2007, and since then I’ve convinced myself I’ve been “rewriting,” even though I didn’t even look at it again until August of 2007, and then I got about a third of the way through before I got busy with work and screenplays and bullshit bullshit bullshit. So I put it aside again and picked it up in February of this year, started from the beginning, didn’t get much farther before The Big-Shot Producer came calling again, and I distracted myself with screenplays.

So I’m back on the novel, and it’s been so long since I’ve read anything beyond the first third that something miraculous and a little terrifying happened: I started to get really into the story. That’s not me trying to sound arrogant — believe me, I’m as surprised as anybody — but it shows me that I’ve written exactly the kind of novel that I like reading. Whether or not I’m the only one remains to be seen, but at the very least I can feel confident that I’ve written the very best novel I can.

I don’t know if the ruse will work or what will happen once I finish. I’m just glad it’s working.

Posted by Stan on July 28, 2008 11:51 AM  | Permalink | Random Musings | Digg It