In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. ~ Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
When Virgil penned
I sing of arms, and of a man, a fugitive of Fate …
did he already have it in his head that he’d knock out the great Roman epic? Or somewhere along the way did the whole thing just get completely out of hand?
When Proust jotted down
For a long time I used to go to bed early.
did he say to himself, "There it is! Just another million words or so and I'll have this lad in long pants!"
Because what if you did? What if you said to yourself, "What's the best piece of work it is possible for me to create?" What if you throw off every constraint — disregard doubt, deny time, defy convention? What if I just dare myself to discover what I'm capable of? What if I do it out loud?
So it was that in the summer of the 2,014th year of the Common Era I embarked upon my fifth novel. Hey, I'd already written four books — I thought I knew what I was setting up for. Oh hell no.
In a sense, all creative work engenders a new world, a new universe of invention more or less (mostly less): but this book — The Swan Of Antares — tipped the scales far more than I had anticipated. It transmogrified. It metastasized in scope and complexity. It ate my life.
Notwithstanding what I said above about “denying time,” I supposed initially that my grand voyage of discovery might need five years. That's all Darwin needed on the Beagle. That's all Captain Kirk needed to discover strange new worlds. — Five years later I figured I still needed about five more. And now, after more than ten years, I still think I need about five more. We'll have nuclear fusion sooner.
So maybe it's time to take stock.
In these dispatches I intend to report on the lunacy of constructing a very long and very strange novel: to say something, week by week, about the thrills and the terrors of creating an impossible work of art. In short, to demand of myself some answers regarding a novel about questions:
Who do I think I am? How did I get here? And where the devil is the exit?
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