Unpublished Guy Fails to Complete Writing Novel in One Month

PRLog (Press Release) - Aug 28, 2009 -
Today, Unpublished Guy (www.unpublishedguy.com) announced that he failed to complete writing a novel in one month. The attempt to complete the novel in such a short time resulted from his participation in July Novel Writing Month. The contest is a writing contest identical to National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November. The goal of both contests is to write a 50,000 word novel. The prize is having written a 50,000 word novel.

“My specialty has been short stories, so this contest proved to be particularly challenging.,” says Unpublished Guy. “One barrier to getting started was deciding what font to use and the point size. Once I had that out of the way, I could focus on the most difficult part of the writing, which was figuring out what the novel title. After I settled on the title, “The Jerusalem Engine,” I was able to make some good progress on the novel.”

The particular story was initially intended to be a multi-layered tome of symbolism based on the epic poem, Jerusalem, by William Blake. In the epic poem, the main character, Albion, takes on several different allegorical layers of meaning, including:

* Historical and geographical
* Religious and sexual
* Political
* Psychological
* Visionary

The central character in Unpublished Guy’s malformed novel was Utnapishtim, the Noah of Sumerian myth. Like Albion in Blake's poem, Utnapishtim would be both a person, reminiscing about the time that Gilgamesh fellow visited, as well as physical locations that would provide the setting and backdrop for a science fiction story.

The novel got off to a promising start, but Unpublished Guy soon resorted to emulating Italo Calvino’s “When on a winter’s night a traveler” and started stringing several unrelated short stories together.

“Things really stalled with a particularly tricky paragraph,” says Unpublished Guy. “It took about eleven hours, but I’m happy with how that particular paragraph turned out. Unfortunately, that success didn’t extend to a 50,000 novel.”

Unpublished Guy’s story fell short of the 50,000 goal by 35,000 words. Visit http://www.unpublishedguy.com/WritingandPublishingFiction... to see a chart that documents the rise and fall of his novel writing journey.

Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/10324132/1