It was a dark and stormy night....

In November 2003, during National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), I wrote a novel.

A bad novel.

A very, very bad novel.

A key part of the plot was that the protagonist (a woman based on me, except she looked nothing like me, being slim and with gray eyes, which is about as far away from me as you can get) spent a lot of time in bars playing trivia. In fact, the name of this putative novel was Pursuit (as in "Trivial..."). The problem was, I had written this without actually having spent much time (any, actually) playing trivia in bars.

That's changed. I've now done some research -- which involved the arduous task of sitting around drinking Sam Adams and trying to figure out which fourteenth century theologian rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation* -- and I have a better sense of the social dynamics involved. I need to engage in more research, of course; next Saturday I'll be at Spoons Bar & Restaurant in Sunnyvale, California doing just that.

I got to wondering if maybe, now that I actually know something of what I am writing about, I could tighten up the flabby sections and the novel might be halfway decent. So last night I hunted it down from the bowels of the old computer (the one the kids use, not my laptop) and checked it out. Was there any hope?

Uh, no.

It was not as bad as I remembered. It was worse.

There is, as the proverb goes, always a silver lining: the opening sentence (of which I remember being particularly proud at the time) is so bad I'm going to enter it in the next Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

I'll let you know how I do.


*John Wycliffe. That's okay, I guessed Martin Luther, too.