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long-running novel

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

I have an aunt who's a novelist, like me. And knowing that she's been working on her novels for most of my life is all that prevents me from saying something like "my novel must be the longest-running project of its kind in the world."

Last year when I was visiting in Toronto, my aunt gave me some floppy disks with early drafts of my novel. I took these back to Tokyo, and wound up buying a USB floppy drive to read them.

I'm glad I did, because recent events gave me a chance to look back on my work and compare. I'm going to package my current draft up and send it to an editor, soon, and I wondered if there was anything in it that has survived from the original draft. I compared the current version against a version labelled "1.01", written about thirteen months into this eternal project (late 2001).

Surprisingly, some of the scenes are studded with fragments of sentences that appeared in the earlier draft. Whole paragraphs are still quite similar. Tellingly, these tend to be the key scenes, such as an important showdown between the inmates of the refugee ship and their masters back on Earth. It's the glue between the scenes that's been entirely overhauled.