Monday, December 17, 2001
I wrote the last six pages of Bast: Eternity Game, Part 2, today, and finished the script. But there's a catch. I was only supposed to write five pages to finish, but somehow I got so caught up in the story that I wound up with an extra page and didn't even realize what I'd done until I was reading back through the script. Almost all Vertigo comics are 22 pp. long (which actually translates to 35-45 ms. pages in my scripts). They were 24 when I started writing for Vertigo in 1996, but were cut back to 22 early in '97 (I think that's when it happened), when comic book sales continued to decline. That means I have a 23 pp. script, and I only need a 22 pg. script. So, either the editorial powers that be grant me a minor miracle and we get an extra page in Part 2, or, more likely, I rewrite the script and remove the extra page. But I'm submitting it with 23 and keeping my fingers crossed.
Anyway, at least I can actually begin the novel tomorrow.
I began a novel tentatively titled Anger of Angels about this time last year, which was originally intended to be a sequel to Silk, and to follow Threshold in publication. I wrote about a hundred pages, producing a prologue and the first two chapters and part of a third and then suddenly, about February, I locked up. Not another word of the thing would come. It was the beginning of my first genuine bout with writer's block and it lasted until May, when, after months of being unable to write anything, I took a trip to Manhattan, to try and grease the gears and get things moving again. Peter and Susan Straub granted me sanctuary in their guest room for a few days and I did a reading in the Village and spent a lot of time at the American Museum of Natural History. Peter and I talked about writer's block. He was reading the galleys of Black House at the time and I was amazed that he could have written so many novels, and terrified that I must have so many of my own left to write and that this blockage seemed to have no end in sight. I met with my agent and my editor at Penguin and someone from Marvel Comics and, generally, just tried to act as though it was bsuiness as usual, just another trip to Manhattan, hot dogs and taxis and nothing at all out of the ordinary.
I came home and put Anger of Angels into a box that has not been opened since. I wrote a short story called "The Road of Pins," and another called "Onion" (for the CRK/PZB collaborative volume, Wrong Things), and then a novella called "Le Fleurs Empoisonnées" for Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold and, by July, I'd convinced myself that the dry spell had passed. I looked at the box containing the cursed manuscript (as I like to call it, respectfully) and felt, honestly, nothing but dread. I didn't open the box. I didn't go back to work on the book. Maybe I will someday. Or maybe Silk was never meant to have a sequel.
And I suppose this is all my longwindedy way of saying that's it's much better to find yourself, at the end of the day, with one page too many, than with none at all. Whether it gets cut, whether or not I get paid for it, it's better.
Tomorrow I start this thing again, that first nervous step on the Long Road to The End. And unlike my last two novels, I have no idea at all how this one's supposed to end. I know more of the beginning and the middle than I usually do at the outset, but the end's a bit of a mystery to me. Someone, Shirley Jackson I think, said that a novelist should never write towards a preconceived ending. So I'll take this as a good sign. Actually, I thought I knew how Threshold would end. I was quite certain of it. Then, halfway through the last chapter, an entirely different ending came to me and that's the one that made it into the novel. It almost went another way. I'd say more but I might spoil something for someone who hasn't read the book yet. Maybe later.
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