Update - Vincenzi

Following a small Google search, I came across this, which suggests that though some novels are as short as 60,000 words and some as long as 520,000 words, most first novels that publishers look at range from 80,000 to 120,000 words. With that in mind, the draft of Vincenzi is hovering just shy of 90,000 words. I still have material to cover - though I am going to be close to the end of the month deadline I set for myself - and a good deal will be cut or integrated elsewhere in the book. (Most obviously, I am going to likely pull apart the introduction and put pieces of it elsewhere, such as allusions in pre-dinner conversation between Vincenzi and his father.) At this point, it will likely end up around or over 100,000 words and smack in the middle of the "average" length.

To do this, I compiled the separate chapters and checked the properties for word count. This is also the first-step for me to request editor and proofreader input. Considering that I started this at the end of March 2010, some serious revision is in store. I am still interested in finding people who would help me slog through the draft - or sections of the draft as I hope Miss Becca continues to do - and make it workable. If the past two months have been any indicator, I could potentially work on a follow up story draft by the end of next summer, something I have began framing last summer.

I am increasingly enamored with these characters and have been looking for and listening to their voices intently for the past several months. I have little interest in leaving them alone after assembling this first draft. Roommate and friend Tim recently received a several chapter chunk to read through at his leisure which I hope proves entertaining. Tim has commented a few times that he thinks this fusion of pulp detective and pulp horror makes me some sort of literary aficionado. I am not in agreement. Mostly I think of this as an exercise in my own geekiness, in linking two genres that have a parallel history of birth, popular success, and quiet integration into other media and genres only to more recently undergo a renaissance. The most obvious example I've come across is Shadows Over Baker Street, a purportedly uneven collection of stories fusing Sherlock Holmes with Eldritch Horrors (a la Lovecraft).

That said, and as I have said before, I don't think of this as a simple story. I have arranged various clues in the text to lead into future stories that develop a world and meta-plot focused on language, power, control, and rebellion. This is in part steeped in my reading into the Occult care of the late Kenneth Grant who has taken the Cthulhu Mythos very seriously in his exploration of extracosmic forces, magic, and global paradigm shifting. Increasingly his arguments are integrated into the characters capable of pulling the strings behind the action. One particular subject of interest is the Aeon of Maat which is also described as the Wordless Aeon in Outside the Circles of Time. Not to mention that starting to write Vincenzi came out of encountering William S Burroughs (incidentally, the name is partially integrated into the character Cranston Murlough) and his notions of nova outlaws and word viruses. These are, to me, the ideal constituents of a (not the) contemporaneous interpretation of Lovecraft and the words of power - especially black speech - that literally and figuratively riddle his work.

Finally, there is the common role of apocalyptic literature, a fascination of mine since I was probably ten or eleven. Apocalyptic literature has been part of the narrative human experience for most of the history of civilization. Note that I definitely doubt apocalyptic genres as being part of Paleolithic and likely Neolithic experience and culture. What I affirm is that human history is replete with attempts to define the end of the world in some form; that is, we are looking around the corner and seeing the dawn of a new age at the expense of the current. We live as much as ever in a revolutionary period and similar to the story "The Year of the Jackpot" and one of the speakers in Waking Life, this may come to some sort of head. Vincenzi is one way or articulating a story about such revolutionary and, yes, apocalyptic change and psychic evolution that is so crucial to Kenneth Grant's writing.