A Season in Hell: December 1-8, 2022

Not even Vera Nabokov can stop me from deleting my work-in-progress. Even if I secretly want her to

Vera Slonim and Vladimir Nabokov, shortly before they were married

A Season in Hell is a series of journal entries I wrote in 2022-23, chronicling the last few torturous months I spent working on my novel The Bright Sword—going from stuck to unstuck. If you want to take it from the top, start here.

December 1

It’s highly inconvenient that one only figures out what one’s book is about just as one is getting to the end of writing it, because then one has to go back to the beginning and write the book that one was supposed to write in the first place, the one that actually led up to that wonderful ending that you only just figured out.

It would be a lot more convenient if changes made to later parts of the book would just naturally propagate backward through the book to the earlier bits too, on a cellular level, so it all fit together. Sadly they do not.¹ But at least now I know where I’m going. I think.

December 3

I can’t write longhand—because I’m too lazy—but there’s something deeply unnatural about writing anything of any length on a computer. What would Hemingway’s novels have read like if his typewriter was always popping up reminders of his childrens’ field hockey tryouts and offering to sell him fishing rods and hunting rifles and plane tickets to Paris?

For that matter what if he could’ve used his typewriter to see pictures of naked people? I bet he would have.

December 4

Today is the great day on which I promised to deliver my revised manuscript to my editor. It is not the first such day, there have been others just like it, and just like on those other days I’m not going to deliver it.

December 7

I cut an entire passage, and I meant to paste it in somewhere else. But I waited too long to hit COMMAND-V, and I forgot it was there, and then I cut something else, thereby replacing the earlier passage in Scrivener’s buffer. I could go back and retrieve the first one, probably, but I am, again, too lazy.

December 8

Oh my God. It’s terrible. My book is terrible and it’s far too late to fix it. I want to burn it.

Or … maybe it’s secretly good, only I’ve just lost sight of it and can no longer perceive its goodness? It becomes an epistemological problem (if that’s what epistomology is): how much can you know about your own work? After all Nabokov tried to burn Lolita, and he was wrong about that. He’d turned on his own book, misjudged it, but his wife Vera salvaged it at the last minute, and everything turned out OK. Joyce tried to burn Stephen Hero too. Saved by the wife again.

If I deleted this file, I doubt my wife would find a way to intervene.

1. AI will probably one day do this. I won’t hate it any less.