Composing The Novel
A process-painting of writing the novel The Archives-Project
The Novel In The Author’s Mind
For the last few years, I have been working on a novel called The Archives-Project. This new novel comes as a sequel to a novel I was working on in the 2001–2004 period called The History-Project.
The story follows the story of the History-Project, which revolved around a group of intellectuals who came together to work on a project called “The History-Project”. The novel was about the project, but the novel was also part of another project, the author’s interdisciplinary art project of the same name.
The story of The Archives-Project revolves around the same group of intellectuals coming together to investigate how and why the History-Project was an abject failure. The main problem is that I, as author, become inserted into the story as it becomes a terrible metafiction of a bold new kind.
Fictional Cosmologies
The History-Project, the novel, had its own cosmology. The Archives-Project does too, though it’s mostly an upgrade of the old universe. In The Archives-Project, everything starts with The Invisible Forces, 13.8 billion years ago.
The Invisible Forces came from a place called NOUS which was a perfect and pure palatial wonderland. At some point, NOUS is broken apart by a force called ANTINOUS, and becomes so many floating land masses, the largest of which is called Antiface-Cloud.
The Invisible Forces inhabit Antiface-Cloud and build what is called Construction-Land, a.k.a. C-Land, which is the engine that they will use to create all future created things, dreams and reality and everything in between. They also subsequently create a place called Archives-Land which is like a massive Sublime Warehouse, which stores all of the templates, usually made of clay, that are used in the Construction-Land engine to create things.
The Invisible Forces
The novel The Archives-Project, like all created things, is created by The Invisible Forces through the use of Construction-Land. The novel actually lives in Novel-Space, the space of all novels. It inhabits a small subsection of all possible configurations of The Archives-Project, as novel.
The point here is that The History-Project, as novel, was an abject failure. I, as author, was never able to finish it. Most of it was literally lost, through water damage and other calamities. There never was an official document called The History-Project, but I worked on the project for over a decade.
The History-Project was an interdisciplinary art and research project that I undertook starting in July, 2001. It is composed of poems, stories, essays, as well as paintings and music. I composed and recorded roughly 23 concept-albums full of original songs for the History-Project, over a thousand songs.
The idea is that it’s The Invisible Forces that are writing this new novel. In fact, it’s the Invisible Forces that write anything, fiction and non-fiction. They are the creative forces in the universe behind all creations, including planet earth and any place, real or imagined.
Composing The Novel
What keeps happening is that I write notes ABOUT the novel more than I actually type pages OF the novel. In total, I have maybe 20 pages of the actual novel written over the course of the last several years.
The same thing happened with The History-Project, the novel. I would sit at the typewriter and write ABOUT the novel, not actually typing pages OF the novel. In all, 100 pages of the actual novel are extant. Everything else has been lost or accidentally destroyed.
The idea here is that it is historical forces that stopped me from being able to deliver on the novel-writing. I was displaced, had to move repeatedly, and in the end I never got to a finished novel. So the novel-writing project was a failure, since nothing was ever “shipped”.
But I do have over a thousand pages of “notes” in digital form, that I collectively call Crackland & The Crackland Journals, which are part of The History-Project. “Crackland” was a place in The History-Project cosmology.
The History-Project cosmology came out of an earlier project called The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema. The Exhibition text WAS actually finished and stands at about 1000 pages. It also includes paintings and songs. Again, a unique cosmology was invented for The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema, which transitioned slowly to The History-Project. In fact, there is no discontinuous point BETWEEN these two artistic projects. They flowed one into the other.
The Artifactual Novel
All in all, over 16 years, only a little over 100 pages of actual novels were written since the inception of The History-Project in July, 2001. Thousands of pages of notes and other research were written during the same period, much of which alludes to the projects in question.
This is the metafiction problem I have fallen into. I’ve written so much ABOUT writing these novels that I can’t seem to sit down and actually WRITE the novels. I am constantly reflecting ON the novels, on the novel-writing experience, and I’m continuously explaining my explanations, in a kind of absurd metafiction that is running out of control.
At this point, these novels have become “simulations” that I “run” in my mind. I have written the entire novels in my mind, I have fully finished and complete stories for both novels, The History-Project AND The Archives-Project. It’s just that I’ve never written them down in actual novel prose. I keep getting stuck in the metafiction and it has become a historiographic metafiction about writing novels that I never finish, “for historical reasons”.
I will leave it at that for now. I will come back to this later.
A.G. © 2017. All Rights Reserved.
