(To begin: Hi! It has been a while! One of my goals in the new year was to edge away from my pseudonym (Nick Moorefox) and begin writing more under something closer to my real name (which is indeed Nick, but Moorefox was a combination of two names close to me). I haven’t written one of these since, but I’m now mostly writing as KJ Stark, my actual last name along with my middle initials, it’s a personal decision (and possibly a dumb one!) but here we are).
I’ve been thinking about beginnings a lot lately.
I’m writing a novel. It’s not a novel I ever planned to write. Back in 2019 I had a fun idea for a story. It was a short thing, barely 1200 words. It was fun, but not anything that would win any awards. I posted it on Reddit. People enjoyed it and then mostly moved on.
Some of you know this story, but four years later a TikTok account with a big following stumbled across it and featured it. I don’t have TikTok, so I didn’t know about it until a few months later when someone tweeted about it on twitter and the thread went viral. Scott Glassgold, who spins these things into gold, got involved. Jessica Knoll (!) signed on to adapt. Sony (!) bought the rights for a feature. It still feels surreal.
The smart thing to do is to turn it into a novel, but I had never thought about how to do that. It wasn’t a story I ever ached to revisit, it was simple and fun and over. It has been slow going. The beginning is tricky. I wrote one beginning that dragged. Chapter after chapter passed before there was a hint of anything. Kind of boring for a book that is supposed to be suspenseful. It wasn’t a slow burn, there wasn’t even smoke.
I wrote another beginning that takes place about 80% of the way through the story. Drop the readers in there, then back up and walk through it. Honestly it felt clunky. Like I was trying too hard to be too cute. To be fair, I was.
I’m beginning some new things too. Life doesn’t look like it looked five years ago or two years ago or six months ago. I had a lot of endings: brutal painful things that dropped out of the sky and scattered my personal storylines. Now I’m figuring out how things look anew. I’m pitching ideas to people I admire. Writers I admire treat me like I belong at their table, which is so fucking bizarre to me I can’t begin to explain. I spend all of my non-work time surrounded by happiness. My life is promising and beautiful in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
That’s hard too. I think about things too much, assume bad things will ruin it. I wonder if I’m cursed. When a bad things (even serious scary bad things) occur, as happened to me recently, and then causes a few probably foreseeable effects, I assume those effects will continue forever. A secret pessimism still lurks around the edges of my plans, whispering that destruction and woe are near.
I have a lot of plans. I have a lot of book too, chapters of exciting twists and turns and interesting character arcs and family mysteries.
So now, in writing and in life, it’s time for me to make sure there’s a solid beginning. I’m still figuring that out, but I have a pretty good idea what I need to do.