Screw Hemingway.

You know, this constant cutting and refining?

I'm getting really sick of it.

I want to just have fun, spewing words.

My latest brainstorm?  As long as I'm going crazy, I've decided to make Cobb a 1rst person narrator again, just for shits and giggles.  Keep all the other characters at 3rd person.  Cobb is a supernatural creature, so I sort of imply that he somehow knows all this stuff going on in other character's heads.

Make yet another version.

None of this is wasted.  All of it is practice, if nothing else.  Experimenting.   I can pick which version I like best at the end -- or which combination of versions.  

Who knows?  It may work. It may improve the story.

What I'd like to do is create a really strong narrator voice.  Really get into Cobb's head.

Is he me?  Or do I imagine him as someone completely different?

You'd think telling it from MY perspective would be easier, but do I really know myself and how I come across?  Wouldn't it be better to take this character and think of him as someone completely different?  Wouldn't he be delineated better?  More interesting for being different?

I have the feeling doing Cobb in first person will make the explication smoother, more natural.

I don't want a snarky tone, like when I started.  I want it to be bemused, kind of confused by human behavior, but curious, constantly struggling with what  it means to be human.  As if it was a very foreign character in a very foreign land.

It also allows me to much more smoothly introduce all the famous writer's I bring in.

It allows me to develop mood and perspective.

Most of all, it gives me yet another chance to rewrite -- and I don't think that is ever bad.  A changed word here, a changed word there -- it's almost always for the better.

I think what's happening here is -- I have to please myself.  Sorry dear reader.  But most of you aren't going to read it, are you?  So I'd best have fun and enjoy what I've created, because it's becoming pretty clear to me that these books aren't going anywhere -- traditionally or online, so I may as well do it the way I want since it makes no difference.

The way I want to do isn't necessarily what makes the book better -- it's what makes me feel good.  Not what my intellectual, critical brain says.

This, despite knowing that my intellectual, critical brain probably creates a better book for the reader.

But maybe not for me.

So call me self-indulgent, but that's what I've got here.  I'm not giving up writing -- I'm giving up writing worrying about whether anyone else likes what I've done.

All this brings back some of the playfulness of writing.    Work as play.  Like creating a work of art and knowing I should stop but wanting to keep adding to it until its a big ungainly mess but didn't I have fun doing it.

Fuck Hemingway.