I've definitely found my groove again on the novel. As its format is an imaginary memoir, each chapter begins with a general observation that triggers memory after memory in a roundabout way until the narrative of the protagonist's life picks up again by association. The tricky thing about working this way is that I have to remember just to keep writing; no matter how tangential the words that are coming out seem relative to the end of the last chapter, hidden connections always emerge - often without warning - that tie it all together and deposit it me squarely back into the thick of things.

The other fun thing about writing about a world that doesn't exist is that you don't have to do any fact-checking. As long as the story is consistent with itself, I can make whatever I want up on the fly, although most of what I'm writing is an attempt to capture the past twenty years of accumulated thinking about this place. It's an amazingly cathartic feeling to let myself broadcast all of that knowledge at once. I guess that's the strength of the memoir. The narrator is by definition omniscient, at least as far as his or her own life is concerned. It's okay to digress, it's okay to foreshadow, it's okay to have strong opinions one way or another. What's interesting is that although my protagonist has more or less the same knowledge of this made-up world that I do, he has very strong likes and dislikes about it that I do not, and I'm finding a real joy (and sometimes a shock!) in discovering his opinions as I browse through the geography and history of my imagination.

51k. We're more than halfway to a hundred thousand words now!