Making the Songs on the Radio

Every evening for the past 5 years between the hours of 9PM and 10PM you have been sitting at your desk drafting your third novel. Every morning, after you cook breakfast (usually this means you pour cereal) and eat, you and your wife give each other a goodbye kiss before you both drive off to work: you with your daughter since her high school is on the way to your office, the wife with your son since his elementary school is on the way to her’s. You work from 9AM until 5:30PM, and arrive home at 6PM, then you cook dinner or order take-out, then spend time with your kids playing Switch, sometimes spend time with your wife, and then around 9PM you walk downstairs into your office where you sit and spend the next 60 minutes staring at your laptop screen as if you are performing surgery.

You test out new sub-drafts and ideas. You condense or relegate weaker ones back to drafts and errata. You determine where to cull and where to hone exposition. You test out ways to precipitate theme and motif. Just like how a real writer does, you clearly picture what you originally envisioned this novel looking like in your mind’s eye, and you compare that vision with what you have currently. Just like a real writer, you make plans for which specific parts of this novel’s architectonic you will address first, and estimate how long each section will take to perfect, and triage for deadlines. You decide which sections you want another set of eyes on (your eyes, two weeks from now) and highlight accordingly. You update a color coded calendar.

You save each document into its appropriate subfolder or sub-sub folder of your “Long Project – In Progress- DDMMMYYYY” folder updated with today’s date, and then save a dated a copy of that folder to a cloud drive where all previous versions of this folder are saved as “Long Project – All – In Progress – DDMMYY”. You walk upstairs to your bed and sleep from 11 PM and 5 AM. You wake up, brush your teeth, go for a jog, shower, dress, and then walk downstairs around the corner down the hallway and to the right to the kitchen to cook breakfast (usually this means “pour cereal”).

Your first novel was a sincere, though some would say wan, work of autofiction. Your second was avante-garde, though some might say over-ambitious, work of experimental literature. This one is tighter, though less ambitious: you’re sticking to your vocabulary to spin a proper yarn, and you feel confident in it. If anything, it is a page-turner.

You got off work at five today. You cooked (or did you order take out?), spent time with your family, and even spent time with your wife. You walked downstairs, down the hallway, to the left, and sat down at your computer to work on your third novel. You made some edits to a previously highlighted section and marked it off your calendar. You inserted a previously excluded chapter with a small bit of symbolic imagery that, after five minutes, you realize should have stayed left out. You hit ctrl+z. The pieces fall into place.

You skim, then pour through. When you compare it to your outline, and then compare that current outline to your very first outline, and then compare the current outline with what you originally envisioned this novel as being in your mind’s eye, you see that it is totally coherent, the prose having already been gone over with a fine tooth comb countless times, between the hours of 9PM and 10PM, Monday through Friday, by you, for the past 5 years. Every little thing is done well in such a way that the very big thing, the novel itself, has been made as perfect as it should be. Not as perfect as it could be– attempting that would have doomed this now living aesthetic whole, that is now your 3rd novel, to stillbirth. Your 3rd novel, whose architectonic was planned and measured and assembled purposively from the moment you envisioned this novel it, a vision that was your constant measure against what you currently had, and now have: every night, between the hours of 9pm and 10pm. The Venn Diagram has finally become a circle.

You save this document into your Long Project – In Progress-DDMMMYYYY folder, update it with today’s date and rename the folder “Long Project – Ready for Submission – DDMMMYYYY” and save that folder to your cloud drive where all previous versions of your “Long Project – In Progress – DDMMMYYYY” folder are saved. 

You turn off your laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad. You flip it over. You retrieve a small screwdriver from your desk drawer and turn it 8 times on each screw of the backplate, for 8 total screws, for a total of 64 turns. You place each screw in a small orange and black glazed clay bowl that your eldest daughter threw for you in her high 3d art class. You set the screwdriver directly to the right of your mousepad. You remove the backplate and set it to the left side of your workstation. You grab a small multi-tool and unscrew the smaller screws of the hard drive. Eight turns, for two screws, for a total of 16 turns. You place those screws in a smaller, heavier, red and blue glazed clay bowl thrown by your youngest son in his middle school 3d art class. You remove the hard drive and place it in your right pajama pocket. You retrieve another hard drive from your second lowest desk drawer and replace it in the chassis. You remove one of the two screws from the small red and blue glazed clay bowl thrown by your son in his middle school 3d art class, and secure the drive, 8 turns total. You repeat the gesture, securing the hard drive. You replace the backplate, and remove a screw from the small orange and black clay bowl thrown by your daughter in her high school 3d art class and secure the backplate, 8 turns total. You do this another seven times.

You stand up and exit the office, walk down the hallway, to the left, to your kitchen, to the right, and remove the hard drive from your pocket and place it in your kitchen sink and turn it on for 10 seconds, wetting thoroughly. You remove the hard drive from the sink and walk across the kitchen to your microwave, open it, and then you place the hard drive on the spinning glass plate. You press the button that says “30 Seconds”. Over that 30 seconds the hard drive emits occasional, mild glows, as plasmic membranes ebb and flow across its surface without sparking. You do not witness this, because during this 30 seconds you pull out your phone, log onto your cloud drive and select all folders labeled “Long Project – Initial Outlining and Research – DDMMMYYYY”, “Long Project – In Progress – DDMMMYYYY” as well as “Long Project – Ready for Submission – DDMMMYYYY” and erase them. You then unsubscribe from this cloud storage service, and you cancel the email account associated with it. You create a new email under the same domain, and sign up for the same cloud service using this new email.

Every morning, for the next 5 years, you will wake up, and you will cook breakfast (usually “pour cereal”) and eat. Then you and your wife give each other a goodbye kiss before you both drive off to work: you with your son since his middle school is on the way to your office, and your wife will drive alone because your daughter will be off at college, and then will be a young professional, you hope. When your daughter is a young professional, your wife will be driving your son since he will be going to the same high school your daughter previously went to, which is on the way to her office. You will work from 9AM until 5:30PM, and arrive home at around 5 or 6PM, then cook dinner or order take-out, occasionally have dinner with your daughter, sometimes spend time with your son watching him play PS5, or you’ll play basketball with him, sometimes you will spend time with your wife, and then you walk downstairs into your office where you sit and spend the next 60 minutes staring at your laptop screen as if you are performing surgery, working on your 4th novel.