A Week of Things Not Done

A little pause this week. I haven’t had much energy to sit in front of the book and start the next phase of work since I know I’ll need at least a full day of concentration to write the next chunk.

The momentum has most certainly stuttered this week but the book has been in the back of my mind as I’ve been reading The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji. I haven’t finished it yet—no spoilers!—but it has this marvelous thing that I find so very rare: real, honest to goodness speed. I’m drawn into this thing right away, waiting for when the inevitable bomb will go off. Perhaps it won’t! But it all feels like it’s heading somewhere exciting and that’s why I’m turning the pages so quickly.

Thinking of it now, detective novels and murder mysteries are of course entirely dependent on this kind of movement because if you stop and take a breath in the story then the mystery will be obvious, the conclusion less than satisfying. You need that breakneck speed to razzle dazzle the reader, to smoke bomb them in the hopes that you can come up with something amazing just before the smoke clears.

I think the book I’m making—or, well, the one that’s in the back of my mind that I should’ve been making this week—requires this same kind of Mystery Novel Speed. I want you to fly through my book without checking the page numbers and without it ever feeling like a slog, not even for a moment. With each turn of the page I want the reader to be excited about the next story or the next typeface I showcase and so I want it to be the Mad Max: Fury Road of typographic texts.

So even though I barely touched the book this week, I think I learned something book-adjacent and important that I can carry into next week: what I’ve learned is that speed is half the mystery.

Next week? More progress, I promise.