Wincing at Light

As we start winding down A Vessel for Offering and begin thinking about the next project to be posted here, I’m feeling a bit ambivalent.  What I’ll be posting soon is a science fiction novel called Agnosis.  It is by far the longest work of fiction I’ve ever produced.  It took me more than a year to write, from October 2003 to January 11, 2005.  I remember the date exactly because I was putting the final touches on the last edit the morning before I left on a two week excursion to Italy.

I honestly don’t know how to feel about this story.

Let me give you some background:  I usually write a novel a year.  I don’t write every day.  I’m what you might consider a “project oriented” writer.  I spend several months reading on topics that interest me.  Then I’ll start scratching out ideas, first chapters, character sketches and random paragraphs.  Most of that is shit that gets tossed in the trash.  On average, it takes me about two dozen starts before I figure out how I really want to start telling a story.  Rarely is the story that I actually end up writing the story that I thought I was writing when I started.  Once the writing starts, I can knock out a first draft of a 125,000 word novel in about three months.  Something like A Vessel for Offering, which tips the scale at 250k, takes 7 or 8 months.

Agnosis took a great deal longer than that, despite the fact that I was writing every day.

It took longer because every day was an exercise in defeating my own personal terror.  It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Shortly after completing A Vessel for Offering in 2002, I started experiencing some weird physical symptoms.  I started passing out for no traceable reason.  Parts of my body would go numb for hours at a time.  I frequently had these absolutely face-exploding headaches.  I spent a week in the hospital at one point while my doctor conducted a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of tests to find out what was wrong with me.  Nothing surfaced.

On December 7, 2002, I collapsed into delirium.  What I remember was my entire body going numb.  Since I was used to this at that point, I didn’t think much of it.  I sat down in my living room and popped out my laptop, intending to distract myself with some light video games.  It took me fifteen minutes to figure out how to turn the machine on.  I stared at the Windows desktop for another half an hour trying to figure out what I was trying to do.  Finally, I realized that something was seriously wrong with me, and decided (as men will) that the best course of action was to go take a nap until the weirdness passed.

I woke up two weeks later in the intensive care unit.  I’d been in a coma all that time.  Turns out that I had been battling a growing infection in my spinal column and ultimately in my brain, a condition called encephalitic meningitis.  It had all but killed me.  Literally. At least once, the doctors taking care of me had pulled my wife aside and told her that I likely wouldn’t survive, and if I did, I was probably going to be severely brain damaged.

I spent a bit more than a month in the hospital.  For much of that time, I couldn’t write my own name.  I couldn’t follow a storyline on the television.  I couldn’t read the books people brought me.

What saved me was a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law.  He brought me one of those kid pencil puzzle books, the ones with mazes and logical puzzles aimed at the under-10 set.  It was all my brain could handle, and slowly, painfully, it taught me how to think again.

The ironic bit in all of this, of course, is that I’d spent a great deal of time researching encephalitic meningitis in 2001 as background for my novel From the Hands of Hostile Gods.  You’d think I’d have recognized the symptoms, but it honestly never crossed my mind.

I didn’t write any fiction from January 2003 to October of 2004.  Not a word.  I didn’t even try.

Why?  Because I was terrified.  Terrified that I’d lost the ability to write.

Agnosis is my attempt to regain what was lost.  How to tell a story.  How to write.  How to live inside my own mind and my own narrative without losing myself into a false construction of reality.

I was terrified of losing myself in the world of the coma again.  But more than that, I was afraid that at the end, I’d have to face up to the reality that I just couldn’t do it anymore.  That I’d lost the ability to write stories.

I don’t remember a great deal about this novel.  I’m vague on how the plot works.  I don’t remember a good many of the characters.  I haven’t read it since I finished editing it in January 2005.

To be completely straight with you, I don’t think I ever will.  It is what it is, whatever it turns out to be.  It is the end of my innocence.

I hope you enjoy it.

Filed under: Miscellany, Writing Tagged: | encephalitis, fear, Writing