How did those 100 pages go?

I didn’t write 100 pages in three days on Presidents’ Day Weekend. I think I wrote about 20. I wrote a lot of those on Monday, too. Still, it turned out to be one of the most consistent times of focused writing that I’ve made for myself in a while. 20 pages are 20 pages, though I’m not 100% sure that these 20 pages are even close to ready to be called even the beginnings of a book.

I can tell you where they are meant to lead, though. How about that?

The concept of the story is to fictionalize my first 18 months here in Philadelphia into something more like 6 months, and to have my character go through some of the things I went through — sort of. It’s going to go in three parts, A Crush, A Dude and A Party. The idea is that we’ve got a late-20s guy with a lot on his mind, new to town and looking to make friends. He learns that social life after school’s out is made much harder by an increasingly complex and distrustful world.

Not to give away the ending, but his efforts don’t go well (please don’t read too much into my real life from what I’m about to write). First, he meets a woman at work with whom he forms a fast bond and their seems to be some tension there. Her ambiguity and his subsequent inability to keep his feelings for her under control takes him out of their nascent, shared network.

Next, he meets a guy that seems really connected into the city and who he gets along with really well. He sees hope for social entrée, but economic constraints force him to pass on too many opportunities to mix in.

Finally, having built something of a wide network of acquaintances, mainly through work, he risks having a party. The results are mixed, or maybe he’s just too goal oriented?

It’s meant to be a modest work. Just 9-12 chapters overall. Maybe 150 to 200 pages. I’ve been trying to do it 100% as journal entries by the protagonist, but my character is given to going off about all kinds of things in it (I mean, he is largely me, after all), and I feel like I’m writing a new version of Notes from the Underground at times.

Not sure where this effort is going to go, but writing the concept out like this makes me feel like I should take it further.

[Note from 2020] I generally remember my old writing projects, even the ones I didn’t finish. No clue about this. My very autobio stuff never holds my interest super long so that was probably it. I don’t think this ever went further than wherever this went?