Dear, Future: I'm Writing Fiction Again

In November of 2020, in the haze of a manic pandemic productivity binge, I participated in NaNoWriMo, "National Novel Writing Month".

For those unfamiliar, NaNoWriMo was a non-profit organized around the goal of writing 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November to get over the creative hump of wanting to write a novel and just friggin' sending it.

There was an idea for a novel bouncing around in my head for years, possibly as early as eight or ninth grade (~2013) that I figured I'd try bringing to fruition. See if there was anything to it.

The idea in a sentence is this:

A man realizes the potential of science to bring about immortality and looks for a workaround to the fact that he's been born far too early to see that potential realized.

I took a similar writing approach to what Stephen King describes in his book On Writing, that is, you take a kernel of an idea and just start writing. Experiencing the story as you go as opposed to creating an outline and crafting from there. And, of course, I ended up taking the most overly-ambitious version of this approach:

My novel would take place in three different story lines across three different time-periods all meant to converge into one cohesive narrative.

I don't remember precisely why I took that approach but I'm sure it was in no small part inspired by my then recent reading of Infinite Jest and thinking, "surely if I can read a difficult novel I can write one!"

I wasn't under the impression I was the second coming of David Foster Wallace but I think I had the sense that if I didn't go as ambitious as possible than what the fuck was the point. A pattern of behavior which has derailed many initially reasonable pursuits in my life.

Here's an overview of the three intertwined stories I wrote:

Leo of the Past

Leo is ostensibly the driving force of the novel. He's introduced as a youngish boy in the 16th or 17th century who has recently come to terms with the fact that he is dissatisfied with the idea of dying.

He lives in the countryside but decides to travel to Florence because he's heard tales of "miracle men" making huge strides in understanding the physical world (note: I did absolutely no historical research). His hope is that they have discovered or will soon discover the secret to eternal life.

He ends up joining a group of Renaissance men and, being a prodigy of sorts, rapidly climbs their ranks. But in time he comes to the realization which the story revolves around:

For all of the progress he and the others have made, they will need progress far beyond what is possible in their lifetimes to secure eternal life.

His story leaves off during a period in which he has left Florence to seek a place he can live a monkish existence in the pursuit of documenting his entire being in the hope he'll one day be resurrected in some form.

Andre Finkenhiemer of the Present

Andre is a determined but deeply untalented engineer.

After forcing his way to a degree in engineering, despite his peers and teachers advising him against it, he secures a job with "UPSENZ", a boutique construction firm specializing in the construction of mini-suspension bridges, owned and operated by the incredibly eccentric Leemon Smeltzer.

As Andre attempts to settle in to his new job and hopefully make a name for himself, a series of strange and terrible happenings push him closer and closer to connecting directly with Leemon.

For reasons I didn't have the word count to flesh out by the end of November, Leemon and Andre eventually end up working together in some capacity. The subject of their work was meant to somehow involve discovering/unearthing/assisting in the project laid out by Leo centuries before.

ZÆ of the Future

ZÆ is a AI engineer in the late 2060's working in the "quasi-secret" computer science laboratory of RECERN, the facility built after an anti-matter "accident" (terror attack?) at the original CERN.

They are attempting to create the first perfect reproduction of the human mind after decades of failures and setbacks in the artificial intelligence space.

Much of this future story line is exposition describing the events which took place since "the present" and ZÆ hadn't really had their chance to shine by the time I reached the word-count goal. The plan, as you can probably guess, was for them to play some role in whether or not Leo is brought back and in what form.

Nested within these three primary stories were many expositional plot lines/world building exercises that were honestly surprisingly fun to read upon review.

Here are just a few:

• An authoritarian ruler is assassinated by a drone smuggled into a rally within a fat suit, directly leading to the second US Civil war and partial nuclear annihilation.
• A geopolitically obsessed psychedelic cult plots to bring about world peace by causing the ego deaths of world leaders
  • Not to mention the extremely involved process they go through to get their designer drugs
• The story of Leo's wildly strange and possibly divinely blursed grandfather

Additionally there are a few quotes that, after so much time passing between writing and reading, I was pleasantly surprised I wrote. Here's one I found while scanning a bit of the manuscript:

"What was this evil curse that God had wrought upon men and all beings, to live with such verve and be reduced to such sickening sludge."

And here's another remarkably pseudo-prescient quote:

"The last major neural net break through was from a now-defunct company called OpenAI with the production version of GPT5, released on New Year's Day 2022. GPT5 was a natural language interpreting net that was actually quite impressive in it's ability to write articles, create art, and interpret the human world in a way that allowed it to make computational rationalizations for useful applications. It didn't take long for the world to realize, though, that GPT5 was at best a really good Siri and still not as useful as an actual human assistant.

I was kind of shocked to read this seeing as though I wrote those words in 2020. I was off by a year and 1.5 GPT versions but was impressed I came up with this, probably based off reading early insider tech reports on GPT-3. We'll see about OpenAI going defunct and what you could interpret as an AI bubble popping but I'm giving myself some points for this.

All of this is to say, I often wish I had finished the novel I started. But alas...

Less than a month after completing the 50,000 word goal I went through a terrible breakup that was sort of the tipping point into a long-brewing mental health spiral. So the story that came streaming out of me in November 2020 never got another word.

On a few occasions I've returned to the completely unedited manuscript with the goal of getting the story back into my system. At the time of writing everything was just in me. But a lot has changed since then. Wherever the story was coming from... it would take a lot of work to find that place again.

I've thought about reading the whole thing, creating a loose outline, especially for the parts where things start converging, taking my favorite quotes and story lines and starting from the top. Keeping the soul of the thing but starting over with a committed intent to going all the way this time.

But I've just never reached the point of inspiration necessary to tackle such a daunting challenge. Particularly since the novel, while being very fun, has a extremely low probability of netting me anything besides some personal pride. Personal pride is great but I do have bills...

And that brings us to today, where the spark of one idea and the fading of another have possibly granted me the motivation to do something with this story I started long ago.

The spark is that some months ago I thought: maybe I don't need to finish the novel. I can just flesh out my favorite stories from it. Create a textual Tales from the Loop-esque collection of short stories set in the same world but without the explicit need for the stories to converge.

That way I can return to the fun I had creating that world and share the stories that right now, only I know. And not only that, but given enough time and interest, maybe one day feel inspired enough to give convergence another shot.

The flip side of the coin begins in late October of this year as NaNoWriMo 2025 neared. I thought that maybe I'd give it another shot. My girlfriend was going back home for the holidays and I thought a creative project like this might help with the loneliness.

And then I went to sign up for NaNoWriMo 2025 and found out that NaNoWriMo is no more.

Obviously the shutdown of the non-profit doesn't mean you aren't allowed to write 50,000 words in a month anymore but that, plus getting interested in some home lab projects, dissuaded me from going ahead with it.

Despite not wanting to write a full novel, I still had a bit of a creative writing itch, and what better way to scratch that itch than to start building out the stories from my partial novel, Dear Future!

The first of these stories will be the next post in this feed. I don't have any particular plans for a schedule or anything like that, I'll just write and post them when I feel like it.

If you like them I hope you look forward to more in the future, if you don't I hope you stick around for my non-fiction writing!

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