A Tribute to My First Failed Novel: An Introduction
Oh, Iona Roche. You've been with me since ninth grade, when I first serialized your adolescent adventures in two notebooks that became quite a hit in my circle of friends. So close to my heart, so like me, and yet so unlike me--I, for one, have never been attacked by a serial killer in my hometown, for example. Then in college, I tried to use you to explain my home to my cooler-than-thou fake college friends. I suspect that if you failed as Northwest Indiana ambassador, it wasn't entirely your fault; the fake college friends totally sucked, and I am better off for having been eventually shunned by them. Then in grad school, a breakthrough! I finally let you speak for yourself, and "Land Beyond Sorry" wasn't totally hated by my workshop peers. Somewhere around 2001-2002, I attempted to devote a novel's worth of attention to you and was able to create short bursts of fiction but ran out of gas at some point. It wasn't you, my dear--it was me. Although my first SIPOS (Self Indulgent Piece of Shite) technically failed, there are bits and pieces that I like. And since I don't have a ton of new fiction waiting in the wings to be published for this HTML final project, I thought that I'd put up some of your lost adventures that would otherwise never see the light of day. After everything you've put up with (all the heartache I've projected onto you, the general lack of plot, the melodramatic words I've put into your mouth), I feel that it's the least I can do.
You have changed as I have changed, and I hope that you will continue to be there for me when I feel the need to scribble some half-baked thoughts and turbulent emotions. I suspect that my most successful stories to date have been about you and your friends.
To my readers, the following are bits and pieces of my first failed novel--I don't even think I had a title for it by the time I had given up on it. There's not a lot of chronological order or rhyme or reason to it. The actual novel itself was not going to have traditional chapters and lots of exposition; basically, the first SIPOS was going to consist of short vignettes that, put together, would create a complete story or at least vivid portrait of Iona. I think I was probably just too lazy to write a traditional novel. This may have something to do with its eventual failure. Hmmm...
This is really all you need to know about Iona: 26 years old with artistic ambitions and an unhealthy obsession with death. Unhappily married to a decent guy, Brian, who happens to be 22 years older than she. She winds up having a fling with a college kid named Drew (uh...details are a little sketchy on him...I didn't develop him very well before I threw in the towel...), which brings her to a crisis point.
Please Note: Although I draw upon my own emotions to help make Iona and the other characters more real (at least in my eyes), she and her marital misadventures are not supposed to represent me or anyone I know. Seriously. You wouldn't believe the phone calls I have to field from people thinking they've broken the code of who is supposed to represent whom. If it sounds too much like real life to be a coincidence, then it just means that I'm not particularly inventive. If that makes any sense.
--karen