By David S. Atkinson

I have to apologize; I haven’t been reading much in the last two weeks. Considering what has been going on, I think it’s understandable. I’ve only read four books in the last 14 days. That may be a decent amount for the general population who haven’t read a book since college or even high school, but for me it’s almost inexcusable. After all, I read 318 books last year (some of them short as A Christmas Carol, some as long as The Tale of Genji, but the rest were around 200-300 pages apiece).

As I said, though, the reason for my lack of reading is a good one: I’ve been writing. I have a tendency to read endlessly and neglect doing anywhere near enough writing on my own. See the reference above to the number of books I read last year. In the same time period, I only wrote maybe seven short stories and did revisions on others. I did do a number of book reviews and other such things, but I was definitely not doing enough writing in favor of reading the writing of others. Now, I think it is important for writers to read, but there are limits. At some point, we have to sit down and write.

I have probably already corrected this issue for this year. On the 14th of this month, I started reading Donald Antrim’s The Verificationist based on a recommendation from Joseph Michael Owens.* To summarize quickly, I loved the book. However, you can read more about that on my Goodreads review here, since I want to talk about something else in this post.

What happened is that The Verificationist gave me an idea for a novel of my own. It’s really got nothing to do with The Verificationist, but I got the idea while reading. For once, OCD worked in my favor. I spent the 15th jotting notes for what I was going to do and completing a book review I had yet outstanding. On the 16th, I started writing. At 1:50 PM today (01/29/12) Mountain Standard Time, I finished the first draft. The draft is 203 handwritten pages, though 36 of those are only partial pages since they end sections. It may be a short novel, but it likely is a novel, nonetheless. I don’t know what the word count is since I write in longhand and type later, but my best estimate is a little over 50,000 words, all written in 14 days.

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