first chapter of The Third Floor done

I am in the midst of making some edits and designing a initial logo, but the first chapter of The Third Floor is finished with page 17.

I don’t have all of chapter 2 thumbnailed, but I know the basic beats and have some dialogue worked out, so I’ll get started on it soon enough.

It’s nice to be getting something done. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had a long stretch here of abandoning projects.

Part of this time was a real disillusionment with art in general. Like when someone would ask me what a good book was, I had trouble thinking of one. What made a book good? I couldn’t even answer that. And I had trouble finding new books to read. Nothing grabbed my interest. And old books that I used to love didn’t hold up anymore. And I say all this as a person with a master’s degree in literature.

One thing I did to solve the reading problem was to sign up for The New York Review of Books Classics Book Club. It took the decision-making out of my hands. I also quickly found that I often enjoyed the books that I sent. And even when I didn’t like them, I appreciated the story of who, when, and where created the work.

And then I received Raymond Queneau’s The Skin of Dreams.

I had heard of Raymond Queneau, but mostly in reference to the founding of Oulipo and Exercises in Style. So in my head I had labeled Queneau as an avant-garde stylist and my knee-jerk assumption about writers like this was that they were all style with no heart. Their work was interesting on a formal level, but empty on a human level. But as soon as I started reading The Skin of Dreams, I found myself falling in love with it.

Yes, the book has formal invention with its constant reinventing of the main character. But it also has a lot of surprising and very funny humor, such as the running gag about fleas. And I was extremely shocked by the realism of its dialogue. While conversations would sometimes take absurd turns, the words spoken by the characters felt observed and lived in. And it struck me that Queneau was that perfect and rare artist who coupled formal invention with a deep sympathy for the human condition.

While I enjoyed the whole book, I was especially taken by the first chapter. I instantly fell in love with the three characters presented and the easy dialogue between them. However, those characters appear nowhere else in the novel. Because of all this, they kept bouncing around in my head.

And that’s how The Third Floor started. The three characters of Alice, Leo, and Charlotte had their inspiration from Queneau’s characters Lulu Doumer, Louis-Philippe, and Thérese. A lot of the beats in my first chapter were taken from Queneau’s. But my characters will continue and the story will move on.

So this is a thank you to Raymond Queneau. You helped me out of a hole.