Finished the draft of chapter nine last weekend. Using an unreliable narrator on top of increasing amounts of metafiction is challenging, to say the least. But I’m sorta content with how it’s turning out. I think I want to get the story’s skeleton on the page before I start seriously considering big changes, so I’m not gonna stress about it right now.
That being said, I’m still aiming to be more or less finished by the end of summer. I’m having a lot of fun writing it too. Ya know, I had two whole classes almost exclusively devoted to magical realism at university and I know the identifying qualities of them pretty well. Originally, I was trying to write a magical realism story that lacked the political critique part, but I’ve since found that it just sorta happens. In fact, all of the defining characteristics just sorta happen. Thus, I decided to just let the story tell itself because it’s doing what it wants anyway.
However weird it sounds, I’ve always felt like every story I’ve written has told itself and I’m just the conduit through which it’s told. So I’m not going to try and control it too forcefully, but rather just listen closely to my protag and make sure she gets from A to B.
mack rogers writes 