I seem to have broken out of my melancholy about my novel into possibly too many Great Ideas about it.  My fear is that I may take off away from it in too many directions ever to get back to it.  Amateur psychologists might see in this an unconscious attempt to fail, but I don’t.  It is worrisome, though, for it certain could keep me from finishing my novel before I die.  In any case, for one thing, I’m more than halfway into what seems to me so far a good way to possibly catch some readers for my novel: a very forthright short essay about the novel that I really concentrate on, and find sites to email it to.  Follow-up thought: an attempt at an extremely honest self-description the purpose of which is to help a potential reader decide whether or not to try my novel on the basis of how much he empathizes with, or is repelled by, me.

While thinking about that, I realized something interesting: in no epic poem I can think of are women of any importance except, not that frequently, as sex-objects like Circe in The Odyssey or some kind of weird idealized love-object as in The Divine Comedy.  Is there even a woman in Paradise Lost.  Another related thought: that Lucifer is an inferior villain because his only goal seems to be power; how interesting he might have been had his goal been the power to do something of significance, like abolishing Hell.  From this hath descended another Great Idea: that I some of my alter ego’s ideas, like the sterilization of a random number of people to effect negative population growth, to my villain,Tenseworth.  Might my novel’s protagonist find Tenseworth’s journal after defeating him?

I perceive that that that is only two Great Ideas, and the first of them shouldn’t take much work.  The second, though, might require a whole new novel!

Be that as it may, I’m now off to face my novel’s final chapter and its epilogue.  Once they are out of the way, who knows where goeth I.  (I feel like gulping caffeine both in liquid and pill form and keep going everywhere until even caffeine can’t keep me going.  But I won’t.  I’m essentially a careful person, perhaps too careful.)
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