About White Trash Land « White Trash Land

White Trash Land is a novel that had its genesis shortly after the 2000 elections. Feeling angry and cynical, I wanted to write a satirical novel about all that I disliked about Western Civilization. Work on the novel started in earnest while I was living in South Korea, at an excellent remove from the influence of the West (sort of).

During the writing process the novel underwent tremendous changes, as the characters took on their own lives and started saying and doing things I certainly had not intended for them. It became less a satire, less about America (indeed, one of the first changes was to move the location to a Canadian city), more about different people living their lives.

I managed to write about a dozen or so pages before it slipped from my radar of important things to do. That is my usual limit, my typical story attention span, somewhere less than 20 pages, then the enormity of the task overwhelms me. I mean, a novel, a NOVEL. That’s a lot. 50,000 words, all written by me. Whoa. I can’t do that, there is television to be watched. By me.

I dusted the story off a few weeks ago, thinking of serializing it in my main blog over at fractual.com. It was going well, but it was an unwieldy fit. The page by page structure, and the backwards nature of blog posting lead me to the conclusion that it needed its own home, and here it is. Welcome.

The novel is still a work in progress, I have thus far written almost 20, 000 words, probably less than one third of it’s eventual lenght. Being a new father and teacher severely limits my writing time, but armed with my trusty Zire I manage to knock out a few hundred words a day. Some of them are the right ones, others need work. Please remember that aside from a spell check and a once over for typos, this is the story as it comes out of my head, no final edit, no master manuscript. Are there problems? Sure. Is it perfect? Not yet, but right now it is what it is. I hope you like it, rough edges and all. Feel free to comment as you see fit.