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Friday, the day we honor and celebrate the Norse goddess Freya, I typed the final words of the extremely rough draft of my 80s gay, cinephile, San Diego, cultist, horror novel, with the draft clocking in at a respectable 89,000 words.

As I have written before, this novel I composed without the roadmap of an outline or even hardly anything of a plot in my skull. I knew a few aspects of the project: that it would take place in the mid-80s (I settled on ’84) and in San Diego. In addition to that, it would deal with ghosts in some manner, magic that had been bound to old cellulose nitrate movie film, and use a fictionalized version of the Ken Cinema, a theater that had once been the heart of revival and art house screening in this city, but closed forever in 2020. That was it. That was all I knew about the project when I sat down and wrote the opening scenes and the first chapter.

Characters were invented as they stepped onto the ‘stage’ and ones I thought might be major elements never quite got there and characters I thought were minor became major movers of the plot as it evolved. The plot slowly congealed from the disparate elements that erupted from my brain like Athena from Zeus’ forehead. But as a firmer, clearer, and more consistent picture of the plot emerged, earlier elements did not fit anymore. However, I did not, at that time, go back and either remove those ill-matched elements or revise them, but, like some sharks, I kept moving forward because backwards was death; the novel would only live if I maintained its momentum and reached a satisfying end.

Now that satisfying ending, with themes and plot that emerged organically from the process, has been reached and the task of revising has begun.

Already my opening line has changed to match the new core conflict, and the first chapter now reflects a deeper understanding of the character’s history as he understands it. Much like The Marathon Man, part of the character’s journey is discovering that nothing he thought he knew about his family is actually true.

I think the most important lesson I learned writing Final Reel in this manner is that I must never go back and revise while drafting. It’s easier, more efficient, and ultimately better for the final manuscript to let the inconsistencies live in the text while I discover what it is that really needs to be there.