Infinite Jest: I've Written a Novel

Last year, Josh and I had a conversation about how we’d never write a novel, because we’d want it to be our own Infinite Jest, and neither of us are any David Foster Wallace. It seemed like a thankless creative endeavour as we would both set wholly unrealistic and unattainably high bars for ourselves, and so we would simply never even try.

Having said that, according to my calculations, I’ve actually written enough words in the last 3 and a bit years to constitute a fairly beefy novel: approximately 150,862 (in reality it is probably higher as that script only splits words by spaces, and I quite like doing that-thing-where-you-hyphenate-all-the-words). According to this completely arbitrary source, that’s more words than any category of non-technical book they list. Admittedly, it’s still not quite Infinite Jest, which, according to Ryan Compton, weighs in at a hefty 577,608 words. Clearly a lot of my words are (exceptionally) low quality, but still, I clearly have it in me to write the kind of volume required for a novel, and in a reasonable amount of time, as I am demonstrably not a full time writer, nor do I consider blogging a hobby, it usually only occupies ten minutes of my day. So, perhaps, one day…