Aspiring author abandons novel

Author Kabex Fitzgibbon elaborates on the difficulties of his craft.

Aspiring writer Kabex Fitzgibbon decided to put his debut novel A Farewell To Reason to one side after striking trouble at the 1000-word mark.

The first part of the trilogy was planned for release in early 2007, but after the second paragraph Fitzgibbon realised it made “better commercial sense” to scale the book back to a single volume of about 50,000 words.

By the end of the first chapter, Fitzgibbon decided to “rationalise” the work to a short novella of about 10,000 words.

“After a few evening's work on the first sentence, I decided the themes of the book could be better communicated in a more condensed, but intense, form … I’m not a great one for padding,” Fitzgibbon told his friends yesterday at a Darlinghurst café.

He also had a great deal of trouble settling on a name for the protagonist of the tale. “I originally settled for ‘Yossarian’, but by the fourth paragraph I changed my mind and had to go back through and change it,” he bemoaned. “Plus, someone else had used it already. Honestly, by the time I did a quick edit I lost my train of thought and the book kind of stalled after that.”

Fitzgibbon also confided in a close friend and would-be scribe, Tony Two, that he secretly harbored doubts about the plot line of the book, and also its major thematical concerns.

“I just don’t know whether the public are ready for an exploration of a young man forced to carry out menial duties as a cleaner in a futuristic space cafe when he really is a brilliant poet, trapped in a dimension beyond time, an expostulation of the subconcious. The public has no taste – all they seem to want is that pseudo-intellectual Dan Brown adventure garbage.”

Fitzgibbon then carelessly tossed his two-page manuscript aside, but not so carelessly as to land in a puddle of spilt cafe latte, and muttered: “Anyway, what I really want to focus on now is children’s fiction. It’s such a big market. Or I could maybe tidy this up and make into a film treatment. I hear Heath Ledger is back in town, I should get hold of his agent.”