It began with wandering...

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“It began with wandering. We rejected the idea of a destination. We thought of such wandering as equivalent to having a light touch. Yet there was also another aspect: we were not prepared.”

I’ve decided to serialize my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on my Patreon. For the indefinite future all posts will be free content. The above lines are from the second instalment.

Faithful Unbeliever is the final book of an in-progress trilogy in which all three books are loosely based around questions concerning the desire for utopia.

You can find it here.


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Metonymy Press anthologies and fundraiser

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Metonymy Press is one of my all time favourite publishers. You can preorder their two new anthologies Sharp Pink Claws and at the same time help support them! Find out more here: https://gogetfunding.com/metonymy-press-needs-your-support/


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Inventory of novels I recently started but couldn't finish

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Over the past few years, while continuing to work on my final trilogy (including Faithful Unbeliever which I'm currently serializing on my Patreon), I've also started a number of new novels that I just as quickly abandoned. (Each time I posted sections of them on social media, which is perhaps the main point.) When this has happened in the past, certain aspects of these unwritten books eventually end up in the book I do write, in both explicit and implicit ways.

I thought I would make a brief inventory of these failed attempts to see if, by writing about them in order, there is anything useful for me to learn:

Jealous Friend
A novel about an artist who is jealous of another artist. This is as far as I got: "Most of the time I don’t think about it. A year will have gone by, two years, three, and I won’t have considered the matter even once. But then there are other years that don’t pass so smoothly. This was one of those other years. It wasn’t anything specific that set me back on this once again wrong path. And this wasn’t anywhere near the worst time. But I truly thought I had let it go. So I was disappointed with myself, disappointed to find myself back in this particular mental space. I had escaped it before and would escape it again. But not quite yet. Then again, maybe there was something that had brought me here. A thought. Something that had occurred to me in a flash. Something I’d done to myself."

Jacob’s in a State of Decimation
Another attempt in a long line of attempts to write a fragmentary, autobiographical novel. An excerpt: "I chose the title Jacob’s in a State of Decimation because I thought it could be some kind of commercial suicide. It is a line from a Destroyer song. Because it is a line from a Destroyer song it seems only reasonable that the theme of this book becomes music. I really love music. In the past I have loved it so much I could barely bring myself to write about it. However, when I find myself in a state of decimation, music is where I go to help myself through." I was also thinking this could be a book imagining what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Toronto and never moved to Montreal.

The Fervour of the Newly Converted
An attempt to write a detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons. This idea has now appeared in many of my unfinished novels in one form or another. It has also had many different titles, including Desire Without Expectation (a title I've now used for many different unfinished books which will also be the title of my next published book forthcoming in 2027.). It often connects to the line: "To try, in some way, to break into my own writing style and damage it. To find the necessary balance between damage and healing. To more fully consider the many overlaps between making and unlearning." I also wrote: "A detective novel that takes place in a world without prisons, a detective novel with a twist and the twist is: there is no crime and no detective. A cross between a detective novel and a book-length poem."

Know Me Better Than I Know Myself
To avoid confusion, I am now calling this unfinished novel Know Me Better Than I Know Myself (though it was also previously called Desire Without Expectation) The short description I wrote at the time was: "Know Me Better Than I Know Myself is nothing if not hybrid. A cross between a diary, an essay, a poem, and a novel. This is not the book Jacob Wren set out to write, but rather the book he wrote in spite of himself. As he writes: “The world is a mess. And so am I. And so is this book.” And yet there are so many themes and (unfinished) stories." I often start writing these fragmented, autobiographical novels and then give up. I find them interesting for about ten pages but then get bored writing about my own life. Excerpts of this work were published in atmospheric quarterly, the International Times and a chapbook published by above/ground press.

One Yes & Many Know
A novel about an artist who decides to sell out. It was mostly just this one paragraph: "It would be like a Faust story, but instead of making a deal with the devil I would make a deal with myself. Up until now, I’d fully dedicated myself to art, and to living art ethically. But now something had changed. I was dissatisfied, and my dissatisfaction suddenly had a possible solution landing directly in the middle of it, as unexpected as a UFO. (Though hadn’t I always said: it’s my nature to be dissatisfied.) There was a success that had eluded me for as long as I could remember. Was my inability to achieve it due to some shortcoming in my work, or was it only because I’d never really tried? What would it mean to reach for the brass ring, and not stop reaching until it was fully in my grasp? I didn’t know but if there was ever a time to find out, it was now. I wasn’t planning to do so at the expense of anyone else, didn’t believe that would be necessary. But I was planning to focus on myself, on my own trajectory. A trajectory that was going to be convincingly upward. At all costs. This is what I began to repeatedly tell myself. What quickly became almost an obsession, taking over my life, while at the same time realizing I didn’t know much about success or how to achieve it."

The Biography
Inspired by people writing to me to say that the Luigi Mangione story reminded them of my 2016 novel Rich and Poor, this was going to be a strange kind of sequel. In it there is an author who's written a novel about a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. He is approached by a real life billionaire and asked to write the billionaire's biography. (I did finish the first chapter, which I think would work well as a stand alone short story, so I should probably try to get it published somewhere.) At the end of the first chapter someone kills the biography-subject-billionaire, and in the second chapter I was planning to have the assassin show up on the author's doorstep seeking shelter. I was thinking the rest of the book could be the author and assassin on the run. It seemed to me that all of this would work well, but I also felt I was writing a book I had already written, and I always prefer to try writing something completely different. One other thing: I was thinking of naming the author in the book Wolfgang Wren.

Grand Meeting of Failures
A novel about a group of people who try to start an art movement. I recently posted excerpts of it here and here. But I quickly realized I had no idea what the art movement could be, and if it wasn't something convincing (or at least convincing to me) I felt the book wouldn't get very far. As well, I feel I write too much about art, and I find my books more interesting when art is only one aspect of the narrative (since in some way all my books are about the relation between art and politics.) There were also a series of art movements in my novel Polyamorous Love Song, and I don't really like repeating myself. Though there will likely be some kind of art movements in my future books, it's a topic I can't seem to stay away from.

Money Selling Poison
This was an idea from only yesterday. I posted the opening here. I suppose the idea was to write my own version of Catcher in the Rye. Two sentences from my notes: "The “phonies” don’t know that capitalism is already over." "Just to be clear, I know that “Jacob Wren rewriting Catcher in the Rye to make it more woke” is a completely bonkers idea." From the opening it doesn't seem much like Catcher in the Rye, more like a book about going back to school. I like the opening but, the more I think about it, the more I feel I don't really want to write about school. Yet I'm clearly not certain what it is I do want to write about.

Most of the above ideas lasted for at least a couple of weeks, but Money Selling Poison lasted for less than twenty-four hours, which is perhaps what inspired me to take this inventory. Try to figure out if there's any through-line running through all these different ideas, and if there's some way I can use this through-line as an arrow pointing me in the right direction.

This all reminds me of an earlier moment of my writing life, slightly over ten years ago, when I also began a series of novels that I started but couldn't finish. At the time I posted excerpts of them as follows:

I want to start again (possible opening for a new book.)
Excerpt from I Want To Start Again
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #2
Past, Present, Future, Etc. / Excerpt #3
The Great Fire of Slander -- (yet another attempt at a new novel)
My Apologies

And yes, someday I am thinking of taking all of these unfinished fragments and putting them together as some kind of book of unfinished books. But for now, I feel I need to keep writing new books, since some days it seems to me that writing these novels is the only thing keeping me sane (though it obviously doesn't keep me all that sane.)

Two final thoughts, things I've posted in the past:

Between writing novels, I attempt to start writing new novels, many false starts. Why does one of the starts eventually take while the others don't? Not a reason but a feeling. Mostly a feeling that I don't know where it's going but I want to find out.

Writing the first thirty pages of a new book and then completely abandoning it seems - if the frequency I have done so is any indication - to be absolutely my favourite genre of writing. (Though for many of these ideas it ended up being a lot less than thirty pages.)

EDIT: I've gone back to working on Money Selling Poison. Maybe it will become a book I did finish after all.



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Money Selling Poison

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"I was feeling bitter and washed up so I decided to go back to school. Many people I knew were going back to school around that time. One foot pressing down hard on the brakes while, at the exact same time, the other foot presses down hard on the gas. To employ a driving metaphor, that is what my life is like. But I don’t drive. In going back to school I was hoping to at least lighten my foot on the brake. I was older than the other students, but apparently came across younger than my age, so the generational divide often went unnoticed or at least unremarked. Nonetheless I felt it. Some days it was the only thing I felt while other days I set it aside. Each day I got up and went to class. I had decided to take all of the classes in the hope at least a few might interest me.

I was also trying to make friends. Trying to figure out how to access my charm. I knew, in certain situations in the past, I’d been charming, but could I do it here at school and on purpose? It was, in many ways, a time of starting over. The school itself was a rather unusual place. It prided itself on how few students were admitted, falsely aligning scarcity with value. Yet this falsehood had also worked on me, since the reason I applied for the scholarship was in the hope of spending time amongst people who were more brilliant than those I’d previously known. In the hopes that being accepted might mean I was also one of the brilliant ones. Since there was always some part of me that believed I already was (alongside some part of me that painfully doubted this fact.)

The acceptance email was formulaic yet meant I could afford to attend. Questions concerning money were the main reason many were deciding to go back to school, their decision contingent on funding. A dreamed of few years of respite from the harsh realities of low wages, of underpayment that subsidized a few more yachts and mansions for the ever-growing ruling class. Every year there were more mansions which meant more tent cities. I didn’t honestly think I’d end up in a tent, but I also wasn’t anticipating any great, undeniable success lying in wait for me along my future path. Like many people at the time, I found it difficult to imagine a future path. School would be a way to postpone the question, the inevitable, not indefinitely but for two full years. A band-aid solution I was hoping might unlock a more substantial one.

You might be surprised to hear that my charm did not immediately rise to the challenge. But everything in this life is a work-in-progress."

- From another attempt at an opening of a new novel, this one tentatively entitled Money Selling Poison



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A story about a soldier who...

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“A story about a soldier who, when ordered to fire at the enemy, instead turns around and shoots his commanding officer dead. A clear act of treason followed by the other soldiers spontaneously bursting into applause.”

I’ve decided to serialize my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on my Patreon. For the indefinite future all posts will be free content. The above lines are from the first instalment.

Faithful Unbeliever is the final book of an in-progress trilogy in which all three books are loosely based around questions concerning the desire for utopia.

You can find it here.


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Faithful Unbeliever on Patreon

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I've decided to serialize my novel-in-progress Faithful Unbeliever on Patreon. For the indefinite future all posts will be free content, so there's no reason not to follow: https://www.patreon.com/c/jacob_wren_writer

Faithful Unbeliever is the final book of an in-progress trilogy in which all three books are loosely based around questions concerning the desire for utopia.


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Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert

Two passages from Tell Them I Said No by Martin Herbert:


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“She quit solo shows at the age of forty, the point when, in recent decades, many artists’ profiles have dipped because they’re somewhat familiar, not the new kid on the block, exploring variation rather than innovation. The art world likes hot young artists and it likes reviving older ones after a few decades in the wilderness, but it doesn’t, as a rule, favor artists between about the ages of forty and sixty. Cady Noland, though, pointedly ceased production at the top of her game, which had the effect of ensuring a scarcity market for what she had already made.”


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“Concerning those who don’t leave, what one longs for – or what this writer, who sees too many exhibitions that are blatantly products of the studio treadmill, which circularly pay for the assistants and the fair-booth acreage, longs for – is some tactical thinking. No artist needs to undertake a half-dozen solo shows per year, plus fairs, plus a continual side salad of group shows. Artists who do this, given the unassailable fact that most of them are not modern-day Picassos, will in most cases burn out and deliver diminishing returns in the meantime. One wishes, however vainly – one writes, at least in part, to accrue useful examples of such – for artists to make statements when necessary and be silent when not. We have no shortage of art, or of galleries, and, as Mark Twain once said, 'No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.'”


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"men are reading less and less"

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"According to a recent article in the New York Times, men are reading less and less. Yet fiction is one of life's greatest pleasures. Why not rediscover the joy of reading with this novel by a Canadian author?"

Wondering how my book made it into 15 idées cadeaux pour tous les hommes sur votre liste in French Elle. "From retro gadgets to stylish apparel, these undeniably cool gifts are sure to delight." EDIT: I just realized it is also in the English version 15 Gift Ideas For Every Man On Your List. (Which makes the entire thing only slightly less strange.)