• About writing the novel.
I tried to replicate the way in which I wrote when I was teenager as a way to get myself to write again, initially I was interested in writing a book about philosophy and literary analysis, I believed in a connection between the observations of metaphysics and the process of understanding meaning in semiotics. Later I lost interest in that idea, yet I wanted to apply those rules to fiction. Initially, when I started writing "The Queen's Club" the idea was completely different. There are still traces of that old idea in the book, one of those are Phil and Theo, named after "Philosophy" and "Theology". The first draft of chapter one was completely improvised, I had no plan for it other than to showcase those concepts using the characters as mediums. The biggest example of what I called "that which was not" is the mention of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit which originally was going to be Kant's Critique of Pure Reason but I decided to use Hegel instead because of other reasons. There are many references to philosophy in the book outside of the citations, and of course some sections were written with some attention to musicality and in a more poetic style. With that said I think the final book is more about the purpose of fiction and literary analysis rather than metaphysics, and even that is not as important to its meaning.
The chapters after the first were planned before writing, something that was necessary if I didn't want to make a story full of non-sense. Don't get me wrong, you can think of my story whatever you want. Do you want to believe it means nothing and I just wrote whatever? Go for it... But I wanted to believe in its own premise, Everything has an answer; but it's not always so clear. So it needed to make sense to me, even if that sense was a delusion. And of course, I did it... otherwise I would have kept rewriting until it was fixed. I learned a lot about the ways in which I like to write and I think my next novel will benefit a lot from what I've learned. In general, for a novel written in 30 days I feel somewhat satisfied, even though I think I made many mistakes. One of those was having too many characters for such a short concept idea, as a result many relationships were not fully explained and some interactions may seem confusing. But at the time I thought the story ran its course and adding anything to it would have been character drama (which would be okay if this was a character-centric novel). In any case, by the end I realized I needed to move on, I wanted to write something better.
• Why machine translation? + Future?
I think it would be very obvious if you are reading this text. My english is serviceable but that is the extent of it, machine translation is also serviceable but it makes mistakes. I chose to go with the machine and read the output, I fixed the issues that I saw (there may still be some I didn't). The final text is not bad by any means (compared to the original) but I also have to admit it is worse and not good. The second reason why I didn't translate it by hand is... well, that's fucking boring! I've read this novel too many times.
I'm probably going to do similar things in the future, but I also expect my future novels to be a lot easier to translate: A lot more like a novel and less of an experiment, but of course from time to time I have to write something obtuse for no reason, it's because I'm a pretentious cunt. But also because it's fun and that's all I want from my books: to entertain me, and hopefully entertain others. Slop is fine, I'll accept the slop tag, sloppa writer, I'm just some guy.