The Ninth Immersion is available from Amazon

The Story

On his deathbed, the composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, reviews the imagery of his life, as he fades in and out of consciousness, focussing on the time when he had immersed himself in the writing of the Ninth Symphony. Is the meaning of his life to be found in the memories which resist – with agonizing stubbornness – his attempts to arrange them into patterns, or is the meaning of his life to be found only in the purely-musical patterns of the Ninth Symphony? (The novel is best read with the Ninth Symphony playing faintly in the background, gradually swelling up in volume until it drowns out the novel by the end of the reading experience.)

The Making of The Ninth Immersion

This journal records my reflections on the process of the crafting of the novel as it evolved through the stages of planning, writing, editing and polishing. It constitutes an effort to be as conscious as possible of the process whereby the single idea that suggested the topic of the novel was expanded into a complex work of art. Topics range from the nuts and bolts of novel-building to the nature of the novel as an art-form.

Planning The Ninth Immersion

During the writing of the novel, I kept a hand-written notebook which records the day-by-day development of the novel as it found its shape and style. The notebook – now in print form – reveals how a vast cluster of thoughts was sifted, selected, structured and polished into novel-form.

The Project

Together, this novel, journal and notebook comprise the sixteenth installment in an on-going novel-writing project in which I am exploring the concept of form and meaning in the novel, and of the novel as a form of expression in the 21st Century. All of the published journals and notebooks are available for free download.