Elwood L. Wood

Elwood has a face of familiarity. Most likely, you think you know him.

New acquaintances often ask, “Have we met before? You look so familiar.” Strangers constantly stare at this warm, normal looking fellow when he is anywhere in public. In line at the grocery store, on the subway, at a baseball game, at restaurants, in the men’s room at a Burger King in Terre Haute, Indiana.

While eating alone at Sbarro’s sometimes he can see in his peripheral vision somebody’s grandmother quizzically studying his face. It’s only a matter of time before they gather enough nerve to tell him that, “you look exactly like my grandson. Especially from the side.” He will have to sit there forcing a smile and feigning interest while his delicious slice of supreme pizza gets cold as Ethel tells him about how her grandson is in graduate school at Stanford, or just got a job in D.C., or how young Dexter got a promotion at JP Morgan.

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Here’s my idea. I started writing this “novel” way back in 2004 and I still can’t get it out of my mind. Yesterday, while running along the odiferous East River, I had the idea of writing my novel in many small parts whenever the mood strikes me. It’s not a blog. It’s a novelog. My hope is that each post on this will either be a portion of the novel, loose in structure, voice, tense, time, and place or some sort of update about how the writing is going and my life in general.

I am Tim Spellman. The eponymous character is Elwood L. Wood. He is not me, but our lives will intersect from time to time.

OK. Here we go.