The creation of Fat Habits, my first and unpublished novel

Feburary, 1992 I took a Greyhound bus to California and then a plane to live with my buddy Rich in Haleiwa Hawaii. I was young and a writer but an immatuer writer. I did not realize then how much work went into writing. Actually I thought all I had to do was travel and live hard and I would be an instant Kerouac or Hemingway. Of course that was a long time ago. Anyway, I got the idea for Fat Habits after I returned home. My stay was short, only three or four months. Rich lost his job and desire to remain in Hawaii and he talked me into going with him, thumbing our way across country. It didn't take much to persuade me to join him. When I returned home I wanted to tell my road story. I kept a journal as we crossed the country and I preserved just about everything I saw, felt even read. It was a thorough chronical of our trip. The only thing wrong was I had no story, just a couple of young guys drinking and thumbing across the states. So my first manuscript, written on my mother's old word processor was basically my journal, printed. After that version I realized it needed more work but I shelved it and didn't touch it again until 1996 when I entered Umass Boston (again) and it was there, in class, that I started to seperate fact from fiction or at least trying to and still keep it real to my experience. After the school year, I got into some trouble and moved around a lot and it wasn't until 2001 that I decided to give Fat Habits another go. I worked on it nonstop. I worked on it at lunch break (telecomm and ac jobs), before work, sitting in my car waiting for the boss to pick me up, on weekends at night whenever. I even spent large amounts of time standing in a trailer writing instead of assembling the fixtures that our company had to install in the school. My writing began to vastly improve but seriously, Fat Habits went nowhere but flat. Still it remained too grounded in reality. It wasn't until 2008, on my like 5th version that I realized it needed a story and I would have to invent one, more characters, delete sections and characters, delete parts I had grown to love but had no relevance to the story I was creating. The more story I began to develop, the more characters and scenes I had to delete. So now I believe I have a good story, good writing but will need tremendous luck if it is ever to be published.