The Saturating Effect of Writing a Novel

I’m very close to finishing writing a novel. I knew that if it was to have a chance of being any good, I would have to get saturated in it. I would have to feel that I was living in the fictional world I created, so much so that I had to know a lot more about it than is set down in the text.

I realized that this would have to be the case when I read that James Joyce knew how exactly how much money Leopold Bloom had in his pocket every minute of the day during which the action in Ulysses takes place.

Of course, I don’t claim to be as meticulous as Joyce, much less closer than very distant from the circle of literary geniuses in which he resides, but I am experiencing that effect of saturation which gives one the feeling of living in a different world. I wonder if this is the way video game addicts feel, especially when playing cutting edge virtual reality metaverse games that enthusiasts feel show the way to how life really (or unreally) should be lived.