Dad comments on this blog, “So, how’s the novel coming?”

Yeah, about that…

That’s what I’m blaming for my 5-month hiatus from this blog. I was writing the novel, and the writing was getting thinner and thinner — like icing running out but you keep spreading it on the cake anyway. I knew it sucked — I didn’t know enough about the characters, their motives, the time period, nothing. But I wrote and wrote, trying to turn out a crappy first draft by the end of the year. Giving myself a self-imposed deadline.

When you’re a writer and you know what you’ve written sucks, you give it to someone else to read in hopes that maybe nobody else will notice its suckitude. But of course, they do. I gave the sucky half-written novel to Bob, in hopes that he would tell me it was a best seller, but after he read it, he disappeared. That’s always a bad sign. Because when you’re a writer, and you give someone something to read, and they love it, and they love you, they usually can’t wait to tell you that the writing is good. But when it sucks, they don’t want to tell you, so they hide for a while until they can figure out a nice way to tell you that it sucks. He was kind and never used the “s” word. He never said don’t finish it.

But I knew that it was broken and that I didn’t know how to fix it. I was so disappointed that I put the novel away. I put the blog away, I put the idea of writing away. But writing pulled at me until I had to try again. I restarted the blog when a poem nagged at me in the middle of the night.

This week I told a writing friend about the sucky novel and that I wasn’t going to finish it. She said, “Ah, finishing is overrated. If it isn’t working stop writing it. Write something else.”

That’s very freeing advice. Makes me feel relieved. Like in yoga class, when we were all doing a one-legged tree pose and falling out of it very ungracefully. The yoga teacher said, in her friendly Brazilian accent, “Ah, balance is overrated.”

I started again with something else. Just a page so far. No deadline. I showed it to Bob and he said, “This is good. Where’s it going?”

I don’t know. And I don’t know that I care. For now, that’s beside the point.