books I almost wrote

Sometimes not writing is harder than writing - but not really. It's just hard in a different way. The guilt. The nagging sense that you're losing time, getting nothing done. You end up feeling haunted. I was writing almost everyday, working on a novel. It was going pretty well even though I didn't know WHERE it was going. I figured I'd recognize it - the WHERE of the thing - when I got there. Then I'd go back and cut out the shitty parts (also the really good parts that just didn't fit.) That's how I do it. I let the thing go and it drags me along behind it. All I have to do is hang on.

And then somebody put a spoon down my ear and beat the shit out of my brains. Handed me a new phone and welcomed me to the 21st century. Which means the novel is on ice. It's just kind of lying there. I'm not sure if it's dead or alive. A cryogenically frozen fetus. Stem cells. It's just lying there, scaring the crap out of me. So I try not to think about it. I think about Libya. I think about the weather. I think about my job and the people at my job. I think about all kinds of things - I worry about all kinds of things - but I don't think about the novel. It comes after me though. It finds me.

Maybe this summer I'll go back to it. More likely I'll start something new and abandon it when work starts again. Then there will be two of them. But of course there are already more than two of them. How many? Five, six? Ten? I don't know. I try not to think about them. There's the one about the guy whose wife lives on some island, calling him on the phone occasionally, taunting him from her island. There's the one about the guy stranded on another island overrun with marsupial dogs. There are others. They all have islands for some reason. And then there are the ones I've finished. What to do with those?

Sententia is going to publish the first three chapters of my novel Zero. That's heartening. Because it's good and I love it. I mean I love it as if it were the thing that created me and not the other way around. I love the characters in it and want people to read about them. They're a little strange, but it really couldn't be otherwise. What would be the point? The main character thinks he's a monster.

In the novel I've just abandoned (I've admitted it!) there is a character who looks like Henry David Thoreau. He has a terrible sense of direction and gets lost in a cornfield for several days. I don't know why I decided to make him look like Thoreau. There's probably no serious reason behind it. Just for laughs. But I guess I'll never know unless I go back to it.

Go back to it.

I can sit down every morning for months and write, and then something happens, some event out of my control - work, birth, near-death experience. And that's it. Dead. All I can do is go back to it.

p.s. Nominations for the Million Writers Award are open for a few more days. Till the 15th, I think. I nominated Anita Naughton's story Bitter Lemons. And what about you? Get over there. Make somebody's day. Make my day!