It’s been quite a while since I posted something on this blog and perhaps longer since I wanted to write about anything in particular. It’s not so much a writer’s block or even a lack of material; just more a lack of inertia in searching for the right words to go whirling off my keyboard until they slam into the correct punctuation marks.
Better still, I’m just stuck.
Oh, I have half written posts about a travel incident in Ireland nearly 10 years ago, a few rants about our overwhelmed president doing an underwhelming job, and even a post about finding liberation through speaking the truth. None of them gave me the willingness to share them with what I’m sure is a dwindling audience (maybe this one will never see the light of day either).
The driving force behind this post has less to do about an interesting subject and more to do with attempting to get my groove back so I can sit down and finally finish my damn novel. Along the lines of Seinfeld and the modern-day version of the show, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, you could say, without contradiction, this post is about nothing. Now I just need to make nothing look interesting.
More than a year ago, I spent a few hours with one of the best book editors in the business. A novelist herself with a half dozen books published, she is taking time away from a hectic travel schedule promoting her novels in favor of an editing job and a steady paycheck. The purpose of the meeting was to see if she could find an editor to help me finish my book. In the end, she agreed to be that editor. I was surprised and honored she would be willing to do so and I set about to get her my jumbled mess of 420 loosely intertwined pages.
Before I packaged them up, I began to read portions of my novel and thought to myself, Well, I can’t send her this page or this page or this chapter and this chapter. In the end, I talked myself out of sending her a single page and told her my novel needed more work before it was ready for her. I’m sure she knew what that meant in writer-speak – I wasn’t about to let go of an imperfect manuscript, especially to someone who knew a thing or two about not letting go of imperfect manuscripts. I told her I would work out a few kinks and get it to her shortly. Well, that didn’t happen, as I’m sure she knew.
I don’t know what event caused me to pick up my novel again, or even when it was. Maybe it was an unseen force putting my fingers back on the keyboard and my mind back on track or a bit more time on my hands, but I’ve been re-working my novel and hope to have it ready for her to edit by the end of the year (if she’ll take it). I never set out to write a top-selling novel. I merely wanted to write a beginning, middle and end that I could be happy with and maybe share it with people close to me. If it made them happy, that would be enough.
Throughout my life I’ve had a completion problem, so this slog of finishing my novel has become, paradoxically, my epic Old Man And The Sea battle. Finishing it is the only goal now. Yeah, finishing it would make me happy….
