Epiphany
     I believe my struggle with the novel manuscript is fairly well documented. But it's probably not fair to generalize it so and pretend the whole damnable thing is giving me fits, it's mostly localized to a pivot point in the novel around the 20,000 word mark. Which hurts everything thereafter. It has existed in several different forms to this point. For awhile the changes I made were minor and didn't necessarily so much effect the events that were to follow and my ability to push forward, but then because I still couldn't quite get it to work (for me), I made a significant shift there at the 20k road sign, which made most of what I'd written past that point moot. But still that didn't solve the issue I was having. And finally, this weekend, I felt like I realized the reason why.

     It has also been fairly well documented that this novel manuscript is the most personal of things I've ever written, as much of the lead character's emotions and motives are a metaphorical look at my own, and while yes, there's always a part of us in our characters and our stories, this one is pretty blatant.

     In the novel, James becomes interested - perhaps obsessed - with the notion of things being buried and hidden on account of something he witnesses his wife doing that has a great emotional effect on both he and her. At the 20k word mark he, a lobster trapper by trade, dives off his boat and tows himself into the dark, mid-winter depths. It is from here everything becomes complicated. And it didn't occur to me until this weekend that maybe the reason why is I haven't come up out of the water yet, and that it's impossible for me as an author to get ahead of myself in this sort of metaphorical autobiography I'm writing. And that I probably won't be able to move successfully past this mark in the novel until I come up out of the water in my own life and can then mirror appropriately in the manuscript.

     So, with that in mind, I've decided to put the novel on the back burner for awhile. Any time I think I'm ready to try again, I'll pull it out and give it a go, but I won't beat myself up each time it doesn't work, such as it hasn't the past half dozen times. I understand now. And it won't work until I've re-emerged in my own life, and the fact is I might not realize I have until I try to write it and find it suddenly to work. Until then, I'll continue to wait, and finally try working on some other projects for a change, something I have not done since December 2005.