The Difficulties of Finishing Anything

Next month is November, National Novel Writing Month.  For those of you unfamiliar with this, here is the deal: You have 30 days to write a novel.  A novel for these purposes is defined as 50,000 words of a non-fiction story that is completed (i.e. the story comes to its conclusion) by November 30.  It doesn’t have to be a good novel, it doesn’t need to make any sense, it just needs to be completed.  The prize?  You wrote a book.  There, now you’re an author.

This will be my third year participating.  Year one I began a gritty detective novel that ended a week into the month due to my contracting some sort of nasty flu.  I thought I could soldier up and write through it, but I am a far weaker man than I like to believe.  My future mother-in-law not only participated but won, and she had never written a story in her life.

Year two went much better.  I buckled down, took the story that I had worked on last year and advanced it a year.  I also decided to make it funny, since I’m not really a gritty guy, as much as I’d like to believe.  This went much better.  Not only did I finish the book, it came out very well, I think.  I’ve given the first draft to a number of people, all of which seemed to genuinly enjoy it (I don’t think they were humoring me).

My original plan was to not let anybody read the thing until I had written the second draft.  My deadline for the draft to be completed came and went, and so I just let people go ahead and read it, and I’m glad they did, because it made me feel good about what I had written.

But how’s that second draft coming, you ask?  It’s still sitting on the table in front of me.  Not completed.  Not even close.  And here we are, almost a year later.

I’m going to try again.  I’d like to be able to say that I’ve written not one but two unpublished novels.  Maybe I can even finish one of them and you, lucky reader, will be able to partake in my genius.

Until then, there is the blog, I suppose.