ManicDDaily

I am facing a real dilemma as a would-be writer these days. I am almost (truly this time) finished with a comic teen mystery novel called NOSE DIVE. It is a silly but fun book whose final proofs should be sent to me shortly. (Hurrah.)

So, now what? I started working last weekend on a novel that I had written bits and pieces of for last year’s Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month.) Approximately 50,000 bits and pieces. Though I ended up last November with a framework that seemed interesting, it was as fragile of the mere vision of a house of cards, meaning that it will require a lot of work from scratch.

In the meantime, I have three or four (maybe even five or six!) pretty close-to-finished old manuscripts. These are each novels, mainly for children or young people, that I thought at one point were done, but then began re-writing repeatedly, and finally, out of frustration with my own questionable decisions during revision, abandoned.

So now here I am, mainly just spinning wheels (the little ones in the cranium). Last weekend, the Nanowrimo novel seemed the most exciting if difficult choice. At my increasingly gloomy age, taking on a new and more serious book felt almost like being faced with a diving board–one of those things that if not attempted now, would be out of reach for the rest of my life.

But intervening weekdays filled with job, housework, and obsessive escapist reading, not to mention a large variety of internet distractions, and a very depressing world newscape–all seemed to snip last weekend’s thread.

Plus there are the ghosts of all those old, once-loved, novels. (My brain feels like it’s on a diving board with them too–that if I don’t address them now, I never will.)

The terrible thing is that the last time my body actually was on a diving board and I did make myself do a spring dive, it was actually sort of problematic. I mean, sure, there was the rush of fear and bravado during the prefatory springy steps, the jump, the upheaval of legs and torso, feet and head, the exhilarating plunge into the surprisingly cold hard water, but then I went so deep so fast, my ears beginning to hurt quite a bit, my stomach too, that I really wondered if it was such a great experience after all.

So, maybe, what I need to do first is look for another metaphor.