Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

The first anniversary of my retirement approaches, and it finally feel as if I am making headway. I am not complaining, but it has been a period of great transition. After nine months, I am finally sleeping more than 5 hours/night (usually), all of our insurances are now in post-retirement mode, almost all of the “big” household projects are complete, and the gardens are now have less of the “prettyish kind of a little wilderness” vibe and more of the “someone definitely lives here” vibe.

Which means—in theory—that I now have time to relax, recreate, and indulge in avocational pursuits such as reading from my towering TBR stack, learning new weaving techniques, and of course, writing. Writing has been the most difficult for me to restart; I’ve tried to keep to my schedule here, but frankly, it’s been a challenge to maintain my regular Thursday posts. Life, current events, injuries, domestic duties, support of friends and family (such as I’m able), they all take energy and pull from my ability to focus. Poetry has been my mainstay, a manageable way to keep my hand in. Ideas and concepts bubble up while I’m on my walks, then percolate for a few days, a week at most, until they’re either tossed aside or they crystallize into something I can further fashion into a piece that I’m not embarrassed to post here.

But what about longer works? What about that novel that’s been “in progress” for longer than I care to admit?

If this Work-In-Progress and I were in a relationship on Facebook, it would be listed as “It’s Complicated.” On the one hand, I began it for all the wrong reasons, while on the other, it is in some ways my best work to date and incorporates ideas and a stylistic structure that I’ve wanted to use for decades.

Today, the WIP is only 30k words long; as I’ve written before, the 30k-word choke-points are treacherous shoals for me to navigate and I’m just not sure if the outline can shoulder a full 90k+ word count. It’s also in a style that is a big leap for me, i.e., non-genre or “mainstream” or (even worse) “literary” fiction. In short, it’s about regular folks with regular troubles and is completely devoid of gizmos and shootouts and car chases and intrigue. And, as mentioned, the impetus to take this turn away from genre fiction came not from some internal desire to “stretch my creative wings,” but rather from wanting to please a dying parent who never saw my genre fiction as legitimate and who, at one point, after the publication of my fourth novel, asked “When are you going to write a real book?”

So, yeah. Complicated.

But like I said, the writing itself ain’t bad. It’s personal, intimate, fluid, honest, sharp, and emotional. I’ve been able to seamlessly merge two distinct timelines—one historical, one current—and the transitions between the two, inspired by Cortazar’s “Axolotl,” both blur the distinctions and link the main characters from each story. In fact, one chapter (in a slightly different form), was good enough to have been published in a short fiction magazine. So it’s not like I hate everything about the project. Far from it. Which is why I’m torn.

I am, in general, a person who likes to complete what I set out to do. Be it a home repair job or a promise to meet for coffee, if I say I’m going to do it, I endeavor to keep my word. If I find I’ve gotten myself in over my head, I’ll usually call in help rather than abandon the project altogether. Completing this novel, however, isn’t something I can’t do; my heart just simply is no longer in it. I could force myself to complete it, write it out to what is probably its full 60-70k words—too short for a marketable novel—and then decide if I wanted to bother marketing or publishing it, but what would that teach me?

Options: (1) Complete the work, or (2) Abandon the work.
Follow-up options: (a) Market the work, (b) Self-publish the work, (c) Post the work here in manageable chunks, possibly with analysis, (d) Trunk the work.

It doesn’t help that I have been entertaining the concept of an entirely new series of books (genre fiction) that I think might be a lot of fun to research and write.

I’ll have to dust it off and see if a re-visitation pushes me one way or the other.

We’ll see.

Onward.

k