Yesterday I took an unfinished manuscript out of the box where I'd packed it away. That collection of notepads of scribbled pages, printed-out sheets of research notes and bits and pieces of ephemera just wouldn't leave me alone. It's a novel I began almost five years ago, filled with enthusiasm at the time. I got somewhat over one hundred printed pages into it and got stuck.

Well not actually stuck. Looking back, now I realize it was a remark by a critique partner that threw up the roadblock. I took the comment to heart and began comparing my work with others, resulting in total despair of it ever being something worth publishing. Try as I might from that point on, I could not generate any passion for the work. Off and on, I'd rescue it from its lodging place at the back of a shelf, struggle to get back into the flow of things, with no success.

One day as I was reading David Morrell's excellent Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing, I came across a statement where he mentioned: "there were times when a project wasn't going anywhere perhaps it didn't need to. If you had revised everything that needed revising and fixed everything that needed fixing, and it still wasn't working, perhaps the best solution was to set it aside and begin work on something different."

Yippee! This successful author was giving me permission to turn my back on a project that had caused me untold anguish for a couple years. Not yet ready to actually put it in a trash basket, I found a box big enough to hold all the notebooks and papers, stuffed everything inside and slide the box into the dark space beneath a worktable (my only available storage space.)

That worked for about a week. But the darn characters persisted in dancing around in my head, bothering me at the oddest moments. I guess they weren't too happy about their seclusion from the light.

So, I'm bringing them back to the computer. Hopefully, with a whole different attitude. It's apparent these character are going to continue to struggle to live. I have to assume this is a story that insist on being told. And that is what I will do. I will plug on, writing out the lives of these two women. But with no expectations of anything more.

Blanche and Katrina will live, experience the strong friendship that survives all that life throws their way. Eventually I will have another packet of printed pages to file away with other unpublished stories...stories that just demanded to be written.