A Tale of Two (Unfinished) Novels

So this may sound sort of odd, but during the Easter Vigil Mass I suddenly thought of my unfinished novel Tribute to Charlie and how it was so much better than the one I did finish, with beautiful language and a mythic arc to the story. This inspired me to dig it out and read it again… and it wasn’t very good at all. Is it even worth finishing? I’m not really looking to get it published, but I thought maybe there was some reason I had to finish it. Like the novel I did finish, this is one I have been working on since I was just a kid. Were there more issues in my life that needed to get resolved? But it just seemed slapped together and not really all that readable, although there were a few moments in it that I enjoyed. Maybe, I thought, I am not really a good writer after all.

So… then I dug out my short stories and another unfinished novel, She the Horse, about the guy who is really 960 years old. First I read my short story about three bratty teenage girls and just loved it, but I thought it would be best to get a second opinion, so I made Travalon read it. He liked it too! Then I read what I have done of She the Horse and I really, really liked it. It’s funny to think that I wrote about middle-aged people in my early thirties, and it should be the slapped-together one because I wrote it for a contest that was just to see how much of a novel you could get done in the month of November. I pondered what was better about this novel than the other one and concluded it was the characters. I really like the people in She the Horse, but the people in Tribute to Charlie are so uninteresting that I do not care about their adventures. Maybe the scope of that novel is too epic, and the other one works because it is just a portrait of a marriage: the woman believes everything is falling apart because she knows her husband has a secret, but she thinks it must be infidelity. Maybe that is the novel I should finish. After all, it is the one all my friends said they were most interested in. Who doesn’t think it would be at least a little awesome to live to be 960 years old if you aged very slowly?

Famous Hat