Jeannine Atkins

A friend here on LJ recently wrote about a leery relationship with works in progress. I began to wonder if this may be because she has a small kindergarten, or at least triplets, of projects. When several noisy books-to-be are tugging on your trousers, how do you choose? Sometimes do you just shut the door on all to stop the noise?

I’m feeling the temptation now to shut the door as I pull together a few years of notes on my novel-with-poems. I'm raking pieces together, plugging in holes, trying to pull together a few finished chapters I can bring to my writing group. I want something pretty in my life, something that at least at first glance appears to be finished.

But I get distracted typing notes for another project that calls. I collect ideas and put them in very messy folders. Should I be giving these my focus instead? In some ways, the Voices of the New are always louder. There’s all that possibility, the salty taste of what’s unknown which, let’s face it, is attractive. We hear the promises, and don’t yet know the problems.

But with just a bit of pinching I can remind myself I love my older project, too. For better or for worse, in sickness or in health, to swipe a line. There are fewer surprises, but there are surprises. And while I like being dreamy, trying out this and that, spilling out uncommitted scenes riddled with gaps, if I ever want an adorable child – or even a loud rascal - to pick up a new book with my name on it, I’ll have to go through the big clean up at the end, wrestling fragments and run-ons into proper sentences.

So I’m keeping on with the old. Trying to celebrate the small beauty of a new sentence and have faith in time as something that will give me more chances once I finish what I started.


Azalea, blue-star flowers, and iris by my porch: