Finishing things

Just like last year, after last year’s knee surgery (right knee), I’ve been finding it hard to start writing again after this year’s knee surgery (left knee). So my writing time now is characterized by what I’m calling grinding away, as if writing were an obdurate plank of wood and I am attacking it with an adze or an awl (have no idea what these tools actually do), trying to get back into the swing.

I did finish one thing – an essay about my mom’s recipe folder. I picked it to work on because the draft I’d written was in such a bad way I figured I couldn’t make it worse. (I have no idea where to send that, but whatevs.)

I wish, as I have wished many times before, that I could finish up all the many many things that are languishing in various folders and files on my computer, the stories, flashes, novels, novellas, etc.

On the one hand, why do I find it so hard?

And on the other hand – wait – there is no other hand. Is there a spot in my brain that is the unfinishing spot? Some bit of DNA that flashes DNF?

But wait again – there is another hand. I have finished things: three novels, a great number of stories (more than fifty, surely), and a possibly even greater number of flashes, plus a few poems (although those hardly count, I guess, since I’m not much of a poet).

How to deal with this? And by this I mean two things – the writing-regularly this and the finishing-things this.

Regularly Finishing

--this is easy: just be writing, right/write? --pick something randomly to finish

--try new times to write --pick something short

--evening --something I don’t care abt (because

--or morning it won’t matter if I screw it up)

--give myself a word count --make a list of things I can stand to

--or an assigned time work on (that’s phrased badly, no?)

--or both Things I’m interested in?

Or better, a list of things that weigh on me

What are the things that weigh on me, that I long to have finished or to be finishing? There’s so much of it that the idea of weight is appropriate, like I’m dragging it behind me, like the ghost Marley with his chains of lockboxes and whatever he was carrying around, except for me the chains would be hung with manuscripts and notebooks and ideas written on scraps of paper. Or maybe the unfinished things would be the ghosts. The Ghost of Novels Past. The Ghost of Short Stories Present.

The above was mostly written in a file titled Writing Stuff Winter 2026 (even though it’s not quite 2026), and at this point I stopped to make a list of what is in my head that is carrying that weight of responsibility and desire and guilt. And also I stopped to ask myself – am I writing a substack? (It turns out that I was.)

Here is the list, of which I’m half proud and half ashamed:

1. Afterwhen - the climate change novellas

2. In particular, Jude, since that’s the one that I was working on last

3. Ivy and Ulli

4. The Rachel story, still, after all this time

5. The trio of UNF novels: SbW, Memoirs, Nora R

6. 29 palms

7. Sugar castles

8. The irene story

9. The val story

10. Sister Rene

11. Under the hill in some form or other

12. Adena Lake

13. The idea of the wedding trilogy or whatever; wedding stories intertwined?

14. The otherside school

15. More cousins flashes

That’s a long list; and it leaves out a lot (a lot!) of other UNF stuff in various states of completion, because I am excellent at starting things. If I only finished a third of them this year, that would be a monumental accomplishment, no?

Happy Writing New Year!