I Did Not Attend Church This Morning

So this morning I finally decided that I would be brave enough to do it: I would read over my "final" manuscript of stories-- Nine Lies-- which I finished and haven't looked at since last May. Would I decide that it's total shit? Would I decide that it's a masterpiece? Both of those extreme reactions seem like crazy-person response, but I was secretly hoping for one of those verdicts. Because wouldn't that be a whole lot less depressing than the realization that I usually come to after rereading this work after setting it aside for several months: that it's good, it's promising, but it needs work.

Hopefully I would feel more positive than after the last time I had completed a "final" version-- sometime in the early 2000's. At that time I had printed out many copies and sent them to various friends and readers, only to decide later that the whole thing needed an overhaul, and I was mortified that I had sent it out at all. Several years passed and then I decided to restructure the whole thing and turn it into a novel. After completing that, I decided to turn it back in to separate, but somewhat connecting, stories. That is where it stands now. Or should I say, sits, on a shelf.

With the aid of absolutely no caffeine this morning, I read the first story, which is rather long, called, "To Havre and Have Not." I have never worked on a story so much as I have worked on this story. I feel like if I was a Mason, I would have single-handedly built one of those grand Masonic halls, except that it wouldn't have a practical use-- 9 doors, 9 rooms, all opening on each other and going nowhere. But let's not bring the Masons into this; I just like the buildings. The memory of writing this story feels like I painstakingly passed my whole body through the eye of a needle. Well, maybe not that. More like I drove back and forth across the country a few times.

Anyway, I feel removed from this story now. I didn't remember at all how I had restructured it. My reading was as objective as it's ever going to be from me. It's not the most reader-friendly story ever written. It starts out making you think it's a straightforward adventure narrative-- or such a story with flashbacks. But then it becomes something else. Set in that weird little pocket of our history between the Y2K (non) crisis and Sept. 11, it was written later, knowing that things would get worse and worse and worse. I feel like this story is about my last desperate attempt to hold onto something-- which I end up losing forever.

I read it. It didn't put me to sleep. I didn't cringe. It actually surprised me, even though I've read those words, in one form or another, about 4000 times in the past. I like this story. I more than like it, but I don't want to sound pretentious, or like a crazy person-- though maybe I am pretentious. And a crazy person. Am I just a pretentious crazy person? But this isn't about me. It's about the story-- and I liked it. At this point, I don't feel like I have any more rewriting to do. Now for the next 8 stories.