Note to Self #2

It has been a while since I wrote a note to self on the blog.

Earlier this afternoon, I was drawn to look at the manuscript of the novel which I have written. By “drawn to look” I mean that I found myself reading through it as a beautiful distraction for what I should have been doing. You could call it procrastination if you were feeling cruel, but I am not feeling cruel so I call it divergent creativity.

The novel is called “the butterfly principle” and it took years and years to write. I think I began it around 1996 (yes, 20 years ago) and I wrote perhaps half of it over a short period when I was full of ideas and inspiration. Then I froze with it, stuck for where to go next. Waiting for inspiration to come as to where to take the characters next. And the characters have been around in my life in various guises for some time now. The main character, Alice, began life in the novel and then took on a greater shape in my doctoral thesis where she was one of the archetypal characters which I used for experimentation. After that, she also became the lead character in a sequence of poems called “the alice conversations” which I wrote in 2004. She also appears in other more recent poems. Other characters have drifted in and out of things that I have written too.

Then in 2009 I picked the manuscript up again and finished it off. It was done!

Here I am at the end of 2016 wondering where to go with it now. I read the ending to see where it went to. I love it. And I am far enough  away from the writing of it now to see it as though it is not mine.

Note to self – what do I do with it now. It has been sitting on a computer hard drive (oh, and on google drive too of course) for 7 years. Is it time to share it in some form? If you are reading this blog post and have any courageous ideas for me please leave a comment or send me an email. I just need a little push!

(November Challenge 17/31)

Also published on Medium.