The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s a book you never finished but still think about?

I think most readers would be surprised at how often writers abandon books, even completed ones. In this way, I am like most other writers. Follow me as we take a journey through my head-canon of the universes that I’ve either almost abandoned or am not yet ready to complete.

I would start with HRYKA, the first novel that I wrote completely from start to finish. I finished it in or around 1995, I think. It’s been dead for so long that I’m not even sure anymore. I let a friend read an early draft and he told me that I had just written Macbeth in space. At the time, I took that as a damning critique (I’m not original) even though I hadn’t been aware of the parallels as I wrote it.

These days, with the whole recasting of classics into modern or fantastical settings, Macbeth in space might actually have an audience.

But reading it last year, the writing is immature and heavy-handed when it comes to plot.

There would be a ways to go before it would be ready for your eyes.

I wrote about 30,000 words of a story, THE WINDS OF ZEPHYR, in the 1990s, then completely forgot it existed. A couple of years ago, I started roughing out a story that has many parallels to it, but tells the central conflict from the opposite perspective. While working on this, I didn’t remember Zephyr at all.

About a month ago, I found some word docs on an old hard drive, and there was Zephyr! And then the light bulb moment hit when I realized that much of this could be repurposed into this new story, that I could tell this conflict from both perspectives. It’s now on the list of possible future stories.

Until very recently, TAU CETI would be on this list. I started writing it in or around 1988. I completed it, such as completed is, in or around 2015. I was mostly happy with it, it was probably the best book I could write given my abilities at that time.

Its problems have been myriad: It’s too complex a story for a writer of my ability (at the time, maybe…maybe not now). It’s a decent story, but my reason for writing it is that it sets up a much more important story in the sequel. That’s not a strong motivational reason to struggle with a story, which makes it easy to abandon whenever the complexity makes it feel insurmountable.

There’s another book that I would love to write, but I know that even now I’m not ready. It’s a complex story (it seems like that’s a recurring problem in my writing) about two young boys who grow up in Beirut, Lebanon during one of Israel’s invasions. The boys get taken in by a group of traveling Buddhist monks, who try to teach them to be ambassadors for peace. The boys live their lives, with varying levels of success and notoriety before meeting again, on opposite sides of peace negotiations around the war that tore Yugoslavia apart. Their differing lives have led them to different concepts of peace, and their friendship may not be enough to help end this war.

As a reader, there are many books that I’ve DNF’d (Did Not Finish) but few that have called me back to try again.

Back in my undergrad days, I had a girlfriend who swore that Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was a mind expanding experience. I found it needed more attention than I could give it. I may have finished two chapters. On a number of occasions, I’ve thought about going back and trying it again. I don’t know, maybe that moment has passed.

I’ve started A Canticle for Leibowitz a couple of times. It shouldn’t be that hard, but I didn’t connect, and I wonder if I would now that I’m older. Same with author Umberto Eco: I’ve tried a few different books by him without ever getting as invested in them as I expected I would.