Failure of the Day: Writing

And on days when it is warm outside and ice cold in this bedroom cum office in my apartment, a person's thoughts necessarily turn to the novel I am failing to make brilliant.

It might not be my fault. It's possible that the idea at the root of this novel is Not Good, and I was doomed from the start. But of course, since the idea for the novel was mine to begin with, it comes back to being my fault again. The people who know me are certainly tired of my cries of "But I'm NOT a novelist!" I'd like to think that because my poems are actually quite nice and usually easily published, I can be forgiven for writing a lousy novel. I can't. Writing a novel is startlingly different from writing a poem. That probably seems obvious, but it is a fact I managed to overlook. I *KNOW* how to write poems: I have a nifty bag of tricks and literary gambits. I am a novelistic pauper though; my pockets are empty.

Even as I write that, I don't believe it completely. There are portions of the novel that are very good. It's only lousy as a whole. But that's pretty much the ballgame, don't you think?

Ah, well. more later.