I am supposed to be writing a novel this year.

That is this year's thing. I am supposed to be writing a novel this year.

It's been five years since I finished my first novel. Maybe more than that, I don't know. I do know that it was something I finished and that's more than I can say about a lot of things.

I haven't finished much of anything since E and I moved down to Florida, since we were in Connecticut and I worked on Eating Stella Style and Ribcage: Volume 1. It was mostly Connecticut where I popped out 200 pages of that still unfinished, eternally unfinished non-fiction book as well.

My non-fiction book or memoir or whichever is an interesting little enigma for me to figure out. This blog you may or may not have noticed can shed a great deal of light onto the struggles I am having with said book.

I am not sure to which extent I am comfortable as a "public figure". I never was, actually, but I'm even less now. I've taken E into my world, married her, grown a few years and opening up every inch of my life to criticism doesn't seem fair. Without full truths and every inch, a book about my experiences is nothing and I know this, so if it has to be that way, then it has to be about the writing first and foremost. I only wish to put a story, a book, into the world... not myself and my life and that is a hard line not to cross. I feel I've crossed it more than once in the past few years and the results were very telling.

My essay, Nine Lives for the Fat Kid Frame of Mind crosses that line all over the place and that, that is the only reason why I put a price tag on the download. I'm not looking for seventy-whatever cents here and there, I'm looking for a filter. It's a good piece of writing and I think a lot of people have enjoyed it, but I won't open that much of my life to every single wandering websurfer.

I get rejection letters for short story submissions all the time. Most rejection letters are little postcards now and I keep them. They don't upset me in the least. It's all about the writing with my little rejection postcards and I like that. It's business or it's art and I'll just keep chugging away. I'll keep getting better. My life, however, does not change and nor do my choices. Those are solely mine, those are no business but my own... unless I keep putting them out there.

So I have a dillema there. For now, I'll wait until my writing, my art can present my non-fiction book as just that... artful writing.

I have other plans at the moment. That novel. And two characters we all may know.