what constitutes the end?

this is the question. one we ask ourselves over and over throughout our lives. always seems to come up no matter the circumstance. in this case, i'm thinking about the end of my novel which just doesn't seem to want to end, as if it has a life of its own and i have nothing to do with it. and then there's the issue of the end, what it means, death. so much death all around me. always the prospect. so i have come to adopt it as something i encounter in my every day life, part of what to expect and in the case of my novel SEPTEMBER 10TH, death keeps knocking on the door. it's where it started and it's where it all ends (eventually) but that's past the place i intended.

the short of it

All this thought of food is utterly distracting but he can’t stop the cinematic progression. Artichokes drizzled with lemony olive oil. Savory goat cheese with ash. Mussels in Thai curry sauce. Escarole in vinaigrette. Food as sustenance, that and the lusty bottles of Bordeaux. He thinks of his inspiration—the provocative films of Fassbinder and Sheridan, the rigorous designs of Frank Gehry and Zoltan Pali, the powerful works of Smith and Iglesias, the literary feasts of Nabokov and Roth…all the motivating forces coming together, attesting to the inferiority of his work. Always something wrong when everything is right. Why can’t he jimmy the lock on the past when everything seemed so simple... There were people, the ones you saw every day who were genuinely happy and then there were the ones who wanted to be seen by you. He plays out these scenes loop after endless loop until he recognizes the drift.

finished or abandoned?

Paul Valery once said that "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." That's how I feel every time I'm approaching the end of a work. I'm not talking about editing; I'm a brutal editor.

Toward the end the work takes on a life of its own and it's out of the writer's hands. Anything you attempt seems false and unworthy and you wait patiently, attentively, for your character to emerge.

Five novels later, the end is still an illusion and if I attempt to defy the process, like a convict I'm engaged in forced labor and it's painfully apparent.