This novel was given up for dead. After writing a couple of fast and loose drafts, I came to the conclusion that it was…irredeemable. So I stuck a hard copy in the closet to quietly decompose. A year or so later, after abandoning the next project, I was feeling desperate. What if I never finish a project again? So I hauled out the hard copy, read it over, and found that:

1) it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared, and more importantly

2) I now had some ideas about how to make it better.

What’s the lesson here? Maybe it’s: Kill your darlings if you must, but remember where they’re buried.