This post is a lousy substitute for a novel.

A high-school English teacher told me once that novel writing is easy, that you can just go on and on as long as you want and that you're not restricted in any way at all. "But a short story!" she exclaimed, "now this is real work!"

She had just handed us a short story assignment. At the time I hadn't quite finished writing my first novel that burdened my poor typing fingers with 360 pages (all of them embarrassing to read today). Wet behind the ears as I was, I sure as hell knew then that writing a novel was real work.

But that was eight years ago*. The latter half of that time I've been working on a different book (and a short story too, but you'd hate it). I've made two startling changes to it and I'm a bit jarred by them:

(1) Since the beginning I've been married to this one, deliberately heavy and melodramatic sentence that's always started the story off**. Well, I thought, fuck that. I'm a writer. I can write a new sentence! Right away I will!

(2) I also renamed my two leading ladies. One of them was originally modeled after someone I know and I kept the same name, but they're like separate people now and the name was constricting her growth--the written one I mean. She's called Finnegan now. The other character has been in everything I've written to date (except that first novel, incidentally) and her beautiful-but-cumbersome name has become a little dead to the teeth after six years and three books***. So now her name is Mint.

'Finnegan' means fair-haired in Gaelic. In the same language 'Mint' means the collector of thoughts, and a determined protector.

This feels like a good change. Although my writing instructor in third-year, Rosemary, said two things to our group that preoccupy me still:

"It takes seven years to write a novel."

"There are only two people in this class that I really think are going to be writers."

Notes:
*eight years ago: I just swore when I wrote that. Nothing that'll send me to hell but then again I'm a Jewish hebrew-school dropout.

**this one, deliberately heavy and melodramatic sentence: "I only own one dish because I live alone." It would morph back and forth between first and third person, present and past tense.

***dead to the teeth: I just thought of that. Does it make sense?