Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Oregon author Ken Kesey knew well what practicing noveists learn: Writing a novel, regardless of its quality, is hard.

Truth.

I’ve written four. The first one found a small regional publisher and came out to positive reviews and modest success. The second one, with the help of a New York agent, circulated the halls of the big five publishers for a year, got no traction and became part of my learning-to-write novels curve. The third one will be published this year. The fourth one is awaiting a polish.

I’m speaking from experience, two kinds, not one. Developing long-project completion chops in the real world also builds long-game muscles in creative work. These aren’t separate silos.

My examples: re-upholstering a barrel chair I love. Talk about terra incognita. That project involved a new power tool. But I managed to keep from stapling my hand to the chair.

And then there was the quilt. That began with excited-naive me buying a gorgeous hunk of fabric and falling in love with a swirling stitch pattern. Hand stitching the thing took a year. The picture above shows it on the dining room table at the basting stage, the bright red thread binding the cotton batting and the backing fabric together before the actual stitching could begin. It required more than 71,000 individual stitches, roughly a quarter-inch-long (I counted a square foot of it and estimated. Yes. I did. A person needs the data.).

I wish writing a novel didn’t take me as long as it does, but there you are.