Onward and Upward (aka, I am not a quitter)

Out of all the people in my life, the one whose opinion of me matters most is my husband. I'm not a criminal or anything, but I rely on him to be my moral compass. He gives it to me straight when he thinks I'm acting poorly, or making a bad choice. He's not perfect himself, but he's got a strong streak of the Dudley Do-right, and strong opinions that he will not hesitate to share (hey, he's Mediterranean).

For all his virtuous inclinations, I have never met someone with worse luck. I'm not talking bad luck at the craps table (although that may or may not have been the case last weekend). I'm talking eleven years of watching a brilliant, hard-working guy get kicked in the teeth by Misfortune, over and over and over. Like the second year we lived together, when during a three-month span he: 1) landed in the hospital with hepatitis A, 2) recovered well enough to rejoin his beloved rugby team, whereupon he immediately shattered his collarbone requiring a plate and four screws, and 3) struggled through the pain (no painkillers, because of the previous liver damage) to finish his exams and get his diploma so that he could go to the US with me to start grad school, only 4) then he got his rejection letter in the mail from Stanford.

And that's nothing compared to the year he lived through last year, which I won't go into because some of that is still ongoing. Just imagine horrible heaped on top of horrible. But I will tell you that he recovered from the hep, collarbone and rejection, came to the US with me anyway, and got into Stanford on his second try. Now he has a very successful, if rather high pressure career, and everything he achieved, he's gotten on the merit of sheer persistence. This man received zero help from Old Man Lady Luck.

So this morning my husband sat down with me and said, 'I'm worried about you. You worked so hard on this story, and now you're going to throw it all away because of a stupid piece of bad luck.' This did not sound as sweet as it looks on the screen. In fact it sounded pretty annoying to me, She who does not like to be told what to do. But...he has a point.

If you've been reading my posts for the past two weeks, you've seen me flip-flop on where I'm going at this point. The siren song of the shiny new idea has been damn near impossible to resist. The passion I've felt for my YA-but-more-likely-upper-MG adventure story got a little squashed, despite my declarations to do it up better than ever.

But to set it aside without finishing it? Without querying it? I know that most writers draft several books before they write the one that gets them to the next level, but shouldn't I at least try with this one? If my husband had let bad luck stop him, he'd probably be slogging away at some mid-level job in Darmstadt instead of launching rockets into space. And if I've learned anything from him, it's that persistence really does pay off in the end.

So, that's my decision. Finish the rewrites, give it all a whirl, and then I can get back to that shiny new idea, which I may or may not have already written several chapters of. Sorry for all the wishy-washyness--this has been quite the unexpected speed bump. And now, back to our regular programming.

Here we go again...