Of Drama Queens and Red balloons, or: When is Ripe Rotten?

Truman Capote likened the finishing of a novel to taking your child into the back yard and shooting it. As a parent, I’m intrigued by the mind that could have created that sentence. Still, I take his point. I was all but undone by the completion of my previous novel, cried for days, became physically ill.  Wracked with grief for what I’d created and destroyed. But not with this one. This one felt more like letting go of a red balloon. There was that sense of loss, but also elation. I’d seen its shape from the beginning, knew from the moment I conceived it, that it wasn’t mine to keep. They never are.

It helps that this is the shortest novel I’ve ever written, that it’s almost pure genre, that it’s undercut by comedy and that, unlike with previous works, I have an agent waiting for it. It helps that I have the distraction of another book launch, some other big events at home. I wonder how long I should leave it to germinate. Is that the word? Ferment, foment? Will it sprout wings? A tail? Bubble and toil? Stephen King says the longer the better. Six months, a year. That makes sense when you’re juggling best sellers, movie deals and miniseries. But for the rest of us, when is ripe rotten? I won’t be the same person in a year. I may not remember what it was like to be the me of 2011, writing this novel. Why I did it may not seem so important. There may be other distractions, a new project. I may, over time, not be able to connect with the urgencies that impelled these characters at this time, in these places. And as any (speculative) fiction writer knows, timing is everything. Secret video footage of Princess Diana was central to my first novel. By the time I finished it, there WAS secret footage of Princess Diana.  An editor and I agonized recently over a short story that mentioned Osama Bin Laden. What do you do? Insert ‘the late’?  Replace Bin Laden with Al Zawahri? Who?

So, I’m thinking weeks rather than months. Catch up on TNB posts, hang up a Gone To Google+ sign on my Facebook wall; pull weeds, try to stay away from the body in the back yard. Murdered child, phooey. Get real, Truman, if finishing a book was like killing your kid, there’d be hell to pay.