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This time last year I was toing and froing on commissioning an editor to review a resurrected novel of mine. Even then I was caught between the ambition to release it and the desire to obliterate it completely. One moment I’d consider it a worthy effort, which I should at last set free. The next moment, it would seed acute agitation in my heart.

Eventually I would reconcile myself to sharing my manuscript with another, dispatching it to a published author and editor based in Los Angeles, to be pored over at length. It remained in their hands for four months, all through the winter, returning to me at the end of February. When it arrived back, their feedback was positive. I expected then to spend the rest of the year working on the manuscript again, acting on their suggestions, making that final push to finalise the novel once and for all.

But instead, I have barely touched it. It lies neglected on my computer. I have lost the impulse and inclination to pursue it. Is it because I took to working on a new novel while it was with the editor through the winter, and that has become my new interest? No, because I haven’t touched that novel either since early spring. Perhaps it’s more that all of this writing — both the old and the new — caused me to go delving into reality instead.

Here I would discover that reality is much stranger than fiction. So 2022 has been the year of the resurgent blog, as I’ve sought to make sense of everything. I thought I would spend the year polishing my fiction, but instead I have been forced to confront everything that led me here. Clearly, I misunderstood much on this journey: perhaps nearly everything. I have been completely thrown, to be honest.

So will last year’s fiction ever see the light of day? I have no idea right now. I have lost the momentum to follow it through; I’ve lost the inclination too. I feel like it has run its course. Or I have. I don’t know what to do with it now. We’re back to the same internal arguments I was having exactly a year ago, debating whether to give this novel life, or to confine it to the bin. Some things never change, I guess. To-and-fro.