Unfinished Novel

Looking for a new project this morning, I dug through my files and pulled out the yellowed typescript of the first draft of a novel I started in Mexico almost fifty years ago and never finished.

Inspired by Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn it was to tell, in the first person, the story of a runaway farm boy. I called it The Adventures of Carl Miller. On the upper left corner of the title page is a notation telling me where and when I began the novel: Oaxaca, 12 January 1970. At the bottom of the page is the notation of when I stopped working on it: Halted 13 February 1970. That was because, after producing just short of a hundred pages in a month, I stalled. I stalled after writing a hundred pages of my first two attempts at a novel as well. Eventually, with my memoir, Leaving the Farm, I learned patience, perseverance, and trust. I learned to keep at it until you complete a first draft, a form, however rough and unrealized, you can then begin to cut and expand and shape into a second draft, and a third, into as many drafts as it takes to finally "finish" the thing. Of course it's never finished. Only, if you're lucky, it's accepted by a publisher and you go into a final process with an editor.

Anyway, I exhumed this old attempt this morning with the idea of maybe taking it up again, of perhaps making of it a novel for juveniles. The writing isn't bad, actually, and I have nothing else on my plate at the moment. What's more, to write a novel of youth, for youths, kind of appeals to this old man.
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