I’ve said this before and I’ve always gone back on it, but you have to believe me, this time I really mean it: I’m done with my thesis novel. Finished. I’ve officially moved it to my “Failed Attempts” folder, from whence it shall never return. When I had said I was going to move it to my “Failed Attempts” folder in the past, I lied. Well, I didn’t lie, exactly. I was planning to do it. But when it came time to actually make the cut and paste, it just felt too, too, I don’t know, too something. Too painful. But this time, it’s already moved. It shall forever be considered just another one of my failed practice novels.

How do I know I’m really going to stick with it this time? Because this time, it felt really good, like a relief. It felt right. This time, I decided, I really am ready to move on.

And not only that, but this is the first time I’ve looked at the novel and thought, Eh, it’s not really that great. I got to this point because I was working on yet another revision of the novel, with the intention of entering it into Fence’s Modern Prose contest. This revision was sort of a combination of my most recent draft and some earlier drafts, and I do think the result was better than what I’d been sending around. When I had been cutting things in previous revisions, I actually cut some scenes that I now think are pretty integral to the reader’s understanding of certain characters, so with those scenes woven back into the story, everything felt a lot stronger.

But as I was working on it, I started really analyzing how well some of the components of the novel are working. There are some great things in this story, I think. Some of the writing is really strong, and some of the moments feel perfect. But there are some really serious problems with a couple of the characters, leaving those characters feeling very flat on the page. There are points that lag, too, and I almost feel like it’s a novella that’s been stretched in to an entire novel.

In short, I don’t think I want it to get published. I don’t think it reflects what I’m capable of. I can do better. I’m a much better writer now than I was when I began this novel. My first drafts, now, need less work than this nth draft of my thesis would still need, and I think it would be a better use of my time to work on a new first draft of a new novel.

Which is exactly what I’m doing right now. And the truth is, I’m having way more fun and am way more interested in this new novel than I am in reliving for the millionth time the same story from my thesis. I’m just so sick of Timothy Bannister and his dead father—there, I said it. I don’t want to work on this novel anymore. I don’t want to send it out. I don’t want it to get published.

But that doesn’t mean that those few years I spent working on it were a waste. I learned a lot about how to write a novel from this experience. I made a lot of mistakes and learned how to fix them, and I think my next novel will be much stronger from draft one as a result. Maybe the next one will be a practice novel too, who knows? But I do know that this last one definitely was, and finally—FINALLY—I’m okay with accepting it and moving on.