When is it time to let one project that you’re wrestling with too much rest and move on to a different one? That’s a question many writers struggle with more than home re-modelers struggle with deciding on the best walk in bathtubs for a split-level north woods cabin.

When I started working on Thirty Minutes Or Less, I had just found out my mom was stage three cancer and wouldn’t be with us much longer. I was dealing with the impending death of one of the closest people in my life to that point, aside from my wife. So instead of wallowing in grief, fear and self-pity, I came up with a fun, lighthearted concept for a supernatural mystery series that allowed me to work out some of my issues with mortality.

By the time Mom passed, I was at least a quarter of the way through a draft, well over 120 pages, and feeling good about seeing it through to completion. Then I had all my hard-drive issues and it’s been nothing but false starts and re-starts ever since.

For a long time, I blamed this on losing that 120-page draft-in-progress. But really, I think at this point, the main reason behind my lack of enthusiasm for the project is that whatever grief-coping mechanism sparked the energy behind the idea is something I’ve more or less worked through now, so writing the novel has become a chore again.

So I still like the concept of a pizza delivery guy who solves mysteries with a ghostly sidekick who just happens to be the ghost of the first murder victim he stumbles across? Yup. It’s a fun concept and definitely a novel worth writing, perhaps even the framework for a solid series.

But is it the novel I should be working on right now? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe there’s something new in me, something more full of energy and verve that would make me eager to sit down and write that story.

Maybe the biggest problem with Thirty Minutes or Less has nothing to do with hard drives or movie-makers who are working on a project of the same title. Perhaps it’s just that this particular novel’s season has past, and if I want to work on a project that I can finish, I need to find a new project than I’m excited about, instead of trying to re-create one I lost when a hard-drive crashed, and have been trying to recapture ever since.