It's 5:00 PM. Garrett and Katie are watching a Star Wars cartoon, which is, unfortunately, not very good. Earlier we went to the library, where Garrett picked out a bunch of books on UFOs. Not because of Star Wars, though. Because of Godzilla. One does wonder how I will log all these UFO books. Science? Social Studies?

I've also been logging a lot of art for him lately. That's because he's been spending hours drawing pictures which include Godzilla spewing green fire, spaceships firing lasers, buildings burning and falling down... eight year old boy pictures, in other words. My particular favorite is the one in which Godzilla's blast of atomic green fire knocks the top off the Washington Monument.

I am not exactly sure how to deal with this, of course. I get the sense that it's not a very Quaker thing to let your kid run around pretending to blast enemy spaceships with lasers he's built out of Legos. Then again, I was the mom who was not going to let my kid play with guns at all. I scoffed at the idea that boys "just did that." But, lo and behold, boys really do just "do" that. Put a bunch of eight year old boys together and they will play war, or superheros, or anything else that involves a high level of adventure and pretend violence. Considering that some of the influence comes from TV -- the superheros thing, for instance -- my kids have always played out scenes from history, too, and history is no bed of roses either. In fact, the number of guns and swords involved in even the tamest retelling of history is enough to make a concerned and sensitive parent squirm. And then there's literature -- should we deprive our kids of Robin Hood? The Three Musketeers? Johnny Tremain? Greek mythology?

I don't honestly think it would matter. If you surrounded a kid in a cocoon of stories that only taught non-violence, you'd probably still have a boy who used sticks to hit things, like trees and weeds. Not to mention that you'd leave him with an unrealistic -- in fact, a false -- view of the world, constructed mainly of holes he could easily plummet through as an adult. You'd deprive him of some of the greatest literature on the planet, and the chance to let his mind work on issues which he needs to decide for himself, that no one can force him to believe or disbelieve. Not to mention that depriving someone of that much history and literature would probably leave you with a child bored stiff.

The reading textbooks they use in the schools try to do that. They try to leave out all the violence, the complicatededness of the world. And, as I remember them, they are deathly boring.

Of course, all of this is just an exercise in extremes, which leaves me no closer to knowing how to communicate non-violent values to my son without forbidding history, Robin Hood, and playing with kids from families who, say, support the War in Iraq. Because I don't think that's a good idea, and I don't think that most Quakers would think it was a good idea either. We have to live in the world, and so do our kids. That doesn't mean that I have to allow my kids to watch Power Rangers, of course, but it does mean that at a homeschool playgroup with about six other boys, there's probably going to be some swordwork involved.

And let's face it: I like Godzilla. And that picture of the tip of the Washington Monument popping off? That made me grin.

So I don't know. And this was not actually what I had intended to write about when I sat down. What I had intended to write about was how, on some days you are just a step behind in the processing of the day's events. How on days like this it's easy to find something else to do than the writing you are supposed to do -- such as rewriting your novel for the nth time -- because you can suddenly make no more decisions. Your mind has ground to a halt. You want to stop and think, and then again, you don't want to think at all. Not about the important things, the things you are caught up in processing. But about anything else. Which is why I have just written this little essay with no point about Godzilla and Robin Hood, and eight year old boys who like to make guns out of Legos.

Anyway, it's funny how you can talk yourself out of working on your novel, and how often I personally do it by writing. It's a paradox: in order to avoid writing, I write. It's like when you use your finger to stop a leak that's under pressure, but the water just shoots out of somewhere else.

This is the water, and the somewhere else.

The thing about the novel is that it needs to be laid down. (There, I said it.) It needs to be put to rest, to be... finished. "That was who I was then, and this was the novel I wrote. This is not the person I am now, and this is not the novel I would write today. But it is time for me to move on. It is time to say, whether or not this novel is ever published, I wrote it, I learned from it, I sweated over it, it taught me. If I never go on to write anything else, if I keep reworking this novel, I will never sweat and learn from another one. I will never grow from its teaching."

In other words, I have been feeling that I need to move on. To write "the end" on that chapter of my life. For the past two years, I have blamed a lot of other things on my inability to produce words. I have blamed the baby, homeschooling, my eldest child, my inability to keep the house clean, my need for sleep, my neighbors. But the truth is, I was hung up on that damn book. Because I wrote myself dry trying to finish it, and as my reply time grew longer and longer (and still spins itself out, nearly two years later), I began to think that acceptance, publication was the reason I was a writer. When that acceptance was continually withheld, I thought, why bother? Why do what I have always done? What's it worth?

But that's wrong. That's the wrong reason to be a writer. In fact, the entire reason that I am a writer (I have come to admit) is that I am a writer. I can't be anything else. (Witness this blog entry, when I am trying to avoid writing.) So to think of those ten years I've spent on Storm Clouds as "wasted" years is wrong. They were not wasted. In fact, I could not have done anything else.

But now that book is through teaching me, and there are others out there waiting in line. So instead of reworking that book to match the person I am now, I just need to let it remain the image of the person I was ten years ago, two years ago.

This is not to say that I won't attempt to have it published. It just means that I must stop investing so much worry into it. I cannot change it as much as I worry I need to change it. So I should just let it be, and that will be okay.

And that is one of the things I am trying to process today. And of course, I could only do it through writing about it. Because that's what I am.