Pass the cheese.

Clarence the cross-eyed muse and I...we're working it out.

I found out something interesting--half-finished books can be like cheese. Leave them lying around long enough and they may just acquire a character you weren't expecting. This is better in the case of the book than it is in the case of the cheese, not that I'd recommend either on a canapé tray. But a little smell, a few streaks of je ne sais quoi which you hardly knew you were inoculating the manuscript with when you eked out the words, can cause it to come out of that dusty stack of stuff-you'll-get-to-eventually with a patina you're certain you didn't beat into it. But you did. It's just that in the trudging...during the times of painstaking doldrums, when you could cough up little more than a sentence or two a week...you couldn't see it. The character of the characters, in their tedious squeezed-out familiarity, was invisible to you.

So you toss it aside, to gather dust with the map of Ohio, your kid's report card, and a book called Making Sense of Japanese. Then, when you pick it up again 3 months later, just to see if you really need to start all over again from scratch, you discover that the characters have, in fact, improved with age, total absence of oaken barrels notwithstanding.

I suspect that Clarence knows that will happen.