I once wrote that my writing process is never linear but resembles something akin to throwing words on a canvass – first chapters ending up last, writing all around the manuscript instead of from beginning to end, not because I think myself an artist but because that’s how my brain works. Then I read that art happens in the editing – likely in a review of Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time, on the Russian composer Shostakovich, or in Barnes’ own words. What I think happens in my editing process is clarification. In this round of continuous rejection then revision, attempting to find the sweet spot, here are some questions I’ve asked myself repeatedly and where my critique has led. 1) Is the writing a piece of crap? In The Writing Life Annie Dillard says that sometimes we must tear down the bearing walls. I’ve done that a number of times. What began as 110,000 words is now pared to 86, 465words. That’s a lot of bearing walls and filler. 2) Is the market cluttered? How many writers, new to fiction, will it bear? Although I don’t know the answer to those questions, thinking yes to the first question and none to the second would be a convenient excuse not to write another word. And yet, the writer in me (or maybe the obsessive perfectionist) cannot quit trying to figure out how to make my work publishable. 3) Does the manuscript need a new title? WHO CAN KNOW THE HEART began as a working title and stuck, primarily due to both the positive and negative attention it drew on the web. In the event anyone thought it was a traditional romance, it was not.  The novel is still about love in the broadest sense along with its natural consequences desire and deceit.  And yet, in my recent revision I renamed the project THE TIN BOX.   But what tugs at Sara, Soren, and Henry are the undercurrents that lie beneath the surface at every turn in the novel.  At its core, the novel has always been a cautionary tale: be careful what you leave behind for others to interpret. What is left behind is a tin box of found and sentimental mementos. The box itself as well as what it represents runs throughout the novel.  And yet, it is the undercurrent of shame and its dark behaviors that connects three generations to each other (grandfather Henry, his daughter Soren, and his granddaughter Sara) and directly links the back-story (the irresponsible acquisition of mineral rights for the burgeoning steel industry during Post-civil war reconstruction).  For Henry the artifacts are in a memory box, layered with all the misery he can collect. When he dies the box is given to Soren; she perceives it an unwelcome stranger that troubles everything she thinks she knows about Henry.  And, when Soren has a tragic accident and “expires,” Sara discovers the box in her mother’s closet. Upon examining its contents, she must shine a flashlight into unlit corners also, questioning who her father is and even if her birthday is an invention. In time, however, Sara comes to see her mother’s bequest as a medicine box that helps her understand her own past and empathize with her mother and grandfather. In doing so she is able to forgive the deceit and move on. I also like using the box as a device because it gives me a chance to say that the inspiration for the novel comes from a tin lunchbox that sat on my parents’ shelf when I was growing up. When they passed and my sisters and I cleaned out their house, the box took up residency on my shelf. Opening a box left by parents after they are gone can be a mixed bag.  I found nothing that I expected in theirs, but it the contents were not earth shattering; rather, they were layoff papers, report cards, ordinary stuff that in time began to bear witness, embodying the loss Henry, Soren, and Sara shared. 4) Last, the question that haunts many writers – should I self-publish? As an author of two books on identity and a number of chapters and essays, I am reluctant.  The title of the novel, I now realize,  is UNDERCURRENTS, written in the tradition of Flannery O’Conner, with a rather Southern turn to psychological gothic, an approach that fits my earlier instincts and my current one.