If you’re a knitter, you might recognize The Dreaded Tangle. Unless your yarn arrives caked or wound into a ball, you’ll have to wind the skein before knitting. Real knitters use a ball winder, hand-cranked or electric. If you’re me, you kick it old school and arrange the loose skein around a chair back and have at it. Sometimes this goes smoothly. More often you get The Dreaded Tangle. And there is nothing to do with TDT but: 1) put it away and ignore it or 2) untangle it.

Because I loved the yarn and had a pair of mittens to knit, I chose Option 2, The Untangle. You start the The Untangle by finding an end to the skein and following that through the tangle. It’s tedious and slow and not recommended if you’re in a hurry. Progress is incremental, measured by the growing ball of untangled yarn, but on the plus side, it’s meditative, as well: kinetic problem solving.

Around this time, I returned to the novel I’d started in May 2025. I’d finished the first draft in October and let it sit for eight weeks before holding my nose and jumping in to the second draft. I went into it in drafting mode, with the idea that I’d just bang out more words, better words, and a few months’ time, voila!, I’d have a second draft.

Yeah. No.

Instead, I ran into the literary equivalent of The Dreaded Tangle, though “literary” here is doing a lot of generous heavy-lifting. It was, quite frankly, an effing mess.

The remedy? I applied the patience I learned in the most recent Untangle, slow and steady, the focus on process rather than progress. Some days I revise three or four pages, other days, I spend an hour on a key paragraph. Often it’s more poem mind, than novel mind and that’s fine. I could spend a lifetime getting  down and dirty on the word level.

There’s always more to untangle tomorrow.  Excuse me while I put on my scuba suit to dive back into the wreck.