Come Walk the Graveyard With Me: An Ode to My Abandoned Projects

There's a folder on my desktop called "Stuff I'll Finish Someday." I renamed it that about two years ago, after spending a decade calling it "Work" and pretending it was a functional to-do list. It is not. It is a cemetery. But it's my cemetery, and today I want to give you the tour.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: the projects you abandon shape you just as much as the ones you finish. Maybe more. So instead of a tidy "lessons learned" essay — I've written enough of those to wallpaper my apartment — I want to walk you through the graves themselves. Bring a coffee. It's a nice day for it.

The Novel (2016–2018, Rest in Peace)

Twelve thousand words. A literary fiction manuscript about a woman who inherits her grandmother's house in coastal Maine and the secrets she finds in it. Very original, I know. I was twenty-four and had read a lot of Alice Hoffman.

I can still quote you lines from it. There's a scene in chapter three where my protagonist cleans out a kitchen junk drawer and finds a ticket stub from a 1979 Red Sox game, and honestly? That detail still makes me proud. The prose wobbles all over the place, but that stub — that's real writing. That's the moment I learned that specificity is where the magic lives.

The novel died of a slow disease: I told people about it. All it took was one dinner party where someone asked, "Oh, how's the book coming?" and I felt the whole thing curdle inside me. If you're sitting on a project right now, take note: feed it quietly.

The Podcast (One Episode, Three Months of Prep)

In 2019 I bought a microphone. A nice microphone. I recorded a single episode of a show called "Making It Up" where I interviewed my friend Dana about her ceramics practice, and it was — I'll say it — genuinely good. Warm, funny, real.

Then I opened GarageBand to edit it, saw the waveform, and felt my brain exit my body like a cartoon ghost. Audio editing defeated me in a single evening. The episode is still on a hard drive in a drawer, and every year or so I think about releasing it like it's a lost Beach Boys track.

What the podcast taught me: I love talking about making things with people. That's not a failure — that's reconnaissance. It's the reason this website exists.

The Etsy Shop (Lived Three Weeks, Died of Exposure)

Ah, the Etsy shop. Summer of 2021. I made hand-lettered prints — mostly quotes and some truly aggressive botanical illustrations — and opened a storefront with the confidence of a woman who had watched exactly one YouTube video about "passive income."

Three weeks. Four sales. Two of them to my mom.

But here's what I actually remember: I learned more about pricing, packaging, and shipping in those three weeks than I could have from a hundred blog posts. I learned that the post office on Sixth Street gets busy at lunch. I learned that customers who write nice reviews are the reason humanity continues. The shop closed, but the competence stayed.

Why I Keep Visiting

People treat abandoned projects like evidence in a trial against themselves. I've done it. Opened the folder, winced, closed it, felt bad for a week.

But lately I've started thinking of these files differently. Every half-finished thing in that folder is proof I tried something on. The novel taught me to write scenes. The podcast taught me to listen. The Etsy shop taught me that I'd rather make weird things for this website than letter "Live Laugh Love" for strangers. Each grave has a gift buried with it.

So here's my case for the unfinished: keep it. Label it lovingly. Visit occasionally. Read the old excerpts. Notice what you can do now that you couldn't then. The graveyard isn't a monument to failure — it's a map of everywhere your curiosity has ever taken you.

And if one of those projects starts whispering to you again? Dig it up. Worst case, you put it back. Best case, chapter three finally gets a chapter four.