The Skull on the Shelf

After his thought-provoking discussion of the futility of self-promotion, I was afraid we might not hear much again from Roger Morris on his plog. I'm pleased to report that he followed up almost immediately with a post on the kinds of writing we face: works we are contractually obligated to write, works we would enjoy writing, works that are just too good an opportunity to pass up...

And those books we feel compelled to write, but fear. And postpone. And redraft...

John Gardner thought that important book you fear was an unexpected sort of asset:

I myself have kept myself going for years by avoiding the one serious novel I mean to write someday. There it sits, five hundred rough-draft pages of it, watching me from its shelf like a skull. Nothing else I do is significant, by comparison, at least in my own mind. I am free to scatter words as an October wind scatters leaves.

Of course, Gardner died in a motorcycle accident before the preceeding quote was published, so his "one serious novel" never saw the light of day.

Do you have a skull on the shelf, either in rough draft, or half-completed, or perhaps only in your mind? (I certainly do. One-and-a-half of them, in fact.)