This is long:
I've been struggling with whether to place my WIP within Literary, or Suspense-thriller. It is similar to some of T.C. Boyle's work re: is set in the 60's, baby boomer characters, but when much younger, deals with "Crazy Love" and is written like a Sports Bio, or true crime in some sense-- so: Crazylovetruecrimesportsbio. I've been writing for about 15 years as well, and have approximately 13 unpublished novels to show for it. About 4 of them are about 85-95% done. I get to one point, full well knowing the damned ending, and yet can not write the turn-around scenes.
Most took only about a year to write, so it is not that I have been actually working on them for many years. Some, to be frank, are embarrassing, and I would not think of publishing them. Most are in the suspense thriller-to-literary mode. A few are fantasy. A couple are historical. I tend to think of myself as a Hitchcock throwback. It's more like things written by Tom Wolfe, or Norman Mailer-- writers of stories like that. The reason I call it literary as opposed to suspense thriller is because s/ts tend to be about big nuclear bomb attacks and such, and this is just about a mean guy in the closet with a knife. They all, in fact, have a truly normal beginning and yet end up as bloody as a Shakespeare tragedy at the end.
It is not that I thought the books were "bad" and so did not publish them, it is just that I was not able to get the final 1/8th or so done. About 2 years ago, I decided to try to find out why I wasn't getting past the character climax, and to the story climax. That's when I decided to try all this final write/writer's club crap. I've met a lot of people, but feel very awkward because I always find myself in the room with nothing but kids writing vampire books for teenagers or whatever bandwagon comes around next year. I've even thought of getting a masters, simply so I can get "referred to an agent."
In the meantime I continue to work on my most recent novel. I had to quit for a year. I think I just was emotionally drained. Things in my life had become disastrous. Now, a lot of that commotion is nearly over.