My last post was about how I was going to rewrite my novel during National Novel writing month this past November. Well it’s now the third day of December and I only got 23,369 words written. The goal as you recall was a 50,000 word novel. I failed at just shy of half way.
It gets worse. I also said I was going to cheat. Of the 23,000 odd words, probably only four to five thousand are new writing, the rest are cannibalized from my first draft. I was cheating and I still couldn’t finish it.
My excuse: I work retail and this time of year I work a lot of hours, and when I get home I am worn out physically and emotionally drained from having holiday shoppers blaming me for them not making it to the store in time to get the last eighty dollar tablet or ninety dollar TV.
The truth: I think I may have fallen out of love with the story. I sit down to work on it and I get kind of overwhelmed with the idea of re-structuring a novel that took me so long to work on the first time around. And then I start thinking about what to change and my brain gets flooded with all of these what if’s and then I go through the plot and think well if I change event A then event B can’t happen as is. Which leads to the question of whether I really need event B in the story or if should cut A&B and just skip to event C.
I want to keep working on it, I really would hate for Julian Random to never be published. But maybe I need a break. I need to focus on some short story ideas I had and publish something. It’s been way too long since I’ve had a publishing credit. And I need to get paid this time. Especially since I just solved my biggest problem and quit my job.
C. O. Bonham 