On the upside, last night did see the completion of the first draft of my short story, working title “Voyage of the Damned.” I’m not satisfied with the ending, which should be no surprise since until I sat down to incorporate some edits there wasn’t even an ending to speak of. It currently weighs in at 7k words, which is a bit longer than I’d intended (convention is that it stops being a “short” story around 10k). I need to let this one sit for a little bit, fester, then redraft it again, letting my brain treat it as a new story so I can get in the right mode for ending it.
Ironically, its this same festering process (which has worked well for me in the past with short stories) that is biting me in terms of the novel project. I’ve written just shy of 50k words for it in the last two months, which is nice, but while I concede the story is not yet done, I’m feeling fluxomed on continuing it. I don’t want to go so far as to say I’m not in the mood for it – but at this time of day, I’m at a loss for a better word for it.
Perhaps the answer is staring me in the face – literally. While there is a plethora of differences between writing a short story and a novel, the mechanics are ultimately the same. I should give this thing the short story treatment, then – print it out, lift the heavy red pen of EDIT [sidebar: yeah, I really use a red pen, as an acknowledgement to all those High School papers that came back marked to high heavens, and because it just feels right to do edits in red], and hack away at the sucker and find the thread that I appear to have lost. I had set a timetable for the novel – wanted the first draft done by mid-March – but that timetable was of my own making. Early or late affects nothing in the real world.
Hmmm…I feel a conviction rise in my chest that is easy to come by at 4 in the morning (woke up an hour early and knew that if I tried to go back to sleep, I’d oversleep by at least an hour). By George, that’s what I’m going to do. Frell self-imposed artificial deadlines that had no meaning or basis in reality. Wow that feels good.