No, this isn’t a weather-related rant.
I gathered up my emergency writing kit and headed for the coffee shop today. I’ve been waiting to hear good news about a job I nearly have but might be miles away from actually landing. I don’t do ‘patience’ very well sometimes.
My emergency writing kit is a large padded black fake-leather pad folio thingy with a zipper around lots of paper and two pens and two mechanical pencils. I drink coffee and doodle, either trying to connect dots or create new dots. I doodle maps, I write character sketches. I draw character sketches. I throw down outrageous ideas for plot lines, or characters, or settings.
Sometimes I eavesdrop on other people in the restaurant. Sometimes I just let my Id off his leash to go see what’s in the neighborhood in my mind. At least I wasn’t in the house, between snow storms, waiting for a phone call.
Among the populated pages was the ominous title, THE DEAD WAR. I paused. It had a line through it where it had been retitled THE CONSPIRACY OF THE DEAD. There were a few hasty notes from my last session, which evidently had been some time ago. I remembered the story arc, and I had finished some chapters and posted it online where it had received some pretty good comments by readers. It seems like only yesterday that I stopped working on it. I guess in some part of my brain I keep going back there and noodling around with the odds and ends of where I left off.
So when I got back to broadband land, I went back to the site where I had posted my material. It’s a high fantasy adventure tale that boils down to… well it’s a zombie story (without using that word in the narrative). The last entry is dated 2006, and I was taken back by that. It cannot have been four years? Okay, maybe it was then. The site was still up anyway, and that was a relief. There had been some really major changes in the layout, and some welcome upgrades. But four years since I had really tackled a fiction project head on. Ouch. Six lonely chapters.
So I re-read what I had scribbled what seemed so long ago. Yes, some of it was really quite interesting. Some of it was dreadfully rushed. Some of it was just a skeleton, lacking any thought but enough to get the reader from point A to point B. But the characters were compelling, the plot was unexpected, and the comments were really good.
It shouldn’t take four years to go back around to revisit a project and evaluate if it is worth keeping around. The last four years have been fairly tough for me for many reasons, but that shouldn’t be an excuse.
Had I kept with it, I may have sold it. But I can’t second guess myself on that now. If I had kept with it, I also would not have the other projects going that I think may be of more long term value for readers.
So I’ll keep it around. Some day, when I get my legs back under myself, I just might move forward with it yet again. I’ve done worse things with my time. Those four years gave me enough distance from it to be truly objective about the content and a new perspective on where I had been wrestling pointlessly with plot devices that may or may not be useful.
