Saturday, December 31, 2011

This is When I'm Full of Excuses

This post has been in the works for an entire month. I was full of excuses then and, as you can imagine, I'm still full of it. I intended to post of November 30th as a nice gesture to round off a rather rough NaNo, but I ran out of time. Besides, I had labeled my defeat far too well: the demise of this year's NaNo ambitions was nothing if not ignominious.

Shortly after November ended I had the harrowing experience of having some of my work reviewed anonymously by my fellow literary magazine staff members. Ouch. I will never own up to some of those entries. The discouragement put me off of fiction writing for probably a solid day and then I got over it.

It did, however, give me the impression that I should only spend time on writing projects that would produce impressive, sophisticated, earth-shattering results. While I remained under than impression, I turned out absolutely nothing. Then I realized I probably won't ever write anything earth-shattering and I decided to stop worrying about it.

Now I'm headed back to school tomorrow for a semester crammed full, but I've decided not to analyze my work before it's finished otherwise I'll never get anything anywhere near finished. I think I'm going to abandon my six novels/year plan in favor of returning to some of my most frustrating projects. Namely, the projects that I was obsessed with while I was working on them and have since given up and now detest. I don't know how long I'll last, and I may have to kill off a couple characters just to keep myself sane, but I have three days on the road and I've nothing else to do so I'm done being a boarding house for excuses.

New Projects:
  • Iron Shoes, last year's abandoned NaNo.
  • Clocker, this year's less than successful brainchild.
  • And, last but not least hated, the untitled story of Avonelle and Byron which I've been working on since 2008.

So, hedgehog people, clockwork people, and wolf people--oh my! I'd best get rocking and rolling.