Something is wrong with my manuscript. I wrote for four hours yesterday and managed to not only kill my story, but my enthusiasm. Just when things were going so well!
My fatal mistake was checking my word count. I was short ~ by about 4,000 words. Word counts are anathema to writers like me. I began second guessing myself. What could I add? I already had my ending planned, but now I had to cram something else in. And even as I was writing that "something else", I knew it wasn't working. But on I plowed. What I did manage to accomplish was to destroy the story's momentum.
Every bit of it will have to go.
Perhaps I'm focusing too much on word count. After all, the range of a novella, cited by literary organizations, is 17,500 to 40,000 words. (If you're really going to write 40,000 words, why not just turn it into a novel?) The problem is, the way Kindle calculates pages, 250 words equals one page. Thus, the length of my manuscript, before I added all that unnecessary drivel, would only be 68 pages. That would not only look bad, but would exclude me from advertising on some of the better-known promotional sites (not that I have plans to do so, but I may).
The fact remains that I not only need to add more, but better content. And I don't know where to go. Except for the ending, the story (in my mind) is finished. Tinkering never leads to anything good. I'm a doer, not a re-doer.
Maybe the answer will come to me. I'm certainly not giving up on it. The story is good.
I simply need a shot of inspiration.
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