When I published Lies and Love, I was feeling so cocky I boldly predicted that I would write four novellas this year. Well, here it is almost six months into 2024 and I'm still jerking around with the project I started in March.
What went wrong? Well, somehow, somewhere I lost my confidence. I made a bad decision, which was to rework my second novel into a novella. I'm not going to rehash how I thought the novel was magnificent when I finished it, only to later find that it was putrid. I identified a problem and resolved to correct it. The novel only barely managed to hit the required word count because of all the back story and unnecessary subplots. Removing those would reduce the number of words significantly, and that's what I set out to do ~ tighten it up.
I should have trashed it.
In the end I was left with a story even I wouldn't read. Worse (if that's possible) the exercise itself was soul-crushing. I realized what a horrible story teller I'd been, and now I'm left second-guessing myself on every new project. I managed to kill the joy in writing.
It's time to wrap this current project up. I'm tired of it, and tired of it not going anywhere. I need to invent a satisfying conclusion and stop simply vomiting out words. One can only write so much foreshadowing before the reader grows exasperated. Anyway, any reader with a modicum of intelligence knows who the "bad guy" is by now.
I'm not ready to give up writing, but I'm definitely ready for a new story.
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