Patience

For a while, I was really on a roll. I published four novellas in 2023 and two the previous year. I took no writing breaks. Finish one, start another. And all but possibly one of them were good. (I'm perhaps too hard on Find My Way Home. I'd had to reread it to find out.)

Then with my last novella, I realized that overconfidence had clouded my judgement. I was all set to publish it until I tallied up the words and found that the total was something like 14,000. There are short stories longer than that! It was the skeleton of a story, really ~ no character development, a stupid plot twist that came out of nowhere, an ending that was too tidy and bereft of emotion. I needed to do better. So I discarded the second half of Inn Dreams and set to work. Adding a new character (the bad guy) opened up lots of possibilities, and within a month I had something I could be proud of. 

In the end it didn't work out all that great. Yes, I got a lot of four-star reviews, but some reviewers quibbled that the story was too rushed. Maybe it was; it certainly didn't feel that way to me, but I took the critiques to heart. 

Second Chance was a novella that started out good, but the story melted away like cotton candy. I might have been focusing more on output than on inventing a good story, and my method of "seeing where the story takes me" didn't take me anywhere in that instance.  

That good premise deserved to be explored fully. I'm not an idea person, so when I find myself with one, I shouldn't let it go. So I kept the best parts of the story, but took off in a whole new direction. It's been great, but it almost feels like cheating. It's like I took someone else's idea and ran with it, even though that "someone else" was me. What I'm trying to say is, it's not as if I started from scratch. I'd already established the character and plopped her down in a new town and had her finally reveal that in her old life, she was a band singer. I already had the bones.

And the new continuation is like a whole different story. Part of that derives from my new resolve to not "rush it", so I'm writing differently now. I'm still not a descriptive writer, but I'm avoiding time jumps. This makes the writing process longer because I can't cheat. If I've said all I can say about a particular scene, I no longer jump forward. No, something has to happen directly after that scene, and whatever that is, it had better be good and advance the story. It's a challenge, but a good challenge. I can't be lazy, which I think I became after publishing at least four good novellas. Maybe those were flukes. Maybe I do have to work hard. 

All that said, this novel (which is what it's turning into) will take a long time. Combined with my new life circumstances ~ my lack of writing opportunities ~ the manuscript is coming along slowly. It won't be finished this year for sure. How far into 2025 will it go? I have no idea. Even when I finally write the ending, I'll need to go back and rework the previous parts that I retained, in order to match my new style.

One thing I've discovered is that I'm very invested in this character. Drilling down to every aspect of her life has allowed me to form a bond with her. Really, with most of my novellas I couldn't say for sure what the main characters' names are anymore. They existed for a time, a couple of months, and then they were gone. 

No, I doubt that I'll ever write another novel. After my third, I swore I'd never do it again. I'm only doing it again by accident. Novels are a damn lot of work with no payoff. So I'm going to enjoy this one. Those first three turned into torture; this one is fun.

I'm going to savor it.