Writin’

I had this idea that I would make a mad dash of writing over this week to finish a story for this Friday’s submission deadline to the First Line. Unfortunately, the idea for the story really only started to coalesce late Monday night, just before I went to bed.

I’ve had some momentum since then, but the word count has still be slow to increase. I spent all of last night working on it, then woke up at five this morning and continued, but these evening all my best laid plans kind of fell apart. Struggling to wring another few thousand words (and most of the plot) from a story I wasn’t really loving just didn’t seem like the best use of my effort. I likely wasn’t going to finish the story by August 1, and even less likely to finish it well, and I sort of used that as an excuse to veg out tonight instead. (The whole being-up-since-five-o’clock thing helped with that, too.)

I think there’s still some stuff to salvage in the story. There’s a character I like, some nice turns of phrase, the kernel of an interesting idea. But I think it also needs to be something completely different than what it was turning into. I also think that’s not just me giving up because the other thing was too hard.

I have noticed, though — and it’s amazing how often this needs to get repeated — that if you just show up and write, eventually something is going to jostle free. (Actually, I think how I phrased it on Twitter was “You know, you bash your head against a wall often enough, something’s gonna pop out.”)