So, as it turns out I'm pretty bad at keeping a regular blogging schedule. Heck, I'm pretty bad at keeping a regular anything schedule- especially writing. By my standards, Untouched should be shiny and polished by now. Remember those goals I set back in February? A little lofty, yes, but if I stuck with the 1K/day writing goal I probably would be there by now.
But sometime in March my writing fever started to dwindle, and in April it took an extended vacation. That lasted until the end May.
I'm getting back on the wagon. Untouched is at about 67K, and I wrote 2K+ just today. I think I've been discouraged lately, because I know that I want my story to be in the best possible condition before I start the query process. And I'm starting to feel that Untouched will never be good enough- not because of the amount of revisions or edits or rewrites I still need to do (which is a lot, by the way). But because the story itself is not good enough. Maybe I'm just too close to the story, but it feels old, stale and ordinary. And I have plenty other ideas that I think could be extraordinary.
So I was faced with a dilemma. Complete Untouched, revise, edit, polish- even though I have a strong suspicion that it will end up on a shelf somewhere collecting dust no matter how much work I put into it? Or ditch the story with 10K words left to be written and start something new, something that actually has a chance at making it?
Hmph. Not a fun choice. Both options are painful and tedious in their own ways. For now I've chosen to complete Untouched. I've made it this far, there's really no turning back now.
I just hope I can turn it into something worthwhile. But if I can't... well, that sucks, but it's a learning experience, and my next project will be better and stronger because of all the effort I put toward this one.
New goals:
Finish Untouched.
Revise, edit, clean up.
Get out to Beta readers.
Gather feedback.
Determine if Untouched is salvageable, or if retirement is the best option.
I think the best plan is to finish. Even if you ultimately decide to shelve the book, at least you've gotten practice in writing a complete work, and that can only work to your favor.
ReplyDeleteFinish then query agents. Like you said, it's a learning experience. Most authors have at least one unpublished manuscript.
ReplyDeleteI just went through this same dilemma and then I decided at the end of writing a book, there's always going to be another idea for another book. You'll be excited about the new idea and the old idea is, well, old. So I say finish and edit. And you never know, during edits you may say, hey this is really good!!
ReplyDeleteI just went through this, sweetie. Go read my "divorce" post and the one after that. I'm not sure if you read those or not??? But I got a lot of great advice from everybody. And I've made a good decision. But yours may be different. If you truly don't love your work, I would suggest taking a long break from it and work on something else. That is not what I decided to do, however. :)
ReplyDelete