Well, I am back to writing original fiction again. This week started out with me cleaning up some chapters of
my old "93 novel"--Dis/inhibition, which was a good transitional task from the manic editing of the final episode of The Destroyer to the nebulous idea mass that is my new story.
In fact, after a couple days immersing myself in my old novel, I wondered if I'd get to the new story at all this week. My "plan" for the week had been simply to come up with some sort of plan with regards to the new story. The time away from it to finish TD has been good, it gave me a chance to mull over what I'd done in the last year and reflect on it without being too invested in what I had been doing with the story when I left off.
And in fact, there were times in the last month when I really started to have second thoughts about some of the choices I had made in the new novel. Characters I wasn't sure interested me all that much, story elements I wasn't sure interested me all that much.
And my interest is so damned important, I can't over-exaggerate how much. How many stories have I invested time in only to have it fizzle out mid-way because a major element in the story just *didn't* interest me? This is my fear, this is why, after a year, I still haven't started
actually writing the thing. Because every damned time I start a new story, I get bored of what I'm doing long before finishing.
This is a danger in novel-length projects. You'd better be in it for the long haul, otherwise, it's a waste of time. And since I seem constitutionally incapable of writing shorter pieces, this is my dilemma.
Anyway, what I ended up doing this week was going back to the
idea-gathering-sifting-organizing project I was working on before the hiatus. Most decidedly *not* to turn it into any outline, but just to take stock of what I have. And that is my "plan" for now.
But the main goal has to be to find some way to
start writing. To get past my fear of losing my muse for this story halfway through it.