Facepalm

Yeah, I’m an idiot.

I’m a bit over 27,000 words into the Scifi thriller (and I STILL don’t have a title for it….sonofabitch), and like I said the other day, I’ve been totally bogged down lately.  Part of the reason for that is I’ve been undisciplined and have let potential writing time slip away in favor of other things, like reading blogs, playing video games, or generally screwing off.  But another part is that I’ve just been…dejected isn’t the word.  Maybe reluctant.  I hit a place where I knew what I wanted to have happen, but couldn’t make myself start.

A similar thing happened when I was writing Masters of the Sun, and I couldn’t get past it until I realized the problem was the image I had for the final end point of the story was so far out that I psyched myself out completely.  So I gave myself permission to stop writing at a good end point and continue the story at a later date, when I’d recharged my batteries a bit.  That end point ended up being at just over 75,000 words, farther than I thought it would be when I decided to do it (I thought it would be at about 50,000 words).  But trimming my desired end point suddenly made the project seem more achievable, and my motivation came back in a heartbeat.

I realized tonight that I have the same problem with the Scifi thriller.  Hence the reason for the facepalm.

The full story isn’t all that ambitious.  I’ve already written the beginning and part of the end.  The problem is there’s a big sequence, the final two-thirds of the book, that I have no clue how to pull off.  Tonight I realized that I don’t have to figure out how to pull it off right this second.  I can pick a convenient end point, one that makes sense and won’t kill the overall story (and may even add a bit of drama to the whole thing), and stop.  I’m not sending this one to a publisher, so I don’t have to deal with their word count requirements.  So why not stop at a comfortable place?

Well, I can think of a couple reasons why not, but most of them revolve around my own doubts or my ego.

Bugger ego.  I’m going to stop and move on to something else for a bit.  I know a perfect place, one that will make this sequence that I’ve written so far complete, with a bit of a cliffhanger preparation for the next part.  It’ll be at around the 40,000 words mark (I think), making this a novella.  But that’s completely cool.  Two or three novellas to complete the story that began with a novelette seems fitting, actually.

So that’s the new course.  There’s a good chance I can reach the end point by the end of the month.  Then I can get going on my NaNoWriMo story at the beginning of the month, as planned.  More on the plans for that story in another post.

It’s amazing.  With a clearly achievable end point in sight, I feel like a weight has been lifted and I’m psyched to get going again.

Ok.  Time to get writing.

🙂