crossroads
so….
last month i “wrote” this novel. really i smashed out 50,000 words that loosely tell about 1/3 of the story that by the end of it, i wanted to tell. maybe 1/2. it’s hard to tell. what i know is that it’s largely about one woman, with two supporting women and what i want is to tell all three stories equally. i’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, analyzing and restructuring the whole thing before i even start revising the first draft, to say nothing of editing.
when i started thinking about how to go about that (yes, i’m so serious about planning that i pre-plan before i plan. i plan the planning.) a new idea popped into my head.
not so much “hey, go tell a new story,” but “hey, if you did this a completely different way, you’d still be telling the same story, only in a way that might be more fun and entertaining for everyone who may be eventually involved.”
i won’t tell you the idea. that’s how good it is. (and by you i mean “you the potentially anonymous reader who might steal the idea for yourself”, not “you my friends and family who support me and read this blog on occasion”. that you, i’ll probably share it with. if only to get additional validation.)
like any good idea, it’s obvious, and it’s really an issue of being first to market with it. i know. i didn’t think that anything that had to do with vampires hadn’t been done, either. but i think i might be on ot something. the biggest problem with this idea is that it means that one of several things will happen.
- my nanonovel gets gutted for everything but the plot. most if not all 50,000 words are left in the dust. this will likely happen with revision anyway, but not so brutally as just junking it.
- my nanonovel gets shelved indefinitely while i work on this new adventure since turning it into a series of related short stories actually works just as well, if not better than adapting the plot of the nanonovel.
- new idea gets shelved indefinitely so that i can work on the nanonovel, risking the new idea never getting picked up, or losing any cleverness points because someone else has already done it.
- i do nothing, paralized by making the wrong decision and/or failing at either and resenting the idea left behind
i confess, i suspect that #4 will be the most likely outcome. the arguements inside my head range from the practical to the absurd. “someone might turn your book into a crappy movie and you won’t be able to stop them” is not a valid argument at this time, but that doesn’t stop my brain from making it.
(and then i ran out of time and had to save this post for later)
later!
last night, while discussing this with my favorite sounding board, i figured out what to do. my biggest concern was leaving one and focusing on the other and then being upset later if/when it didn’t work out and i had “lost” my momentum on the rejected idea.
it occurred to me that i actually have 3 things going on. two are connected to the new idea (setting up and then executing the short stories) and one is connected to the nanonovel (revision). they’re all relatively different things, so why not do them all at once. or if not at once, at least do a bit of each every month. i can put off the novel for a month or so (i need a break to really look at it with a fresh face) and work on the setup’s setup for the new thing.
i’m a bit worried about taking the month off. i’ve already gone from feeling weird that i’m not spending 2-3 hours a day writing to stuffing that time with other neglected activities (emails, reading, WoW). if i don’t keep it up, i may fall completely out of the habit. december’s a crazy month, though, even crazier than november, so if i just spend an hour or so a day plotting and planning what i want january – march to look like detaily-wise and the whole of 2009 high-levely-wise i should keep my momentum going well enough through the next 28 days.
it seems i’m not so much at a crossroads as i thought. hooray!
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