Geoff: Seriously, you have to finish proofreading your Wolf Children story.

Me: I guess you’re that sick of listening to me complain about it?

Geoff: No, because you’ve left it out sitting by the computer for months now. I keep reading the first page over and over and I want to know what happens!

So I modified-pomodoro’d my way through the rest of the first-time through proof-read this morning (ten minutes on, three minutes off). So run-through one is done and I have a ten thousand word literary grown-up non-linear fantasy story that I spent all summer working on. It’s like I want to guarantee that I never make a living wage as a writer.

All future Wolf Children complaints will now be about typing up my changes and subsequent proofreads. Oh how I am looking forward to all that.

No. I am a no-go NaNoWriMo no-show.

I did it.

As of six minutes ago, I have a completely typed up version of my faerie story. From beginning to end. In a file. An awesome-saucem file.

To celebrate, I made a word cloud from word it out because Doretta Lau made one yesterday and linked to it on twitter and I am nothing if not a follower of what other authors (although calling myself an author is sure to come back and fuck me over somehow) do.

Love the LaTeX markup down in the bottom. I just ran the .tex file through, so that’s what you get.

Now I get to more-or-less ignore it for a few months and then slog through fixing the huge mess my 53 000 word story about faeries is.

It is no surprise to any of you who have actually interacted with me in real life that I my natural mood tends to melancholy probably more than is healthy. The radius of good news around me is a few minutes while the radius of not-good news, including news that isn’t overwhelmingly positive, is months. For example, I’ll have three short stories coming out before Christmas in three separate journals: red kitty zine, The Rusty Toque, and The Puritan. This should be cause for at least an hour of feeling grand but instead, all I can focus on is how much Come From Away is dragging me down. I can’t even conceive that I should be at least thinking about thinking about this story any longer. Except I have to since it is the story I am working on for my Humber course.

I should have picked the unfinished story about the faeries instead for my course is what I think when I am laying in my bed at three in the morning trying to rework entire sections in my head so that my mentor doesn’t think I am a slobby writer.

I didn’t drive a car for eleven years because driving caused so much anxiety to me. Similarly, if I could, I would just forget Come From Away. I would convert it to an ePub and have a pay-what-you-want for it and there’d be a little link in the sidebar over there and maybe I’d make two or three dollars from my relatives feeling sorry for me. Instead, I am sitting here trying to think about whether I want to just quit. If we’re going to talk about things I am good at, I am very good at quitting. I quit academia. I quit government. Maybe I should quit longer story writing.

I like writing short stories. I feel I am better than average at it. I have a story idea about someone who gives out non-compliance tickets for time travelers and his name is Antrim Nec. Doesn’t that sound more intriguing than whatever Come From Away is devolving into?

Sometimes things are broken. I have a commitment to the end of this course, then I think Come From Away is going to be junked and I’ll try to frame it in my head that this is a learning experience and I am learning but really, it is cold out and I have to wear a winter jacket and really, I just don’t want to think about these rambling words any longer.

Come From Away is hovering, at last check, around forty-eight thousand words. Forty-eight thousand. Two thousand more words and I’ll have a NaNoWriMo (yes, I had to look that up because I kept simply typing a string of random letters after Na) length novel, albeit one that took much, much longer than a month to write.

Except – I don’t have two thousand more words to say about Come From Away.

This is all I want: I want a fifty thousand word novella. I’m sure that sometime in the past, I read that publishers want a minimum of fifty thousand words, and this factoid buried itself deep in my brain, and now it keeps surfacing to nag me about not writing those final two thousand words. Last week, Come From Away was only forty-five thousand words. So there were three thousand words left via Jane sneaking out to assemble a stroller and Peter dying his hair. I put in their argument to strengthen the ending. Maybe strengthen is the wrong word. Maybe the right word is pad.

Do I really have two thousand more words to say? Should I stop? Should I start putting more energy behind my faerie story?

Two thousand words seems so puny when I’m writing one-off short stories. I can almost never squeeze my stories down to that length. But then, when I need to wring out a bit more action from forty-eight thousand words of action, I’m like a dried out turtle shell in the desert. I got nothing.

I’m thinking my faerie story might actually work better without faeries. How vital are vampires to Twilight? I think I fail at YA paranormal writing.