Except for the fact that I’m now pretty sure I don’t know what to do with this, I put one of my Wolf Children characters in quarantine because she was annoying me. Or the story was annoying me. Or life was annoying me. Whatever.

Don’t really know what the point of my doing that was, story-wise, because now I’ve either got to backtrack and not put her in quarantine, or who knows. Stupid Wolf Children story. I keep trying to abandon it, but then I feel like I should at least finish one draft so I’ll stop having to think about it.

Geoff has read my first chapter of the unending slog of Wolf Children story. He says it is worth writing a second chapter.

So now I have some work to do, considering it took my six months to get the first chapter done.

I chucked the first fifteen pages of my wolf children story (fifteen pages in my writing notebook, so about three thousand words) because it was all wrong. So that was a waste. Restarted and switched the narration from first person to third person omniscient. Like Tolstoi, I lord over all my dystopic characters, seeing all, deciding on their fates on my whims. I’m also going to delete any internal thought and adjectives. So basically I’m going for dry and unappetizing.

Still, wish I could have realized all this the first time through.

Taking a break from rewriting, I am writing a brief short story about a cutlery drawer, that likely I can’t ever publish anywhere because it steals things that actually happened and makes them funnier (like I do with conversations I have with Geoff, which he complains about even though I almost always take his wittiness and Oscar Wilde-ify it so everyone can marvel at how clever he is). At first, I was all happy because I’m tired of fixing my old stories and I thought that writing new stories would cheer me up. Then I remembered that writing new stories is just as miserable as fixing old stories. In fact, writing is miserable. Especially when there’s still snow everywhere. Especially when I have to shovel it.

Winter. Awful.

But I can see, with this new story, where I’ve plateau’d. All I do is tell, when the whole point of fiction is to show. I used to show everything and people were confused. Now I tell too much and people are bored. I’m bored.

At a plateau, you’re supposed to keep going. It should even be easy because unlike going up, you’re just walking straight along. It’s not like I enjoy hiking up. In fact, any incline, no matter how small, I whine from top to bottom because I hate it so much. But, apparently, I don’t like walking straight along a path either. I’m a self-entitled child of the eighties and nineties: why can’t I be great at something instantaneously and without having to work at all?

Sometime soon I should have a link to my new accepted story Deep Breaths Underwater, which is to be published by Found Press.

To pique your interest, here is what Geoff has to say about Deep Breaths Underwater: “Oh, I really liked that story.”

There you go, Geoff approved!