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.
Comments
I read your refrigerator story and really liked it. You are very good at short stories. I think I understand what you are going through with your story you’ve fallen out of love with. I had a novel that happened with. It now sits half completed in a binder. I feel bad because I keep picturing the characters sitting around a poorly decorated waiting room for the time I call their name and finish their story. Unfortunately this may never happen, the poor things will just wither away.
Author
🙂 I always think of my unfinished stories as characters in waiting rooms too – the waiting rooms in 19th century Russian novels in train stations, shivering while wearing fox fur coats.
A few months ago I read an article (that I can no longer find) about first novels and how the amount of effort needed to put in to fix them isn’t worth the hassle; it’s better to just start a new novel. I keep thinking I should do that except, of course, I have to submit chapters every few weeks for my course, and they might wonder what happened if I suddenly stop, or if suddenly I’m submitting something new with different characters in a different place doing different things. I guess it could test how observant my instructor is 🙂