I pushed through and got a whole proof-read and polished Wolf Children story. Eleven thousand words of literary non-linear fantasy that doesn’t even work. The amount of time and effort needed to make it work: likely infinite. Probably needs to be twice as long. Probably needs to have half of it trashed. Why did I choose to spend time on a story that I know doesn’t work? I don’t understand myself.
Let’s say that the story is, contrary to expectations, magnificent. It’s still unpublishable because it’s a bizarro eleven thousand word literary non linear fantasy story. It’s too literary to be fantasy. It’s to fantastic to be literary. It’s too odd a length to be short or long. It just is like a big ugly thing that I have now spent almost a year on and why? Why why why why why why why?
Whenever I think Why don’t I have a novel yet? I’m going to remember this. Because I do silly things like Wolf Children instead.
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🙁 It saddens me that literary expectations of certain lengths and a certain genres makes some things unpublishable (or at least prohibitively hard to mash into the right ‘boxes’).
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I have an idea of epubifying it and then simply selling it here for 0.99$, to guarantee that I’ll make a grand total of 0$, but at least it will be out there. I’m still waiting for Geoff’s feedback and I’ll probably squirrel around on the internet to submit it to some longer fantasy journals before giving up.
I am trying to think of it as a sand mandala meditation — all the hours and then swept away.