Geoff recently read the first 120-odd pages of my faerie story. He was, well, he had some positive things to say, but also a lot of non-positive things to say too.
You don’t think it’s really good? Like one of the best things I’ve written? I asked him.
He looked at me like I was insane. No he said. Not at all.
Hmmmmmmm. This is not good. I actually like my faerie story. I mean, there are lots of problems still, but I like writing it and I like seeing what’s going to happen and I care about the characters.
So what stories do you like I ask Geoff.
I actually like Come From Away Geoff says. And Darién Gap.
I made a noise that denotes annoyance at Geoff.
What he said. I like what I like.
But why can’t you like what I like I replied.
So there’s that. Geoff doesn’t like the faerie story as much as I do and I think that he has rose-tinted memories of the mess that Come From Away slopped itself into. Plus I don’t know what to do. For all my liking of my faerie story, I don’t really feel like fixing the problems in it right now – the word Geoff used was convoluted and the word he used before convoluted was unnecessarily. I’m reluctant to start anything new since all my new ideas are open-ended and I already have two sprawling, incomplete stories mocking me. I’d say I had a whole island-of-misfit-toys story thing going on, except then I remembered that at the end of that show, all those toys found homes and people who loved them. So I can’t even get my pop-culture metaphors rights. I just want to think of a brief, short-story idea, like my psychic idea last month, or the story I wrote about cows way back in the fall. Instead, I guess I’ll just read a bunch of books and hope there are some ideas I can steal from them. Or maybe I’ll just write some random words down and then link them together with prepositions to see what happens.
Usually every two months I get down about my writing, and then little good things, little pushes, happen. It’s the two month mark right now since the last push. Am I going to have to rely on my own shoddy belief-in-self to get me through? Perish the thought.