Aaargh....

Okay, that was frustrating. I had an extremely busy month with more pressure at work and various family events. I also have been sending out a bunch of my stories to journals. They’ve all been getting rejected. On top of that, I’ve had a couple longtime friends who asked for copies of my stories like a year ago. They’ve never said a word about them and we even had dinner together over the weekend. Ouch!

Writing fiction is a test of self-confidence. Most of us who try this imagine that everyone who reads us will at least like what we do. The truth is that no writer is universally appreciated. In the meantime, I have my own inner critic, that thing that sits inside my head and does its best to stop me from embarrassing myself. “If it’s not perfect, it won’t be universally acclaimed by those who read it, “ says the inner critic.

It’s diabolically circular.

I feel good that I kept pushing nonetheless, but I found myself perpetually rewriting the same few paragraphs. I’d have some thought about “fog”, “walls”, “the passage of time” and want to get it written down and I’d hear this thing tell me that it didn’t fit or that it impeded the flow of the story. I began to forget that there are times to fix that sort of thing and times to simply let ideas flow and set their own shape. I certainly have times when I don’t seem to have any ideas, but having too many ideas can look like the same frustration, the inability to move forward.

So here I am again, I pushed through chapter two and still feel like it doesn’t do what I want it to do. Have I waited too long to start the conventional part of the action? Probably so. Is there a mood shift from chapter one to chapter two that’s not accounted for? Possibly. Am I closer to my goal or not? I have no idea.

The current chapter two has any number of problems, including the fact that I haven’t worked out the logistics of why Jan remembers Lucky better than he remembers her. I probably have more worries than “Wow, I did thats” in the chapter. Right now, I’m trying to decide between just moving on to chapter three or fixing the slow sections of chapter two and running the risk of taking myself sideways once again.

Sometimes, it just isn’t fun.