Hey, guys, read a fancier version of this post over at H2NH ePub, now!
Now that I've set up my
office, and figured out my
writing playlist, and the whole "I moved back to America" excuse is wearing a little thin anyways, it's time to get back into the zone. I've finished a couple things since I've got back, but not nearly enough. I need a plan, a scheme...a
project.
Naturally, instead of getting one of
those, I immediately sat down to read a book. That is: Stephen King's "
Under The Dome", in delightful hardcover. But lo! I could not escape the Devil of Writing — an distinct entity from Writing Demons, in that he hounds you
until you write, instead of being a quivering mass of loathing trying to destroy you
for writing — for he was in the afterword, where Mr. King declared that Lo! (yes, again) this manuscript used to be a much suckier, more abandoned manuscript that he dusted off and punched up into awesome-sauce.
Well, I'm better than
him.* Thanks to my constant moving and insane mental loops and general half-assery, I've got at least a
hundred abandoned manuscripts. And they're all
awesome, or I wouldn't have abandoned them for the next awesome thing.** I've always said: "Whatever I write will stay written", which is a general truth and cannot be denied, but I feel that they've stayed written long enough.
It's pretty easy for a working writer to lose track of unfinished work, but my obsessive cataloging is proving to make it a lot easier to find all these manuscripts, and they're all in plain-text, so I'm good to go. I'm a different writer than I was two years ago: I've calmed my manic need to Create, tempering it with the Joy of Finishing Sh*t. Past me set Future me up for success in this regard, being way too excited with the next idea to bother to finish the present one. Ah, well. Low-hanging fruit is still delicious.
I've run out of current work to format up, and I've obsessively refreshed the old finished sh*t until it's beautiful and salable, and, indeed, it is selling like hot fruitcakes***, so now I need some new stuff. I also need to cultivate some of that "self-discipline" I hear so much about, and it's very distracting to have such a pseudo-backlist hanging over my head, especially when I know exactly how so many of the plots will turn out already.
And they're awesome.
So, here's my Goal: proceeding from Almost Finished to Least Finished, I will go through my archives and finish up these manuscripts, not worrying too much about length, and publishing them as they finish until the whole thing is cleared. Then, with a clean slate and a happy heart, I can roll into the new stuff that is still lurking in my brain, thus sating the Devil of Writing and saving the day!
First up: Lived Too Long to Die
Laconic Captain Frank Evers and the motley crew of the ISS Unreliable Narrator are tasked with breaking the Quarantine around the Sol System so that the perky Professor Kelly Qu can survey a forgotten Earth. Adventure, drama, tragedy and love await in this novel of science fiction and romance.
Get back to work.
Thanks for reading!
daB
feel free to comment
*this declaration is under review by serious people with real jobs.
**I only finish the sh*tty stories. Be told.
***That's a lot.
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