Unstuck

I do that, really. For me, though, the 'click' comes when the story idea is ready. For this one, I had an idea. I'll make a blog post sometime about how it came to me. Anyway, the idea formed, and I wrote a page, maybe not even that. And the idea sat there for a couple years, probably churning around in my brain. Eventually it was ready, and I started putting it down. I've been disgorging it ever since, about a year now when I have time, which has been a lot recently. Most often my ideas are short stories, and I can crank one out, after its baking time has been met, in about four days of furtive activity.

As you can tell, my first drafts aren't necessarily the most readable. Oh, they're not horrible, but they're not great. Typically, working entirely on my own, I pore over the draft and edit like crazy. Once I spent a week writing down a story and four months picking at the editing, polishing it to a high sheen. It was well received. I published it through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program, now shut down, and it sold a few hundred copies, which I mark as a success. I had a sequel queued up in outline, but they shut down the program before its oven timer went off. I doubt I'll ever write it, but it would have been a good story.

This novel effort is a different beast than short stories, though. The idea came out well-formed; I knew what needed to happen in large blocks, and I wrote the prologue, the first scene, and the epilogue all right away. But the gap between the first page and the last is larger than I've ever dealt with. I'm wrapping up Part One at around 45K words, and that's nearly four times longer than anything else I've written. Part Two is looking short, but Part Three is threatening to be epic in size.

I like this story well enough that I want to finish it. If I don't, the epilogue is wasted, and I like the way it worked. It's acting like a goal I'm striving to reach. Stay tuned.