Bad mojo, get thee behind me

After much soul searching, I have arrived at the conclusion that both “serious” things I tried to write in 2009 are unqualified failures, unsalvageable, and will never see the light of day. The first (which some of you may remember as the Interactive Web Story) because I was in love with the concept but couldn’t produce two stories that lived up to the promise of the concept. The second (typically horrendously titled Beyond the Burning Moon) because I had some sort of mental lapse and decided it would be a good idea to follow some popular writing advice that is fundamentally at odds with my nature.

To wit: “Power through! Get it written! Everything can be fixed in revision!”

I have determined, actually, that last bit is a lie, at least in my case. Powering through, churning out a daily word count regardless of the quality of the words in question, and getting it done under the pressure of a schedule resulted in a draft that contained few complete sentences, huge gaps in logic and continuity, one chapter in which I couldn’t tell whose point of view it was supposed to be until the last couple of paragraphs, and a million other problems. EVERY SINGLE WORD would have had to be rewritten. In other words, it would have been like starting over from nothing, only without the excitement of a new project and Cool! Surprises! because now I’m locked into “fixing” a mess, retreading old, sewage-flooded ground rather than actually writing. When powering through just so you can say you’ve “finished” results in a huge piece of shit, it’s not something that can be “fixed.” All that can be done is get rid of it before the stench sinks into everything else and no amount of Febreze can disguise it.

Know that seething resentment that bubbles up when someone at work or in your family screws something up and you have to go along behind them and clean up their mess, wasting your time and energy because they didn’t have the decency to do it right the first time? That’s how I feel about this story. It makes me angry because somebody half-assed it and now I’m expected to do it over again.

I think it’s probably counterproductive to continue jabbing at a story that makes me angry because I will never be able to give it the kind of attention it deserves.

Ergo, I have given myself permission to abandon it. Sorry if you were looking forward to it, but I assure you with the utmost sincerity, if I ever managed to force myself to finish it (which was looking pretty doubtful), it would have fallen short of even the lowest expectations and, by virtue of being The Thing I Have To Get Done Whether I Like It Or Not, would have prevented me from writing anything new, different, and better.

In the meantime, I have moved on to something I actually care about and am invested in. And if it takes a week to get the first page right and three days to make that one analogy work and a month to make that setting come alive, that’s how much time it will get because (a) when what came before is sound, what comes after is a hell of a lot easier and (b) I will do this right the first time so revision is a matter of copyediting rather than a nightmare of thousands of wasted words.

Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson (seriously this time) and am no longer entertaining process-related advice from any source, and I have a squad on hand to smack sense into me in the event of another such mental lapse.