Natural Selection

Yesterday, I did something scandalous.  Something that I tell other writers to never, ever do…

I gave up. 

"I know." she giggles behind the back of her hand; eyes darting around the room to see if anyone has noticed, but the gleam in them suggesting that she hopes someone has, “I’m bad.”

The story that I quit working on, frankly, I hated it.  At first I didn’t, obviously or I wouldn’t have begun writing it, but eventually, yeah. I wasn’t digging the characters. I found I couldn’t care less if they ended up together and that’s kind of not a good thing when you’re writing a contemporary romance, just saying. As I reviewed what I had so far, I found the pacing was torturous; it felt forced.  Truly, it was a stinker.

I gagged on a stench so thick it burned my nostrils and brought tears to my eyes.

I write for my own enjoyment. Writing takes time from my fiancé, from my children, from sleep, from eating, from the laundry (I hate doing the laundry but it must be done because I LOVE clean knickers); why do IT if I don’t enjoy IT? There I was plugging away at a story I disliked with characters I didn’t care about. Meanwhile, I had other stories with interesting people in my head clamoring for my attention.  It didn’t feel like quitting, it felt like survival of the fittest.

Die awful story, die! Crawl into the black hole of abysmal nothingness where crappy things that waste my time deserve to go and rot.

I know what happened, the how, the why, and who’s to blame. I had an opportunity to submit my novel to an editor and I took a break from what I was working on take one last run at polishing both it and the synopsis before sending my baby out. And when I came back to senorita shitty-story I wasn’t emotionally invested anymore.

After cheating on her with a past love, I found her clumsy and unsatisfying. Though I know I was the one at fault, I kicked her sorry ass to the curb and moved on to someone younger, newer and more interesting.

After a week’s misery trying to make it spark the way it first did, I dumped what will forever be known as “The Stinker” into the file folder entitled CRAP (nothing ever gets thrown away just-in-case) and I moved on.  And I’m totally okay with that.  In fact, I accomplished more in the following thirty minutes than I had in the preceding three days. 

 

I’m happy once again.