I think the other reason I’m a little blah about my writing is that it just feels like nothing, in general, is happening. Things are out for submission, things are at the copyeditor, things are being written. But I like the part where I say “Hurray, go read this!!!” and you all say “Whoa, we read it and it was fun and awesome.”
And what if it never happens again?!
That’s my big, secret fear–that “Frank” was it. And that I’m too stupid to know it.
Redrafting the Ben & Sue project with a different narrator has been lately hard as hell. It’s both that I know the story really well–so that doesn’t feel like a first-draft–and yet here I am writing all new stuff that I’m not sure works or even needs to be there, which is a perfectly fine place to be in a first draft, but a weird place to be in a 8th or 9th draft, whichever this is for some material.
Another hard thing is that I’m still not sure there’s any narrative urgency. I’ve been staring at some parts of this so long that I have no idea why anyone would want to continue reading it from one sentence to another. I have no idea why scenes follow each other.
I think this is, in part, just a kind of narrative delirium brought on by being stuck in this story that almost, but doesn’t quite work for so long.
Anyway, last night I hit that same old scary spot with this manuscript–the ending, which I am, yet again, rewriting.
Tiny Cat Pants 