Taking a little paws

A rambly ROW80 check-in.  Possibly only vaguely coherent. Sinus infection and dizziness make for a fuzzy brain, plus I’m really trying to figure out what to do with this story I’ve been trying to work on.

Trying.  That’s the thing.  I took several months–most of a year–off from writing.  I needed to make sure it was still my big thing (it is).  When I realized I was still thinking about writing and stories and story ideas all the time, I decided to get back to writing and really give it time and attention.

I decided that I was going to restart the last thing I had been working on.  It’s a good story, has some nice bones to it already.  Needs quite a bit of fleshing out of the characters, and some work to help me see the details of the setting.  But it’s good, and it’s a ghost story, the kind I really love.  So this should be a great idea, right?

Apparently not.  Monday I was listening to a video from Morgan MacDonald of Paper Raven Editing about re-motivating your writing. She asked why this project is important, and my answer was, “It isn’t.” Argh!

How did I come to be working on an interesting and good story that I don’t care that much about?  It all started with NaNoWriMo.  This was my 2013 NaNo novel.  I wrote it because I needed a new story to write for NaNo, and I do love ghost stories and haunted houses, so I started one.  And when I came back after my writing break, it seemed to make sense to go back to the most recent thing I was working on.  Also, it’s not one of the stalled novels that I really love and am not sure how to restart.  I thought writing the ghost story first would help build my writing muscles and get me ready to go back to the others.

What this all boils down to is that I’m just not that into this story.  I should be–I love haunted houses and ghosts and family curses.  I just can’t seem to get really into this.  I’m not sure what I want or need to be doing about that.

So, while I figure it out,  I’m going to take a little break from the story.  Just a little pause while I sort out what I want to be doing. I’m going to go back to one of my rollback points–short stories.  That’s where I started, and that always seems like a good place to go back to when I need to remember that I actually like writing.

I’m going to write some short fiction, try out some flash fiction even (as soon as I decided this yesterday a story came to me just about fully formed!).  I’m going to let myself play with stories without getting too fully committed to any one story right now until I know which one I really want to be writing.  And, I’m going to do some outlining of what I have written so far on an old story, Ordinary Girl, because that may be the one I go back to.

This needs to be for fun and joy and love.  That’s how and why I started storytelling and writing in the first place when I was a little girl.  So if I’m not having fun, and it’s not just a temporary thing, that means it’s time for a reshuffle.  That’s what I’m going to do now.