To Each Her Own in Problem Solving

New obstacles to fin­ish­ing this dang rewrite are being thrown at me. Every time I think I’ve solved some major prob­lems and I nearly have the pieces togeth­er, someone gives me a new reas­on to pause the for­ward motion. (By golly this sounds like a plot­line in itself!) It nev­er feels good to hear these things, that the cli­max of the story isn’t cli­mactic enough, so yes, I was upset about it. I’m recov­er­ing from the death of my hard drive, and still mourn­ing the loss of a lot of stuff due to the back-up sys­tem hav­ing failed me. I knew I’d have to rewrite some rewrites I had com­pleted in the fall, which is bad enough, but now I have to go back and re-eval­u­ate a whole plot concept and fig­ure out how to fix it.

But you see, I’m a prob­lem solv­er. That’s one of the things I love about writ­ing, and it’s one of my strengths.

Colleen has been say­ing to me for months.…

“You need to set Book One aside and get some dis­tance from it. Work on Griffin.”

A few weeks ago I finally said to her, “You know, when you say that I think you’re telling me that Book One sucks.”

She said, “I’m glad you said that, because that’s not at all what I’m say­ing, and now we can clear this up.” [Did I ever men­tion the import­ance of hav­ing writer friends you can work with closely? To help each oth­er through these chal­lenges? Someone you trust] We did clear it up and she stopped telling me to set this story aside.

The oth­er day, after Colleen (yes, it was Colleen) poin­ted out the flaws in the cli­max of my story, I ven­ted a bit to Jonath­an, anoth­er won­der­ful writer friend whom I trust. [my part­ner for the 2009 3‑Day Nov­el Con­test.… You can­’t col­lab­or­ate on a pro­ject like that with someone you don’t get along with!] So I ven­ted to Jonath­an and he said…

“You should set this story aside and get some dis­tance from it. Work on Griffin.”

Errrrrrg.

I under­stand where he’s com­ing from, of course. And I’m glad every­body’s excited about the Griffin story. But here’s the thing: I don’t want to work on Griffin. My pas­sion is still with Kyer and Valrayker right now. I’ve been work­ing on this massive edit/rewrite for ages and I want to fin­ish it. If I set it aside it needs to be my decision; it needs to be because I feel that is the best choice right now.

I’ve giv­en it lots of thought, tak­ing my gut feel­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion, as I always do. I’ve already shif­ted into prob­lem solv­ing mode, I can feel those wheels turn­ing.… So no, this is not the time to set the story aside.

Now that I’m over being upset about it, it’s time to get back to it.