If anyone cares, I’m currently at 37970 words on the short story that wanted to become a novella that’s trying to be a novel and still needs a good title. I wrote a thing two days ago that I like. It sounds like this:
“Are you okay? You seem weird today.”
I didn’t seem weird. I was weird. And hormones and pre-teen angst and my general level of constant anxiety were all just wrecking me.
Those two lines capture precisely who I was when I was 12 so perfectly, it’s almost embarrassing and maybe even a little painful to read them.
I’m somewhere in the third act of this thing that refuses to cough up a title. I have two main story things that I need to wrap up, one character thing that I want to put in but don’t need to put in, and then I leave it alone for a day or two before the rewriting begins. It’s equally frustrating and exciting and scary to be this close to finishing the first draft, and that’s okay. It’s a good place to be, practically and emotionally, because it’s what I have to do before I can get into the part where it starts coming together into one whole story, instead of a bunch of things that may or may not hang together.
But, anyway, for everyone out there who is writing a story and feels like they’re never going to get to the end, or that it’s no good, or any of those things our brains tell us to protect us from taking the creative risk of finishing something: you’re not the only one. Hell, I bet even Neil Gaiman feels stuck and frustrated from time to time, and I’m pretty sure that he’s an actual, living god.
