Sunday, September 3, 2017

"Sometimes We Need to Go Back to Move Forward."

If you know, you know.

The quote in the title is mine. As I said in an earlier post, I'd been abandoned by my oldest and closest friend, writing. It's sucked. I haven't felt whole in weeks. I'd tried reading a bunch, but it wasn't making things click again for me. I entered my novella in a contest hoping the deadline to turn it into a novel would push-start my engine. Nothing came.

This morning I heeded my own words and dug out an unpublished novel, a play and a series of poems. 

"Now, this guy could write."

Victory. I've been firing away at the novella-to-novel conversion and cleaning up a short story for hours now.

I'm back.

To celebrate here's a nice bit of writing I read recently:


5 comments:

  1. Did we ever find a more or less recent draft? I'd love to see it revisited, now more than 20 years since you started it.

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    1. Nothing digital. I found an old printed proofing copy that I might scan into OCR at some point as well as a play/screenplay draft that's actually pretty good that I don't even recall having written. I still have every old HD I've ever used and may be able to pull some things off of those as well.

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    2. Cool. Yeah, we left things, at least in the last digital version I read, with a bit of a hasty (in hindsight) tying up of loose ends... now, 15 years later, seems like things weren't so simple. Now, on the other hand, I feel like there's a coda for the book which, while it leaves a lot unresolved, puts the protagonist in a position where they can look back and reflect and have real gratitude: which is weird for me to type considering who the protagonist is, and having seen some of the ugly and a lot of the truly remarkably good things that he's been through that never made it to the page.

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  2. I shall endeavour to look for a reasonably recent (as in more than 15 years old but not older than 18) draft, which I am almost positive exists somewhere in the ether despite hand drive failures, web site migrations, and laptops left on curbs. As much as I loved Document in 2004, I always felt it was missing a few chapters. Those chapters have been written, now you just have to type them out to get them from your pretty-pretty brain to the page.

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