Time heals

Wa-wa. Pitiful me. I just looked back over the project I’ve been working on for the last two months and it is junk.

It was my NaNoWroMo story. I didn’t finish it in November and kept at it in December. It was starting to gum up in the middle so I figured I would print it out and read what I had. That wasn’t a good idea.

It is total crap.

How can something that held such promise fade away to nothing?

And what is to be done about it? It seems like the harder I work on fixing it, the more impossible it becomes.

All writers go through moments like these. I’ve been there a thousand times myself. It is maddening. One minute you’re up, the next you have no idea how to repair it.

The best solution seems to ignore it for a while. Besides the fact that no solutions is within sight, a few weeks away allows it to stew and work in the subconscious. That will take a few weeks or longer.

There are, fortunately, a couple other projects I can turn to. One is a final revision before shopping for a publisher. The other is another piece that was put away under similar circumstances. It was finished, but lacking in some way. Even if I knew what it needed, I couldn’t muster the the zest to do anything about it.

Time has passed. I see where it needs to go and I’m ready to tackle it again. Maybe when I’m done, the issues with the NaNoWriMo story will have worked themselves out.

What do you do when your work in progress becomes stuck in mud?