This entry really doesn’t fit here at all, since it has nothing to do with work, or the ocean, or the cruising industry, or anything to do with anything really. This is a purely personal need to share my frustration with someone…
There are a few of you (one at least) who will completely understand. For those of you who don’t …well consider this another glance into the labyrinth that is my mind.
A lot of you know that the reason I keep this blog is because I am a rather compulsive writer. Maintaining these pages gives me a chance to flex those skills, and has the dubious benefit of keeping most of the people I’m close to up to date on the slightly controlled chaos of my life (at the very least, it lets you all know that I haven’t fallen overboard and drowned, gotten mugged somewhere in Cairo, or actually missed the ship altogether)…originally when I started this whole project it was going to be strictly a travel-journal. Port-related entries only. Yeah, we can see how well that lasted.
(I never expected to keep this who public blog thing up more than a year by the way. It’s mere existence is all Simeon’s fault.)
At any rate, I write here because I am a writer (among other things), and a writer will write, whether or not she has anything to actually write about.
Except…when she is trying to write.
Some few of you know how long it took me to write Last Light of the Goddess, when I write novels I write slowly, but I tend to write fairly consistently. Last Light simply spilled out of my pen and onto the paper and then went through several years of complete overhaul before finally being sent off to live with the rest of the big kids. Last Light was all in all…a fairly easy ‘child’ to raise.
Grounded however (which has been called various things in the….14 or so years I’ve been banging my head against it), is, for lack of a better word, a stubborn brat. The kind of child who hates school, won’t eat her vegetables and refuses to tie her shoe-laces, I have no idea where this story wants to go. What I have written of it is some of the best writing I’ve managed to put down on paper (not all of it of course, it also contains some of the worst writing I’ve ever churned out), but honestly, getting two sentences done on this story? Is a good day. Usually I stare at it and re-read what I’ve written ten times, change one word, add a period, and then close the file in frustration for another month and a half.
In the near 14 years I’ve been working on this thing, I have written (and rewritten at least once, since I did an overhaul on the whole thing during my first contract in a desperate attempt to kick-start it) exactly 14 single spaced pages. A page a year…wow.
I got further on it once, when I was about 15, I almost finished, but then I re-read it and realized that I didn’t at all like how it had ended up, that what little bit of an ending I had felt tacked on and contrived, that I had written the characters all wrong, and in fact some of them weren’t even supposed to be there.
Then I lost the manuscript
And re-wrote the same 14 pages.
You can see the pattern here.
I am almost at the point where I would give the manuscript to someone else to get it past the point where it’s stuck.
But that would entail trusting someone else with my work.
It would also entail giving up.
Curses….