I Used To Write Her

Like someone else in a similar position recently posted, I’ve decided to suspend A Season Underneath indefinitely. The reasons are legion, but the biggest is that I am on my fourth rewrite and it doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot better. The chapters are just sort of there, with no real story to bite down on. I can’t imagine anyone really liking it, but that might be because I’ve been looking at it for a while now.

I actually don’t mind doing this. The first draft was an elephant gun misfiring at a mosquito. Awful-awful. After a few rewrites most people would have moved on to something else but I kept at it, so I am where I am now because of undue persistence.

It’s a common thing to not have one’s first manuscript published because your first (and sometimes subsequent) book are too horrendous for exhibition. Even established short story writers can’t/won’t bother with their first novel because it’s a beast many tentacles to hack off and a greenhorn novelist doesn’t have an intellectual axe big enough to handle it. They finish it but it sits somewhere on a shelf or hard drive somewhere while the second novel, if the writer hasn’t offed themselves yet to get it done, gets more traction with agents.

So with that I’m starting a new manuscript with the nickname Retardo Montalbán (please, PC language police, find a more worthy cause). It will be soft/social sci-fi, alternate history, not really dystopian, with a sort of Luddite-libertarian feel…no damnable vampire love triangles, wizards, fairy tale characters in real life, hyperdrive shunts, or anything occurring in the year 1,000,000,000 AD. It’s a story with people who do and think things and set things into motion, not a bestiary of gimmicks.

So, birth/death, a new year, and all that jazz. Krampus will be pleased with me.

Photo by riptheskull.