Editing Mood

Originally I'd intended this blog to be a place where I could stick a couple of short stories and point people at them, but as I haven't written anything new recently, I thought maybe I'd throw a few things down about what's going on with my writing. At least that way it might encourage me to work harder.

At present I'm just over halfway through rewriting a novel that I'm hoping to have published sometime in the next year. It has a potential home, although I'm not going into any details (or putting too much home in that) as there's every likelihood that something will go wrong - such as me not finishing my editing work!

I have to confess that I'm terrible at finishing anything - I have the desire to be a perfectionist, but not necessarily the drive. So I'll tinker with something for ages, but will often abandon it in an unfinished state because I don't feel up to the task of making it as good as I believe it can be. I'm bad enough when it comes to editing short stories; it's so much worse when I'm dealing with 100,000+ words.

What's made this even worse today is that the part of my novel that I've been revisiting is uncannily similar to something going on in my life at the moment. Which is particularly odd as I wrote that part of the story about six months ago. I'm not going into details as I've never believed in living my life for all on the Internet to read, but it makes it a bit harder to edit when I'm having to deal not only with making that section of the novel readable, but also with the emotions that it's stirring up.

The part of me that's always a writer says "Now if only I can get some of those feelings on the page."

The part of me that's not a writer wants to be able to walk away from it all and play Overlord on my Xbox.

At the moment, the call of the Xbox is winning.