Monsters and Mayhem

I have a lot of things in my head.

I've had a few random ideas for my current story, involving time travel, human sacrifice, the usual. I also have this gnawing in my brain, in my very soul, to finish The Long Road.

I don't know why that story is so important. I mean, every year, I sit down to write a NaNo novel, and I say, "This will be the one." The Great American Novel. The story that's going to change the world, even if it's just my little corner of it. It's the story that will make sense and I'll be able to show it to everyone without cringing. Every year, I say that.

And every year, I write a pile of complete nonsense, with a few good gems sprinkled throughout, the needles in my haystack. I shrug and say, "Oh well, maybe next time." And I put it aside, saying maybe I'll fix it one day, if I ever figure out how. I have eight years' worth of stories like that. Every so often, I'll come up with a little idea of how to edit them, or something to change, but very rarely do I actually go back and try to rewrite the damn things after more than a couple months.

But The Long Road has been haunting me. It wants to be written. I've realized that so much of the first draft has to go, and so much needs to be changed. It's going to be a lot of work to turn it into a readable piece of literature. It's going to be hard. And here I've been doing all these other little projects, to avoid doing the work, to do the easy thing, but it's still in my head. All the time.

It needs an outline. There's no way around that. While the eldritch horror tale I'm working on now can be literally planned out a paragraph at a time, The Long Road deserves better. I don't think I can do a full, detailed, scene by scene outline, but I at least need to know the major plot points, the important details and backstory revealed at each point, and an idea of the emotional state of each character at each event. I want this to be good, damn it. I want a finished book I can hold in my hands. And for some damn reason, I want it to be this book.

But this month, I've set out to write this short story of ungodly creatures and probably death (which is totally different from The Long Road), so I have to at least write my 3,000 words of that, and fulfill my contract to myself. Then I'll be free to stare blankly at pages and try to rewrite this damn thing.

For now, I must go write. I'll see you next week.