Slogging through a funk

Just a quick update, since it’s 3 am and I’m kind of in a daze after playing Halo: Reach on Xbox live with my roommate.  Whoa, decompressing…

This whole week, I’ve been in a weird funk.  It sucks to be unemployed, especially since I can’t commit to anything long term because I’m waiting to hear back from the wilderness job.  Man, I really hope I get it–but even if I do, I’ll need to raise some cash to keep me going through January until the paychecks start coming in.  And if I don’t get the job, I have no idea what I’ll do.

But mostly, it has to do with my writing.  I’ve been running through the rough draft of Worlds Away from Home, and…holy crap, it REALLY sucks.  It sucks to the point where I’m not sure exactly how to fix it.

Part of it probably has to do with my initial ambitions for it, which I probably set too high.  I originally wanted to write a science fiction romance that turned the “romance” element on its head by having the sex be the thing pushing the characters apart rather than bringing them together.  I got a little too didactic in the rough draft, though, and failed to tell a story that, at it’s root, is meant to entertain.

That’s probably the most important thing–to tell a story that’s fundamentally entertaining.  So I’ve been looking at that, and I’m finding that there are significantly fewer plot threads here than there were in Mercenary Savior.  That, and there’s considerably less suspense.  The character arcs are still sufficiently complex, I think, but there aren’t nearly as many hooks and cliffhangers as my other work.

This whole week, I’ve been vacillating between “alright, I can do this” to “this novel sucks and I should just throw it out and never work on it again.” In fact, I drew up a chart today of all the novels I’ve started, finished a first draft, and finished a polished draft–and the results are a little stark.

I only just produced a fully polished draft for Genesis Earth, so at 2010 I’ve finally gotten one novel to the point where I think it’s as good as I can make it without an editor/agent to help.  One freaking novel–and that’s after two years of work.  Mercenary Savior, I’m finding, isn’t quite where it needs to be, though it’s close–probably I’ll nail it down in early 2011.  But other than those two?  I’ve got nothing.

I started Worlds Away from Home back in 2008, and I’m wondering whether I was even good enough back then to craft a story that could carry through a complete novel.  Ashes of the Starry Sea was probably a bit too ambitious, and Genesis Earth, while it ended up working out, was so small in scope that it wasn’t that hard to pull off.

Is something fundamentally flawed with Worlds Away from Home? Did I bite off more than I could chew?  Is the story premise so screwed up that I should just abandon it and reuse it occasionally for scraps?

I have no idea.  Maybe I’m just being too angsty–after all, I started Genesis Earth BEFORE I started Worlds Away from Home, and that one turned out great.  It took two years, of course, but it worked out in the end.

So will this one work out?  Probably, I suppose–but only if I can solidly get behind it.  I’m trying to put together a detailed plot outline to figure out what the story needs, but if I can’t find something else–something on par with the cryo scene and the first line of Genesis Earth, which for the longest time were the only two things keeping me from trashing that project–if I can’t find something redeemable like that, I might just drop this monstrosity and let it die.

Blarg.  I hate this.  I might just take a break from things and write a couple short stories.  This whole week, I’ve been writing nothing but outlines and revision notes–I need to do something a little more creative.

Anyhow, that’s what I’m currently slogging through.  Before the end of next week, I’m hoping to find out whether I’ve got that wilderness job or not.  Let’s hope…