Walls

I am, or should be, right now, looking over a manuscript and making edits. But I just don't know what the bigger picture for this story is yet. I need to add a bunch to it yet, I know that. But hell, I just don't know where to go from here with it. I've read through the whole thing, two hundred something pages in Word. I marked the hell out of the draft I have. Now I'm back to looking at it and thinking, "What am I taking out? What am I leaving in? What works? What flops?" Narrative, yo... narrative is the thing. Serve the narrative. I have a writing Qui-Gon Jinn whispering in my ear. And I keep swatting him away because he is distracting. And kind of an asshole.

I am having trouble seeing the bigger picture. Is this fucking thing any good or what? How do I make it better? And it's not at the point yet where anyone can read it. It's a jumble, I know that. So I'm stuck in my own head, trying to figure out how to position these pieces that I have so that they're just right. I'm stuck with a stack of papers that is laughing at me. Saying, "You fell apart at page 38 and you never got your shit back together, man. What were you thinking?"

Ugh. You shut up too, papers, or you and Qui-Gon and I are going out back. I guess I really need to just keep my head down. Keep outlining. Rewrite. Revise. After I revise the 50k words I have and after I write about 40k more I suppose it will be ready for Alpha readers! And then Beta readers (if I can scrounge any of those up)! And then rejection letters! Oh, so many rejection letters. Really, brain? This is what you came up with? This is what you like to do? I mean, that being the case, would you mind rewiring yourself, so that you force me to sit down and just type away every single night? Could you do that for me? Because you've already wasted most of my 20's getting yourself boozed up and too drunk to write. Not that I minded, that was fun, but of course, it was all in your service anyway. Figure your shit out, brain.

Ok, back to it. Sorry for that, I needed to look at something else for a bit.