Got 1,224 words written so far this week.
Those are spread out over different projects. I added a little to the novel, started drafting several new essays, and decided to go back and edit a short story from last year.
The story was easy for me to write, but it's been hard to edit. It's quite personal, pulling something from my childhood and turning it into a horror story. It's the first story I've written about where I grew up, and as such is hard for me to see any other way than how I've written it.
So it's taken me counts on fingers about six months to digest some beta reader feedback I got on it, and figure out what the story needs.
And I think I do, now. I can see a hole in the story, a gap in the POV character's motivations that I tried to paper over with his personal flaws.
That might work for me, or for someone who also grew up in the kind of town I did, but it doesn't work for communicating that character's perspective to everyone else. That's a failure on my part, a failure of craft, and -- hopefully -- it's one I can fix.
What about you? Have you ever had a story -- or a novel -- that you simply couldn't edit into shape until after a lot of time (and maybe some leveling up in your writing skills) had passed?
