I may have mentioned that I’ve been publishing on Wattpad on Fridays. That will not change. However, I have a confession to make; I don’t really care about the story I’ve been working on. I was not making any progress on the stories I considered to be “worth telling” because I liked the ideas too much. I was afraid I would “screw them up.” By that I mean, fail to tell the story I had in mind. It’s ultimately the same mindset that drove me away from visual arts. I was never able to recreate the pictures I had in my head to my satisfaction.
Seeing my paralysis my girlfriend, April, suggested that rather than work on one of my best ideas, why didn’t I work on one of my worst. Worst is relative, of course. That brought two ideas to mind so I selected one and got to work. I had fun at first. I was amused by some of the scenes, I had a little romance going between two characters, I threw in what I considered to be outrageous action in an effort to “raise the peril.” I got to about 15000 words before I lost steam. It’s just not my kind of story to write. I’ll read and watch movies and television shows about stories like it but write one? Meh.
Another confession, starting off publishing to Wattpad on a weekly basis using a story that’s already 15000 words in isn’t as motivating as I’d hoped it would be. Rather, the lack of pressure has led to inaction. Yes, I know. I set myself up for that. It was performance anxiety.
I’ll admit, part of my fears come from my experience with NaNoWriMo. I “won” in 2018 and had a mixed experience. On the one hand, there’s the motivation to get those words done on a schedule and the added benefit of feeling like part of a community. On the other hand, the pace required is not really how I write. What I ended up with was a huge mess that I had to spend a lot of time trying to fix which left me feeling overwhelmed. I liken it to building a house. Which works out better, cleaning up at the end of each day or letting all of the debris pile up in the backyard until the end of the job? I learned that I need time to clean up at the end of every day and I didn’t feel like I could take the time during NaNoWriMo.
My point: I’m going to stop working on Tunnel Vision. Heck, I don’t think more than one person has actually looked at it anyway. I worry that abandoning Tunnel Vision could indicate to potential readers that I don’t finish projects but would you want me to continue plugging away at something I wasn’t passionate about?
No. I’m going to switch to working on my “good” ideas. I’m still worried. I worry about: maintaining the weekly schedule, keeping up the quality, having my ideas stolen by a more prolific writer before I can finish developing them, writing spoilers, typos and editing errors, innocently writing something that brings me to the attention of cancel culture, and the list goes on.
So, basically, a typical weekday.
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