What I'm Working On

At the moment, I've taken a break from query rejections to work on finishing a short story. It is currently a dead-end short story, so it is not the best use of what little time I have. Rather than think of it as a story, I consider it an exercise in stubbornness – a refusal to give up when the going gets tough.

The current issue, growing deeper with every edit, is that the protagonist’s conflict is internal; as difficult to recognize for the reader as the other characters who fail to display appropriate emotions or reactions. This is frustrating because the characters and the setting feels like a backdrop. No matter how detailed I make that painting it still feels flat.   

The obvious choice would be to re-write this in a different manner. But that isn’t the story I want to write. Hence, the stubbornness.

Writing what I want is important to me, mostly because it is the only reason to do it. I could go busy myself with writing for work, or argue withpeople over social media. But those aren’t topics I feel like writing about.

My preference is to project what is in my mind onto the screen. This urge is reminiscent of when one steps back from what they are doing and get a better approximation of it as a whole. In it one can see the emotions and thoughts they had while creating it; the story in full becoming a map of one's feelings. 

But at the moment, that map is incomplete; the story has not been finished. So I'll toil on, the only sacrifice being the passing hours and those filaments of other stories which will remain unwritten as I work on this one. Hopefully somewhere ahead is a solution to the feeling of completion I seek.