the state of the novel

Hey, so…Writing is hard. Did you realize that? Because I seem to forget this every so often, and then I try to get back into writing, and then I remember and I give up again. That’s been the past five months for me. A lot of starting and stopping, which results in a rather sad 14,000 words, give or take a few hundred.

I’ve never really been a finisher. I have the start to dozens of stories, and they’re all rather decent starts. I’ve got notes for world-building, character traits, all sorts of research. But no ends. I’ve been trying to figure out why it is that I can start so easily but endings elude me. I think part of it has to do with my lack of focus; I get distracted incredibly easily, and thus I get bored and want to move on if I stick with a story for too long. That’s not to say that my stories probably aren’t worth putting forth the effort if I can’t even hang with them as the author. I just really suck at follow-through.

Another reason dawned on me fairly recently, and I think it might be the reason that drives my non-finishing most of all with this story and another I’ve got in the works. I am terrified–petrified, even–of sharing my work with strangers. It’s completely anti-everything I want to do, but I just don’t know how to possibly let people I don’t know read my work and judge it accordingly. This is something I need to get over, because I definitely want to share my work, and I definitely want to, y’know, make money from it, but I can’t if I don’t finish anything. So how the hell do I finish? How the hell do you finish? I’m eternally in awe of authors that start and finish so easily. I want that. I’m totally going to have that.

Eventually. Maybe.

In the meantime, I’ll just continue procrastinating writing by cutting my hair. Because that’ll totally help my word count, don’tcha know.