Saturday, December 12, 2015

Finishing Up

As the end of the year approaches I'm struggling to meet my self-imposed deadlines.  With only three plus weeks remaining and Christmas coming the time is so short I despair of meeting them all.

I did finish one of the short stories as planned two weeks ago and another this week.  Both have been sent it off, leaving about four unfinished shorts on the workbench, but they are not scheduled until next year, which is only a few weeks away, alas.  I did vow to get one of the three WIP novels to a point where it could be reviewed and am pretty close to finish, that is, if there ever is such a thing as "finish" in a writer's lexicon.

Paul Levinson once remarked that novels are more frequently abandoned rather than finished and I now understand what he meant.  I am so sick of one of the one I've nicknamed "Plotland" that I just want to put an end to it. I've tried but then realized that some of the tangled threads needed resolution and had to deal with those, only to find that action introduced further complications, and...  You get the picture - Chinese boxes all the way down.

So in the next three weeks I have to bring another of the novels to a close. Write the final chapter, discover the conclusion to the plot, and resolve the as-yet unresolved subplots. Where did all this complication come from? I set out to write this as a short story, only to find that my muse, that interfering bitch, wanted more, and yet more and I've had no choice but to satisfy her insane desires.
How will I ever get everything done?

I still do not know if this was a good year professionally or not. The middle of December is when I start pulling together material for my archive deposit at NIU and looking at the royalty statements and checks to see if I earned enough at writing during this year.

Maybe enough to order extra fries.




#SFWApro

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