When to Let Go

After four restarts, endless revisions and never getting past the halfway mark, I've given up on a project after committing to it for the first time. It doesn't feel like I thought it would.

For context, I've been working on what was going to be the third Alumita book for what feels like forever. It was the book I started immediately after finishing the Ashes books two years ago (!), and the one that frustrated me to the point I ended up writing the first Dizzy book to get away from it. But fresh eyes and a new book under my belt didn't work out how I thought it would. I picked it up, set it down, restarted and revised the first half innumerable times without ever making it past the halfway point. I thought it was just resistance at first, and that my usual strategy of dealing with resistance (turn away for a little while and then run past it when it's not looking) never worked.

I've talked numerous times here about working with resistance and using it to take stock of what may not be working in a story, and also how important it is to just get the story down and worry about revising later. But in this case, both strategies failed. No matter which new angle I came at it from or how much momentum I thought I was building on every reboot I hit the same wall at the midpoint. I changed the love interest, I changed the whole premise of the story (while keeping basics like the setting and other ephemera that was working), I even overhauled the main character's motivations and outlook, and all of it to no avail. No matter how much I changed the foundations around, I could never figure out a way to salvage a decent building out of it. The story just kept fighting me, to the tune of months worth of work. And it won. (I hope it's proud of itself!)

I'm still not entirely certain what the root problem was. I still think there's a good story in there, I just couldn't find it, even after months of looking and multiple restarts from different angles... in short, working on it until it wasn't fun anymore.

And that's when I knew I had to be done. For good.

I think there were two issues, neither of which have anything to do with the story:

1) The same problems were waiting for me when I got back from writing the first Dizzy book. Like I went on vacation, had a great time, and then as soon as I got back I remembered why I left in the first place. My subconscious was no help in solving them behind the scenes; maybe it was smart enough to move on before I did?

2) I think I reached a new level of writing maturity with Death Has Golden Eyes, and returning to to an old story (especially one that had so much work already done) made me feel like I was going backwards as a writer. Short of blowing it up and starting from scratch, it was always going to feel like Old Me's book, like I was going to have to devolve somehow to finish it the way that 'd started, and that didn't feel good.

And that last part is the real reason I'm done: it wasn't fun anymore. The whole point of the Alumita books is that they're fun, for me first and foremost. If I don't enjoy it, there is very little chance you will. I'm not a perfectionist or a tortured artist or anything, it's simply that being unenjoyable is pretty much antimatter to a comedic romance: they annihilate each other on contact.

Not to worry, though! There will be more Alumita books at some point, just not this one.

It wasn't an easy choice, but the decision to bury this book once and for all has been a liberating one. I feel much freer and more creatively inspired, and look forward to tackling new story problems every day, rather than for excuses not to. The sunk cost fallacy got the better of me for awhile, but the best way out isn't always through. Sometimes it's to set the whole quagmire on fire and ride the updraft.

Whee!