HULK SMASH!
"That F***ing thing is going to kill you," my friend Mike told me today when he asked me about my novel and I said that I was facing a lot of thoughts about what the story was about, what I have already on paper, what I need, what's unnecessary. It's a daunting and almost debilitating thing. And as I spend day after day replotting, restructuring and thinking thinking thinking I start to agree with Mike that it may in fact kill me to bring this thing to close.
I don't know why. I don't know how novelists do it. The ones who push them out so fast. Maybe I'm afraid of completing it. Success? Maybe but it seems implausible. Failure? Seems more likely. I mean Bam! this is crap they'll tell me and then my dreams are quashed. Sure but I mean I've sent things out already.
The rider's story should be an easy one to tell. I mean it has a direction. East. It has an end. He gets home. It has a focus. He spreads chaos. There. You have point A and point C and the bloody trail of bodies that represent point B and the space between. There. Story done. Now where does my problem come from?
I spent the last month exploding the story. Balancing a bunch of stories of characters who I want to be important eventually, but not until later. So what I did was send it out to a few friends to have them read it and toss their two cents my way. They have been. And it's been very helpful. But it's causing me to really figure out what I want to tell, and causing me to go swinging the broadsword of my editing ability and rebuild from the ashes of destruction.