I feel like SUCH an impostor today. I can’t work on the novel, because it’s what I’ll be workshopping at Viable Paradise in October, and I’ll probably need to change a thousand things about it, so why keep working on that when I’ll just have to rewrite (or shelve) it later?
A short story I’ve been working on is plotted, but I can’t seem to actually make it work. Some of my “ideas in reserve” aren’t jelling, so I’m having a hard time doing anything with them.
My OTHER novel-in-progress is frozen, because I’ve convinced myself that the synopsis makes little sense, and also because I need to do more background work before I can tell a story there. My OTHER other series idea is frozen, because even though I’ve been working on it off-and-on for more than 15 years now, it’s remarkably similar to a currently-published book series (which I had never read until long after creating my own), and while I think it can still be made to work, I need to think on it so it doesn’t get any more derivative in appearance.
I am terrified that what I will discover at VP is that I have the ability to write prose, but that I will never be an author because I can’t seem to generate ideas in quite the quantity that I need to. Most everything I think of seems like it couldn’t really be even a short story.
Yep. Frustrated.