You shall know me

I've taken to wearing my steel toed boots before I plop down at the keyboard and hack away. Lately the hacking has been competing with the incessant daydreaming which is like junk food and leaves me with a nice empty feeling.

Upstairs, on my foot locker there's a plastic binder that haunts me. It's a gloss blue, three ring that I probably paid 89 cents for. When I got it, say 11 years ago or so, the idea was to put the pages of my book in it, which I did. 85 of them written in my barely legible lefty script, the words piled on top of each other appearing forced out and squished together. No spaces between lines, and surprisingly for me very few line outs or other typos.

"And that's all it takes," Gregg said; Is the last line that I wrote. I wonder what caused me to give up then? If I read it now, I can see the answer clearly. THE STORY WAS GOING NOWHERE.

That is about as horrible a feeling one can have. Ideas form and get sketched out in the rough, a thin string holds them together, but this means nothing. What means something is 250 pages of a cohesive entertaining story that the writer feels tells the story they want to tell.

I started to write another story, recently and got 42 pages, but the story lines were so similar from my first one that I had a hard time navigating the plot. It didn't help that I came upon inspiration at work for another idea. This lit a fire in me so hot that I had no choice but to get the first scene down, which I did after stalling it out for a week. This is my story. If I had one book to write, one shot this is it.

That week turned to another week after I finished the third chapter and realized that the POV I used would fail to tell the story I wanted, so I rewrote the whole thing. That turned into another week when it came to me that even though I knew the dominant themes of the story, I had no idea how to tie them all together.

After three days of staring at a blank screen, and surfing interwebs, I woke up on Sunday and immediately wrote five paragraphs, then curled up on the couch with my two cats and spent a half day plotting. That yielded 3 and a quarter pages of material. It's a start, but not enough to avoid the snags, pitfalls and little traps that I keep creating for myself.

So I will spend at least another week plotting, letting it simmer and develop into the idea that I want it to be. I'll be easy enough to recognize if you come looking. Mine will be the steel toed covered feet sticking out from underneath the pile of wasted paper, silly ideas, hackneyed plot devices, overwrought cliches, grammatical and syntax errors, two-dimensional characters, and barely comprehensible premise.

This is how you shall know me.