Well, At Least I'm Here

Well, this has certainly been a sad state of affairs, hasn't it? All that talk about how I wouldn't let the blog lapse, and here we are, eighteen days into December and I've posted, what, three times?

Shameful.

The truth is... well, I'm not sure what the truth is. I know that I've allowed myself to become terribly distracted by work and other, lesser pursuits than writing over the past couple of days. I've told myself not to stress about this brief lapse, that even the greats don't write every single day of the year and that a break is okay, particularly since it comes between the completion of the first draft and before the beginning of the editing process.

Although, that's something that's been on my mind a lot, as well. I want this to be my next novel. Hell, I very much want this to be my first published novel, and more and more, I find myself worrying as to the length. Is it long enough to be considered a novel? My first work was 88,000 words, but I wonder if I go back now how many of those chapters could very much be considered fluff that really should be cut from the final plot. I remember writing a scene where a character gets attacked by some kind of panther. I think its purpose was to show the lethality of the protagonist, or something. Who knows.

The concern is not that I don't have any more ideas. I do have ideas. I want to write another book about these characters. The problem is that right now, it feels like the pacing is such that this story is done and that if I keep going, it really should be a sequel instead of a continuation. Unless maybe I decided to break up the novel into two distinct "books" within the actual work? It's weird hard to explain; I keep feeling like I've told the story that needs to be told for the first book, but then I also feel like if this story isn't long enough to be a "novel," and I have more story to tell with these characters, it should be obvious, right? I don't know.

Then I wonder if perhaps I'm silly for fretting about this because when I go back and edit, I'm sure that, at least in the initial drafting phase, there will be all kinds of things to add and clarify and explain which will probably increase the length. I don't know. I'm sure that a lot of the reason why I feel antsy is because it's been a good, what, three days since I wrote much of anything and I haven't written any fiction since Monday, even then this is supposed to be a break.

And of course, I'm already thinking about other things, new projects, whether I decide to reopen work on the current novel and keep writing, or start in on a separate sequel, or revisit my old novel (probably not going to happen) or try to do something else entirely.

I don't know. What I do know is that I miss the simplicity and elegance of writing a story for an hour each night, every night. It was very nice to simply sit down, write for a while, marvel at my progress and then go about my business. Although I suppose I could just go do that again, I mean, it's not like there's anything stopping me except for the fact that I told myself it's a good idea to put some space between the writing and the editing parts.

I read that somewhere in a book, I think.