Spoiler alert: self-pity and whinging below.

As of chapter 49, I’m feeling kind of lost. Putting Rorie into a frank and open discussion of the voice-in-her head may have been a bad idea. I don’t know. Here is, once again, the inspiring gimmick for a story failing to stand up under my own scrutiny. I don’t know what to do with Emmy. Or with Rorie-and-Emmy. I feel like the relationship between these characters is muddled and without the sort of intrigue and tension that I want to build into the story.

And I feel like I’ve got three narrative threads for three characters, and each one is occupying a different stratum of the Give A Crap scale. Rorie is having her drama with the voice in her head, but setting aside how weird and tramautic that should be, I’m not sure how big of a deal it actually is for her. And then Tom is maybe worrying about his job, and futzing about trying to figure out how and to what extent to be openly gay, and that seems kinda trivial. And then Nyx is just having a shitter of a time. Psycho violent sexual predator drug-dealer ex-quasi-beau trying to pimp her. Drunk and mysteriously contentious dad, dead mother, doesn’t even know where she’ll sleep tonight. Kinda makes Tom and Rorie seem like big babies.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. At just under thirty thousand words, I’m starting to feel some serious strain. Cracks are starting to show in the foundation of the story, and that’s driving me a little crazy. I want things to work, I want the characters to make sense and the story to proceed in a satisfying manner, and yet in my head I can’t help but tie back everything that happens going forward to everything that has happened already in the story. And every ten thousand words I write is ten thousand more words to worry about tying back to.

I know it’s a rough draft. Intellectually, I can look at what I’ve done and what I will yet do and say, look, this is raw material, this is the stone from which a later, more well-considered version of the telling will be carved. For all the difficulties and frustration and unexpected misbehavior of character and plot, I am, yes, generating ideas and developing an understanding of who these fictional folks are. Even my lamentation over how something in the story-so-far is wrong is a useful thing, because it will let me consider what, instead, would be right. Yes? Sure. Intellectually, I can say this.

From an emotional standpoint, though, I am feeling pretty burnt. Lost. At odds with my own narrative. And, as a consequence, I type out long, incohesive blog entries in the time I could (should?) spend writing out the next chapter that, frankly, I haven’t any idea how to start.