Unsurprisingly, life doesn’t go as planned. Writing sometimes even less so.

My plan to work on CL, really dig into my beta’s edits, and get the show on the road during the month of February was a complete and dismal failure.

First came the Valentine’s story (which is waiting for a friend to read and may be waiting forever for that to actually happen), then I read through my beta’s notes, jotted down some ideas, thought about what she said…

…and then I was stuck. She was really encouraging about wanting to see the story published, but after reading through some of her comments about things she thinks needs fixed, I don’t even know where to begin. Some of them are major changes that will require pretty much re-writing the entire thing (or at least I feel like it will).

This leaves me with three choices: Make the changes she recommends without doing complete re-writes and then find a beta to read the new version; get a second beta to read the current version get his/her input; or re-write the whole damn thing.

I know writers are their own harshest critics, but part of me doesn’t even know the story I was telling in CL anymore. I wanted it to be a steampunk tale of how a man falls in love with his servant and his servant falls in love with him. But along the way it got complicated…distracted. It became something else. And while I don’t necessarily hate the story it became, I’m not sure if it’s the story as I meant to tell it.

Where does the leave the author? Kinda depressed, honestly, although not enough to want to give up on the whole endeavor. CL isn’t dead, it’s just not talking to me at the moment, and I’m not sure leaving messages and texting it every week is going to help. So I may give it to another beta, see what that person says and then decide if I’m hobbling it together or starting from scratch. Both are kind of terrifying.

Meanwhile, I have a short story that everyone who read said it felt like the beginning of a story, so I’m re-evaluating it. Taking notes, trying to get a sense of the characters, and wondering how it would be constructed, because I don’t think it feels like an A to B to C plotted story.