I didn’t get a lot of writing done yesterday, but in comparison to the past month, I did really well. I was editing and reviewing a lot of writing—when I haven’t touched a manuscript in a long time, I’ll usually read the current chapter I’m on to refocus myself into the style/atmosphere etc.—but I did do what I said I was going to and I had a great time doing it. I did some writing for X (sent a submission in) and also got around to writing some pages for both A Woman’s Conquest and DW. I was going to just focus on one project, but I’m at a crossroads with A Woman’s Conquest.

A Woman’s Conquest, where is it going?

So, I’m that type of person that has a bad habit of abandoning things and starting again when I can’t get it right. But, recently, I’ve been thinking that I need to spend a bit more time trying to fix what I already have, so I don’t get six different iterations of the story and start getting confused. Issue is, for some of my projects, they definitely got better after rewriting them those six times (DW is a great example of that). The downside is that I don’t always start again after abandoning something. I get discouraged and then think “maybe it just sucks completely, so what’s the point?” There are definitely times when projects aren’t really worth pursuing, so I dismantle it and throw anything I couldn’t part with into another project where it makes sense, but when I have something like A Woman’s Conquest, where I definitely want to do it but don’t know how to fix what’s not working, I just stop working on it and hope that something picks up later. Which isn’t a great habit to have. I’m not trying to force my writing, but I’m trying to encourage it a bit more rather than waiting for it to take over my fingers.

I’ve been thinking about how some writers shift the perspective or the starting point of the work, but I don’t think either of them are the issue with the manuscript. There’s definitely a lack of description, but that was from “spit writing” (when I just throw it down before I don’t put anything down) but going back and filling in the blanks doesn’t seem to click as much as it normally does, and so it makes me think that I just have to re-write it.

I think one thing that’s definitely tripping me currently is that I’m writing it in present tense, which I rarely do. I’ve been thinking about changing it, but I do think the present tense suits the first-person POV for the main character because of the way that I’m writing them. I don’t know if other people have the same issue, but for me, writing in different tenses isn’t just simply changing the tense of the words. There’s something different that I need to do that I can’t explain, and I feel like that whatever I’m doing is not quite right.

I’ll have to figure it out soon, because I don’t want to abandon this one.