This year I decided to dust off my 2009 NaNo Novel The Ferry because I actually finished it and could use this month to polish it into a second draft, then have someone else eyeball it. I set a modest 15,000 word goal, since I wasn’t expecting to greatly expand on it.
Then a few days ago I chucked all that aside. Am I mad?
Maybe.
What happened is I started re-reading the story after a long time away with it, so my eyes were “fresh” and it just didn’t grab me like it should have. There’s a newer prologue scene I added awhile back that I actually quite like, then it goes back to the largely unchanged text of 2009 and it doesn’t really gel, though I can see what I was attempting.
In brief, I was trying to set the mood through a long, slow burn where tensions keep increasing, without anything actually supernatural or weird happening. The ferry is late. It’s really hot. The terminal is crowded. Tempers are short. A stranger insinuates herself to the main characters in a way that is not entirely welcome. But nothing actually happens. And instead of things feeling tense, it starts to feel a little more like, “Is anything going to happen?”
And when it does finally start, I’m not convinced it’s even that interesting. Weird and deadly dog-like creatures appear to have gotten on the ferry and start attacking. There is a fear of panic. The bridge appears to have been attacked and is now empty. But still, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep reading…and I wrote the thing!
I went back to Road Closed and in a way it has the same problem. There’s a lot of set-up in the early chapters before anything spooky or weird happens. Right now I’m deciding on how best to rework the beginning of the story and how to fit things together at the end (the middle is strangely fine). It’s already stronger than The Ferry, because it has the added bonus of watching a guy slowly self-destruct from drinking even before the ghostly shenanigans start.
Here’s hoping, then, that I can make real progress on Road Closed this year and maybe even self-publish the silly thing.
