Optimistic about tomorrow’s writing

I’m hoping I’ll make progress on the ending of my novel tomorrow. It’d be great if I could actually finish it. That’s actually a possibility now that I think about it. I’m sitting at just over 48,000 words. My original aim for the book was half that. Then I jacked it up to 30,000, at which point I realized the book was most likely going to make novel length and so I quit aiming for any particular word count.

When I went looking through the “deleted” editions to find some bit of info I was sure I’d already written about, I discovered that several of my previous versions were actually remarkably good and probably even better than what I ended up writing this time.

In all likelihood, they shouldn’t have been deleted in the first place. If I hadn’t been so stuck on the idea of reaching the end of the book by 25,000 words, any of these versions could have led to a perfectly good story.

Ah well. Live and learn.

I’m okay with the book as is, even if part of me might always wonder what might have been if I’d kept going with one of the other plots.

But I can’t go through another redraft of any of it or I’m just going to abandon it. That’s all I can really say about that. There’s no more going back with this book. Moreover, I don’t believe the book will ever earn enough to make all the work I’ve put into it worth it, but I wanted to write this book and I did.

I wish I cared more about the market, because if I did, I’d probably be many thousands of dollars ahead of where I am, but I don’t and I can’t make myself so I just do the best I can doing what I can tolerate when it comes to the business end of publishing and writing only what I want to write. I’m sure the big sellers don’t begrudge me my modest success doing things my way—more sales for them! ;)