"Freeze, Protagonist. Freeze for seven years."
This isn’t going to be a super-long post. It’s not going to be like my criz-azy long essay on Home Ec class, or how the story of the immaculate conception used to terrify me. This is going to be a relatively short, Phil Lemos-like post about what I did this evening.
Tonight, I finished a writing project that I started, and then abandoned, in 2004. It was an big project for me at the time, because it was the first story I presented in my very first writers’ group, and it was also the piece that introduced me to the three ladies who would become my longest-running writing group and some of my best friends.
I think I’ve mentioned that I have a problem finishing my stories. This particular piece was the poster child for all my aborted projects. I wrote it right to within an inch of the end. The heroine was in the woods. The gun was pointed at her. She had a lot of feelings about this. And then… I stopped writing. I just left homegirl in the woods, at gunpoint, just like that, and closed the file for seven years. Sorry, protagonist. It’s been fun. Hope you like nature. Hope you like it a lot.
That piece has been bothering me ever since I closed the file in 2004. It became symbolic of all the projects I abandoned for no good reason. Well, no more. Prompted by a friend, I reopened the file, and spent a month revising and rewriting the thing. I did the last edits tonight. It’s done. My protagonist is finally out of the woods. (Literally. I changed the ending.)
None of my unfinished projects are safe now. I could tinker with any one of them at any point in time. You never know when I might strike.
You are an inspiration. I wish I’d saved that unfinished novel from high school.
Very inspiring. I was uploading all my files to Dropbox earlier, and was horrified at the number of unfinished stories, essays,memoir pieces, I had. So, no excuses. Time to shape up and shape them up…
Thanks ladies!
That’s great!!The rest of your projects better start hiding…I have a feeling that you might be on a roll!
Good for you AJ!