Many years ago I did something that I thought wouldn’t work, but has turned into something kinda great, and I wanted to tell this story so others might be able to use it. I was into writing as a serious hobby and was always thinking about it. One year, at my annual review at work I asked it I could start a staff newsletter. They said sure. Now it was only a couple extra hours a month, but it was regular paid writing and it felt wonderful.

Sometimes I really have a hard time coming up with new, interesting things to write about, and I’ll try to talk to management to see if there are topics they want me to cover, but generally I’m left alone to do what I want with it. I interview new employees to get to know them better. Run little surveys and make games out of the answers people send me. Try to throw in current news of the industry. And in the last couple years I’ve asked for book and TV show recommendations from the staff and include one a month of each.

Since I don’t get much feedback about what’s working and what isn’t, other than everyone telling me it’s great (I work with the sweetest bunch of folks!) I have lately just decided to keep myself entertained, and if I’m getting bored, then it’s time to change things.

So two months ago I decided to add a little fiction into the mix for fun. We have a hospital cat, and since we’ve been closed to the public and only doing curbside appointments she has been allowed to wander and have the run of the front office. I thought a fictionalized story of her imaginary adventure would be fun to write. This has been a huge hit with the rest of the staff. Last month, to encourage feedback, I decided to make it a choose your own adventure story and gave two options about what she would do next. I thought one choice was the obvious, fun choice so I already mentally planned out how that would roll into the next installment for this month and was kinda excited about it. Obviously, you know that means that the survey came back with 100% of responses choosing the other option. That’ll teach me to plan ahead.

The hospital owner enjoying what I’ve done has also led to me doing more writing. I did a press release when we moved into a new location and I’ve done some blog posts for the website and have been asked to do more. My biggest challenge now is myself. I get to do this writing work at home and I’m not as organized with my time as I need to be. I’ve set myself a time schedule and so far so good. I don’t always hit my goals but I’m doing much better than when I didn’t make any goals at all and would stay up into the wee hours to finish a newsletter before the end of the month. That wasn’t healthy for me and it didn’t produce my best work. This is an ever evolving place for me and if I come up with any wonderful productivity or time management tips, I will be sure to share.

I mainly wanted the throw this idea out there to other writers. I’ve learned that most other people hate to write. It’s a weird idea to me, but it’s true. If you love it, and offer to do it, people just might take you up on it.

Now to figure out how to continue that cat story. . .

I’ve been ‘revising’ my novel for an embarrassingly long time. In reality, I was ignoring it.

Oh, I’d think about it. Ponder what changes I needed to make, but I rarely to never sat down with it and really worked on it. I even bought a book on revisions and worked through the steps. I was a little excited back then, that I would really do this thing and make a decent book out of it. But I still didn’t like it. And I stopped work.

I told myself I didn’t have the time to work on it. That’s somewhat true, my time is tough to come by on many days, but the longer things dragged on the more I knew I was fooling myself. I could do something if I wanted to. I could make at least a little time. I was choosing not to.

A few days ago I remembered some writing advice I once heard, I’m sorry I don’t remember where exactly. It said that when you’re stuck or ‘blocked’ on a piece it’s usually because of a story problem. Something is wrong in the story that needs to be fixed to let you move forward again. So I shifted my thinking. Instead of trying to make the story I already had there work better, I wondered, what exactly didn’t I like about it. What wasn’t working in the story for me.

It didn’t take long to figure out from that small change in the way I looked at it. The problem is pretty substantial. I’m not sure I can fix it with revisions. Maybe I could start over from scratch and keep the elements I liked and take out the problems, but I would have a fundamentally different story than the one I have now. And that’s the problem. The thing I don’t like about it can’t really be removed.

When I was planning the book, I thought about what other characters I could add that would bring extra conflict for my main characters. I maybe made them too big a conflict. They took over the plot. Because I planned them there from the beginning, I didn’t see that they were derailing things so badly. They were just supposed to add a little extra tension and a subplot, but because their only purpose was to be in the way of the main characters, they were much to good at it. Too much of the story was dealing with them, and even the climax scene was a showdown with these annoying people and the actual thing I wanted the story to be about was a afterthought by the end.

Maybe someday I’ll know how to fix this and come back to it. More likely, I’ll take the pieces I loved about this book and work them into something new. While I’m in mourning of all the time I put into this story that I will never share, I’m trying to also remind myself that this is how I learn. This will make later books better. Right?

Now that I’ve mentally and emotionally processed this decision, I’m ready to start moving on. A fun idea for a short story came to me this afternoon, and I’m ready to start something new at long last.