Predicament

Out of all the fancy certificates and stuff that the National Novel Writing Month offers after the fact to winners, there's only one thing that I find to be useful at all. A special code to CreateSpace allows 5 free paperback copies of the winner's finished novel. Needless to say, I'm planning on taking advantage of it. Not for the novel that I wrote this year, but rather The Third Face.

The problem is that I still don't think I've revised The Third Face enough to even show 5 people. There are some pretty big problems with it, mainly the near-absent setting descriptions and the overwhelming rush through a seemingly disjointed plot. Its main villain just suddenly appears in the last few chapters without fanfare, and the conflict that set off the story is not resolved, but rather conveniently escaped by the heroes.

This would all be okay if I was still willing to revise it. But as things stand, I don't even like The Third Face that much anymore. After 5 drafts of overthinking everything, I'm just kind of sick of it. I contacted someone for help, then realized I couldn't even bring myself to write a simple outline to share because I didn't want to go back through my work anymore.

The code I got is good until June 30th of next year, so it's not like I'm in a huge hurry to get this done, but I also know that I take a very long time to get done with most tasks, and tend to just forget about them if I've been neglecting them for too long. That's not a good formula in this case at all. Okay, it's never a good formula. I should probably do something about that problem, but what? How can I approach this? It's hard to get started on anything in the face of the holiday season, and I just kind of feel stuck.

Oh Right

National Novel Writing Month ended a week ago. Before, I was constantly making blog posts about my writing, but after my lull in productivity in the novel, a similar lack of work went into this blog.

Unlike the blog, however, which has gone without a single post since then, my novel did pick back up, and I managed to finish it just in time to win! I was very excited, just as I have been each year before, and it felt great to let out the customary giant sigh of relief. There are few things more joyous than the finishing of another brand-new novel, and it never gets old, either.

After the euphoria stage came the relaxation, this idea that since the novel was finished, I could just sit back and do nothing. With no school or work, only projects that I choose to do are there to occupy me. Thus, I played video games and then spent three straight days with my girlfriend before finally coming back to reality last night.

It wasn't until a few minutes ago that I realized that, in addition to the things I had been catching up on (like steadily working out more pages for my Pokemon webcomic and uploading more gaming videos to my Youtube channel), I still had this blog to update. Naturally, I came right to it and began typing up an entry. Then I got distracted and it took another good hour to get it finished, and I still haven't gotten to any of the other things that I was about to do before I thought of this. Man, task management is hard.