Cannibalizing

Does Gail do any real work, you may wonder? She certainly doesn't say anything about doing anything that could pass for real work.

Well, since the end of January, beginning of February, I've been revising the first four months of 365 Story Project entries I did last year before everything went to Hell at Chez Gauthier. The revision was going well until a couple of weeks ago. I was getting (and still am) overwhelmed with the various storylines for the various arcs. I had colored notecards. I had lists. I was spending enormous amounts of time trying to manage information. I was reaching that point that comes in all writing projects at which the writer goes, What was I thinking? I'm ashamed to even have had this idea, forget about working on it all this time.

I was driving in the car one day, when I thought that perhaps the whole thing should shift to a traditional book format, that perhaps I had many book possibilities in the material I'd generated.

Nah, I told myself. That can't be right. And I continued struggling on.

Then yesterday I started reformatting from the beginning into a narrative for just one storyline, keeping only those things that will support that one storyline. Two chapters fell right into place.

I am cannibalizing the earlier work. I must say, cannibalizing feels good.