Revision Decision
And then put it in the bin (a literal storage bin, not the garbage) and ignored it. I have a decade-plus of lightly-edited first drafts in the corner, and to date only two of them have achieved escape velocity: One Last Quest which tumbled like my personal Icarus back to ground, and Trouble which remains airborne. All other stories are still locked away, compressed under the weight of their own specific issues and my inertia about dusting them off. As I remember well from NaNo days, the temptation was great, right about mid-month, to scrap everything and start over, because the pressure of bad output began to press the backs of my eyes. The courage to persevere was sometimes (oftentimes) difficult to find, in among the lazy phrases and aimless plots and ever-shifting character names.
What I need, now (always, forever) is a list.
I love lists. Even in the wild-and-free NaNo days, I was making scene lists on index cards, interspersed with ideas or motivations. The stack of cards became my lifeline to shore, and if I felt I was drowning, I could pull a card and write what was on it. It required trust in Past Me to have made a reasonable path, and too often Present Me had already wandered away from the core thread, so the cards lost their relevance, but they were lily pads to leap to, to keep the shore of "finishing" in view.
And then in the bin they went, finished!
Well, "finished." So now I'm working out a list for the next part, shore to... I don't know. Shore to door? Shore to publish? Shore to somewhere. Shore to done. Shore to pull-it-out-of-the-bin-and-finish. Because I'd love to see these works get some air again, learn to fly on their own, or failing that, discover that they were steps along the way, and best left in the dark.
🧩🦏