Horrible Harvest

Picture this. You’ve been working on a book since 2020. It’s been a passion project. You completed a behemoth first draft, thought it was genius, only to discover it was shit, and you retreat from the book for a few months before you decide I can rewrite this piece of shit. You sit down, get 3/4 of the way through the rewrite and decide it’s an even bigger piece of shit, so you scrap it and start over again. Your third rewrite. You finish it. You feel “Okay” about it, and you begin the copyediting phase, for consistency in tone and bad grammar, in my case.

Then you’re going about your business in real life and a first line for a new book comes to you. Out of the blue. Unexpected. Unwelcomed because you’re committed to finishing this goddamn book you’ve been working on for the past six years. You ignore the line. You open your laptop to continue working on your passion project and then you think, “You should write the line down before you forget it. You can get back to it once you’re done with the copyedit.”

So that is what you do. You open a new document you write the line and then the follow up paragraph comes to you, and you think, “I might as well write it down. You don’t want to forget it, do you?” Hours pass and you’ve suddenly committed 6,600 words to the document – Just so you won’t forget them when you really want to write the book.

I’m sure I’ll get to a point when I think this new book is trash, too, but right now I can’t leave it alone. I’m drawn to it much like I was drawn to the previous book. I feel like I’m cheating on the book I devoted so much time to. Any other writers struggle with this sort of thing? Finding the flow in writing is so rare, I hate to pass it up just to finish a book I feel obligated to make as perfect as I can.ck to it once you’re done with the copyedit.”