Dearly Beloved,
It is my dismal duty to inform you of the demise of one of my WIPs. Born in the summer of 2012, it started life on the rails of an Amtrak train as a light contemporary romance involving a motorcycle accident, home renovations and actors falling in love. As it matured, it outgrew the accident and renovations but held fast to the romance between two actors and became a full (if flawed) 50,000+ word manuscript in the late summer of 2015. After enduring a series of critiques, in 2016, it attempted to enter the world of submissions and contests. It did not fare well. Multiple revisions efforts never seemed to make it any better and in August 2019, it was pronounced dead.
In accordance with its final wishes, plot points, characters, dialogue and settings will be donated to orphans.
The first story I ever completed is no more.
Towards the end, it had become a mangled and tortured thing with unresolved plot points and without understandable motivations.
In my (non-expert) opinion, this sometimes happens. The fault lies squarely with me, as it should. I started writing the story before I really knew what went into writing a romance. I have read romance novels ever since I was in the 5th grade, but I’d never understood how the stories were formed. I took my first fiction-writing class in 2013 and tried to apply the lessons I’d learned to my story. Some things I got right, but there’s more to writing romance than just writing fiction and I was missing some of the romance beats.
With each writing class after that, I tried and tried to make the story work but I never had the time to fully delve into the whole story, so I just kept rewriting the first five chapters. Also, during those years, other stories caught my attention and this one would (yet again) fall by the wayside.
Before now, I didn’t want to give up because a) I didn’t want to and b) this story was supposed to be the first in a series. I played with the idea of getting the other stories out and using this one as a prequel, but even that ultimately couldn’t save it.
When reviewing my WIPs for this project, I looked it over again and realized that I had actually started writing this story in another WIP and it worked better. And, the pieces that I was missing from the new WIP were in the old WIP. Only one could survive and the new WIP was cleaner and better organized so it won out. The old WIP is no more and the series it was supposed to start will probably fare just as well as stand-alones.
It’s the circle of life.
