Stuck

If you've been following Holovideo on JukePop Serials, you may be wondering when the next chapter will be coming out. It's going to be a while, because there's a problem. I'm stuck.

It's not the kind of stuck where the writer has no idea what happens next. I have a complete chapter by chapter outline. The problem is this: it's twenty years old. I originally started writing Holovideo way back in the early 1990's, when I was working at a community college and a local collector brought in a bunch of memorabilia from the early days of television. That got me to researching, which led to a number of story ideas, Holovideo among them. I wrote out a complete outline and the first several chapters, then lost interest and moved to another project.

So when I decided earlier this year to pull it back out and serialize it at JukePop, I thought it would be an easy task. After all, it was a pretty straightforward story, so all I'd need to do was unpack each chapter from the outline into a developed text, polish it, and post. What troubles I did have in keeping to my publishing schedule mostly involved external crises -- a death in the family, conflict over the estate, business activities taking over my schedule and leaving no writing time.

Once I got those out of the way, I thought I'd be back on track. Chapters seemed to be flowing reasonably well, even if I didn't seem to be getting all that many +votes. And then I started in on Chapter 20, and looked at the outline and realized there was just no way I could get a complete chapter out of what was there. Obviously my twenty-something self had an idea there, but my forty-something mind could no longer get into that headspace.

Which means that I need to take some serious time to re-reading the existing nineteen chapters, figuring out where the story needs to go, and reconstructing the outline to get me to that end. And that means some serious unbroken thinking time, which has been scarce on the ground of late.

I'm hoping that once I get these last two conventions of the year done, I may finally get the time I need. It may depend on what the Thanksgiving holiday is like, but with a close family member in precarious health, I may end up spending a lot more time visiting with them than writing. So I'm not guaranteeing anything in terms of schedule, just that somehow I am going to see this novel through to the end. It may take me a month or two to fight my way through to the end, but I'm not going to just leave it dangling forever.