Overcoming Can't

So the Draft of Hello Kitty is done. Now what?

Which really isn't a what at all now, but more of a how.

For the plan after I finished Thumbs, the work before Hello Kitty, was that I would revise. Not Thumbs, which needs to ferment some more before such revision. Not Jeff of Yellowstone, which needs revision, but more of the fine-tuning kind. And certainly not yet Hello Kitty which has just been finished. Instead, I had/have my sights on the novel That Fargo Kid, which not only needs revised but in some places fixed.

In fact, I intended for Hello Kitty to be just a short story to end 2011 and act as a buffer between the long work of Th and the expected long work of revising TFK; however, HK turned out to be a fairly long work in itself. Sometimes stories are like that, making me cautious to do another buffering 'short' work before such revision, as it could easily take up another few months or more.

Yesterday towards that end I moved TFK notes, an attempted formal timeline and incomplete reverse outline to OneNote (an amazing program) along with the current draft to the Working file on my computer. Everything is set. So what now?

Well, I should probably: read all 468 pages (134,000 words) of TFK first to get my mind back into that groove; take notes of certain sequences and/or details which I will likely need to change, delete, or expand; kill darlings that don't fit; and generate copy that fixes some things.

However, all of the above are wide-scope strategies that intimidate the daily. When I'm in the midst of writing a novel, my day-to-day goal is straightforward: 1,000 words a day and I feel like I'm making progress on the story.

Here, the envisioned work ahead is more difficult for me to break up into daily chunks that will leave me feeling satisfied with that's day's output. Heck, it is downright overwhelming and the urge to drown in a sea of can't washes over me: The story is broke; it's unfixable; go on to something else, something that will get you back into the bliss of 1,000 words a day.

But in the end I don't want to just write 1,000 words a day. I want those 1,000 words to be good words; the best that I can create. So I owe it to my craft and to my story to make every effort to thwart that nagging can't.

An effort that overcomes can't and takes do all the way to done.