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[wolfofmagdeburg]

Where the hell does time go? I have a little over a week left in the flat- room- I'm living in at the moment. I won't miss it much. My internet connection is wire-reliant and intermittent, and my TV connection has failed since there was a storm up here a couple of weeks ago; I suspect the aerial on the roof was damaged. Two of the three other

Comments

[mrs_leary]

Gosh! First off, let me congratulate you on writing (and rewriting!) a whole novel. Everyone talks about doing it; not many actually get in there and do it. Well done

[wolfofmagdeburg]

Well, I haven't written-written the whole thing- I got a little under halfway through it the first try around, scrapped it, and now I've got a lot of wierd disjointed bits and a detailed plan for version 2.

When I say about a satisfying end, I don't necessarily mean a 'happy ending', I mean just some sense of completion or closure, some feeling that the reader has gotten something out of the experience. I know it's hard for me to judge, but at the moment, I just don't feel like there's anything productive to be said about the planned end. There's no *impact*.

I don't really know what I'm going to do about it, I'm just yelling into the ether. I just don't know why nothing I try works.

[mrs_leary]

Perhaps it's time to get back to the basics. What is it that makes you unwilling to just let this one go? What is the core idea, or the heart of the thing, that drives you to write it? I'd say start from there, and work your way back out

[wolfofmagdeburg]

I've spent so much time on it, and I care about these characters the same way really passionate fanficcers care about their favourites- I want people to see them the same way I do, I want people to care how they feel. I don't know anything about child-rearing but I imagine the feeling is the same- my characters aren't objectively better than anyone else and they may mess up, and mess up often, but I want them to have the sympathy and love of others just because they're *mine* and the instinct is to make sure they have the best chance to thrive. In terms of the plot, I wanted to address domestic abuse because deeper dialogues about this are *still* only going on in the deepest niches of law and social work; the pop culture grasp of what's 'normal bickering' and what's abuse in a parental or familial relationship (especially in film and literature) is a) massively skewed and b) sensationalist and heirarchical. Think about the racks and racks of parental abuse stories/autobiographies you can find in any supermarket book section- a