2) Yeah, but there’s a difference. I’ve written crap which I was interested in just to realize later that “yeah, it’s crap.” But at least I was interested in it. Given the current story, I’m not interested in it, so why not drop it? See that’s what happens when you realize you’re writing crap, you stop writing crap and move onto something less crappy. You don’t keep writing the same crap, don’t keep doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. It’s like reading War and Piece, hating every page of it, then telling yourself, “if I read enough of this eventually I’ll like it.” Sometimes you’re just not ready to read (or write) that story just yet.

3) I’m not quitting, that’s for sure. In fact, this whole article was about NOT quitting. It was merely venting some of the thoughts running through my mind at the time. I’m stopping with the current story line as it’s shaped, because it’s utterly unsatisfying and I’ll simply be wasting my time by continuing down that path. I wrote the post to sort of “think out loud,” as they say, and see what new ideas might come. (One came up last night during a conversation with someone who read this.)

As for food, the food’s been me not reading anywhere nearly enough novels as of late. been too focused on non-fiction, and if I want to write short stories and novels, I should probably read more of those.

2) If you write enough crap, you’ll write about something good. There is always something more interesting out there. Yet the things i find the most interesting are the things I can rely on the most.

3) It sounds like you are going through what runners call ‘the wall’ which im sure you already know all about with the depletion of one food source and the beginning of the digestion of the other and what not. Come on Gnorb! you can do it!!!!

Food for thought.

All the best!

That said, I’ve already written over 10,000 words, and I don’t care to leave this as it is. There’s a world here, and in it there are great stories to tell. I’ve just not been focusing on the right one.

As far as autobiographical tones are concerned, your idea of journaling the experience is one I’ll consider, but it still makes Nicandro too close to me; that has a LOT of pitfalls I don’t care to enumerate, not the least of which is that if I start including people in my real life as part of my novel, even when they’re caricatures of what the real person is like, then I run the risk of (1) offending someone, and far more importantly (2) making characters completely flat.

So what to do from this point? The more I think about it–and I’ve been thinking about it all day–the more I’m thinking that maybe the grandfather had a far more colorful past than even Lily Lee, a neighbor of his in the retirement community he lived, could even guess to know. (Or did she?) And perhaps Nicandro decides to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Or… maybe not.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, and I’ll keep you updated.

I never participated in NanoWiMo but if I have some friends who have encouraged me to participate regardless of my interest in writing.

If it has been promoted to me correctly, my understanding is this.

The point of it is to just write, and disregard the edit process in terms of both grammar and substance, correct?

So why not just force the writing? Doesn’t matter if all you put down is “Nicarando goes to the fridge, he opens it and pulls out a soda after long deliberation,…” and so on. At some point shouldn’t forced writing pull you off into an interesting tangent?

And if it seems overall autobiographical, use it to your benefit. Use the things you do daily and write it into your story in a 3rd person journal-like experience which has Nicarando living the day you just had. Do this until you hit your muse, or perhaps edit parts to adjust for the action you wished you had taken.