While it is true that if you’re going to be a professional writer, you have to finish what you start — half or even 7/8 of a story isn’t something you can sell or even give away. You have to work on pieces for which you have a passion. What I’ve recently discovered is there is a time for each story. When that time has passed, you need to move on.
What I had been trying to do was to update a novel I wrote over 30 years ago. The update would have worked because the subject, latenite TV, had almost come full circle as far as my material was concerned but the process of updating the text involved a level of attention I simply discovered I no longer had for this topic.
Think about it. Everything from telephones to typewriters to character’s back-story, which now had to involve a different wars, and even jokes about TV shows, required changes. After a while, there were just so many things to be altered that it required so much time and effort that I wished I were expending on actual creation, that the result was that I was laboring on something I didn’t enjoy as much as I did when I originally created it.
So, I closed up the rewrite and all its files and went to work on a totally new project which I love and can’t wait to get to each day.
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