My escape from nonfiction

The longest thing I’ve ever written was just shy of 31,000 words. For those of you not in the know, that would make it a novella, as a novel is at least 50,000 words. This 31,000 word story was called “Business As Usual” (originally called “The Only Difference Between Trickery and Manipulation is the Paycheck”), and I started writing it one day in in the summer of 2006 and randomly wrote bits and pieces of it over the next 3 years until I finally finished late last year. However, there is a problem with writing something like that over 3 years: my writing changed a lot over the course of that time period, and even though I rewrote parts of it many times, the things I’ve learned since then have made it almost impossible for me to ever be able to truly be happy with it. It’s a shame, because that story took me through a lot and taught me a lot.

At the beginning of this year, I started writing another story tentatively titled “Time and Time Again.” I started writing it with every intention of it being the first novel that I ever complete, and trust me, if you’ve never tried to write 50,000 words, it’s not an easy task. I’m currently at about 20,500, which isn’t even halfway there, even though I feel like I’ve already reached the halfway point in the story with the current plan I have for the end. I wrote “Time and Time Again” for about a month and then left it alone for a while, only to recently pick it back up. I found what I’d written in a folder and started reading it, and an hour and a half later, I felt like I needed to know what would happen, which is a good feeling for me to have when reading my own work.

So now that you’ve got the backstory, here’s the point: one of my New Year’s resolutions was to finish this story, which means by the end of this month, I have to have at least 25,000 words. Wish me luck. I’ll need it.