the reboot

Today I faced a familiar crossroads.  I spent over an hour trying to get word count on paper and only managed a piddly 600 words.  And it was all filler, and it was all terrible.  From there I sat for a moment and considered my options:

1. Continue writing this miserable piece that has no action, no excitement and has the pace of a clunky wagon (the kind used in the Oregon Trail video game.  And yes, mine is being pulled by dying oxen...)
2. Reboot it.  Swap the first-person perspective for the much preferred third-person POV and start the whole thing off with an exciting scene.  Get the future reader interested, hell, get ME interested.  Have shit get real right away.

Of course you can probably guess which path I took.  I put my 5600 words to the side, opened a new document and started writing. And guess what?  In under an hour, I already had 1600 words!  That's the best effort I've done this entire month.  It was easy to write, it was exciting, it had plenty of detail and it spun my storyboard right-round (like a record).  Plus, some of the stuff that I have already written can easily be put into this new edition (with very minor editing) so I would say that I have about 2500 words of solid material instead of 5600 words of clunky dialogue and filler.

I realize that I need to work on my first-person perspective in the off-season (along with dialogue and editing of course) but for now, I'm pumped and the story is coming along nicely.  In fact, I hope to post a sample bit of writing tomorrow!  Just want to clean up something that makes sense and can stand alone.  A treat for the few people that are following my journey.