Crows & Dogs

It's a week into National Novel Writing Month and I've worked up a generous deficit of words, picking at different story threads until the entire structure has unraveled at my feet. I've had at least two opportunities to describe the project I'm working on and, both times, I demured rather than launch into details.

After the second time it happened, I started to consider whether the challenge was the plot--woman's dog is stolen by fairies and transformed into a bee; woman dithers and then starts searching for dog, encounters Cupid, is convinced to accept his help that ends up coming with a cost; woman finds dog and has to decide whose version of the tale she's in is most just and what she has to do to rescue the dog and save Faerie from an abrupt change in state--or whether the challenge was that this story just isn't something that I ever really want to share.

There are plenty of stories that I intend to send out into the world and some that I have already have (that are still looking for a home), but maybe this isn't one of them.

For me, that's a challenge. Is it justifiable effort if it's just a story I want to tell myself? WHY would I want to tell myself a story?

My provisional answer is that there are stories that I want to tell that are lurking around this main story and that, for some reason, working on that plot and that story allows me to tell other stories that I'd rather tell but wouldn't have encountered if I didn't make an effort on the larger one. I shift that unwieldy narrative and allow the story scavengers in my head to pick through the shiny and yummy things around it and other stories are dragged from the muck.

Will I ever finish the main story? Possibly not. It's not really an appropriate story for NaNo, anyway. There's an existing draft of the required 50,000 words; however, I think that reworking that, adding new words, and shifting them around into new chapters will keep the rest of the year full of drafts that I actually want to complete. So, I can't describe my draft, but I can say that it's serving it's purpose.