Pathways: Final Thoughts
Well, that’s it for my long story. There are some successes and some failures with it. First off, some stats. It’s 73 typed pages at 31000 words. A full bore novella, really. I’m not sure how many total posts I made for it or how long it took. Except to say it took probably about twice the time I expected it to.
And that, really, is what the major failure was. Around the middle of the story, I got bored with it. I think that can be seen fairly readily by anyone who has read the entire thing. The middle parts of the story became shorter, as I wrote maybe only 4-5 typed pages per week, and the story moved much slower than I had originally planned. When I first started, I was excited about it and near the end, I got excited again (especially after the spaceport exploded).
I hadn’t anticipated that happening, since I’ve written novel-length prose before. But as I worked, I realized that with the novels, if I didn’t really feel up to working on it for a month, I was under no personal pressure to do so. So I was able to leave it, go write some other stuff, then come back when I felt I could pour the proper amount of creative juices into it. In this story, I did not, and really it wasn’t until I wrote some other, non-EVE related stuff that I began to get back into the flow of things here. But I think I ended it nicely. I think the last four or five parts really were among the best I’ve written.
I may come back and write some more about these characters (at least the ones who survived) some other time. But for now, I think they’ve had enough excitement in their lives. Next week will not see a new story, but the week after that I will be returning for more one-off stories. Around the middle of November, I’ll have hit the year mark and finished up my personal project of a “story a week (though there were two or three weeks I missed)”.
Thanks for reading!
