Glimpse of Perfection

I am slowly finding my way again, back to the page and the pen.

I mentioned in a previous post that I had been away from the writing for a numbers of years. But the desire to write and tell stories has returned.

As part of rediscovering my work again, I read a number of my old stories -- both completed and drafts.

And I think I have a modicum of talent.

Or at least I did.

It's funny that I couldn't see how good my writing was when I was up to my eyeballs in doing it.

I guess that's why writers leave their first drafts to mature before attempting to edit.

It's not just about hitting the story afresh. It's also about leaving yourself the distance to distinguish between what needs to go and what needs to stay.

Anyway, I re-read some of my old work and thought past me wasn't half bad.

Of course, the complementary thought to that is: can I be that good again?

This does worry me. Quite a bit.

But I remind myself -- frequently -- that I'm only here at this stage to write. Not necessarily to excel.

I have to find the love again.

One of the goals I've set myself over the next two months is to finish a zeroth draft of a work that's been languishing in my Build folder.

I read through a bunch of them -- so many with compelling premises and worlds and characters -- and found one to tackle.

I like the setting of this one -- a corporate mining station on an asteroid in one of the trojan Lagrange points of Nepture. It's quite a departure from my usual terrestrial setting.

And I love the character dynamics too -- the leadership team of the station, all driven by their own different agendas, and the stranger who drops into their midst and up-ends the boat.

I think I picked this one also because the writing doesn't intimidate me the way some of my other partially completed ones do.

The tone is a very utilitarian one -- this is a corporate world, in a future where it's cheaper to program people's augmented perceptions of their surrounds that it is to actually beautify them.

No purple prose to discourage me.

But then the funniest thing happened the other night.

I had the headphones in, the pomodoro counter ticking down and I was in the zone -- the writing was coming easily, playfully, intuitively.

And then I did it -- a tiny turn of phrase, an offhand metaphor from the protagonist.

I paused and re-read it.