Further on Viable Paradise, and putting The Manuscript away

So. After nearly two and a half years of research, drafting, backwriting, rewriting, drafting, and workshopping, I've decided to put The Manuscript away. Maybe for good.

It's terrifying, because for the last two years I've been working on virtually nothing else. But the fact is, all those hours of research amounted to only about a third of what the novel needs, and despite revision after revision since around a year ago, the novel was still a structural mess. When I started, I absolutely did not have the skill either to flesh out a fully-developed world closely based on real civilizations or to build approximately six interlocking plot arcs into a coherent narrative. The Manuscript shows this.

I think it still has promise if I'm willing to put several more years into it, but I don't think that several years on one novel are what I need as a writer. I've learned a ton about my process by working on it, I had an awesome experience workshopping it in my supervision course at school, and it's given me confidence that I can, eventually, develop into a Real Professional Writer. But there's only so much to be learned from sludging through the revision bog.

-

So, now what?

I've got another story that's been sitting on the back burner for quite some time now. I drafted a very confused version of it around March 2013, decided confused was about as good as it was going to get at that point, and consigned it to the depths of my file folder. Remembered it a couple of months ago and started toying with the ideas.

I originally wanted it to be a short story, but it would like to be awkward novella length. I'm going to see if I can wrangle it into a novel. It's deeply disturbing and kind of verges on the horror genre. It would be the first of a number of stories set in the same universe.

I've got a (structurally coherent!) outline and the first two scenes drafted. It's going to be my submission to Viable Paradise. Once I finish drafting the submission (I think the first five scenes will fit) I'm going to throw it up on Google Drive and see if I can bribe a few writerly friends to look it over for me. (I would wink at the people I've marked out as targets, but I don't know if any of them are following the blog just now.) Once I've got some realistic feedback, I'll write my cover letter and send it in -- at the moment trying to write a cover letter feels like diving into an abyss of inadequacy, mostly because I have no idea what anyone will think of this new story.

I think I've written the paragraph that will hook the instructors, though. I think that reading this story has destroyed my sense of reasonable human behavior in a novel, because it's kind of a scary paragraph.