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Okay. For eight years now, I've been working, mostly in my head but in sporadic writing fits, on a fantasy comic book/novel. Most of the eight years has been research, devouring book after book after book on the material needed to make the story feel real, to immerse myself in the world I was trying to give voice to.
Just to give you an idea.... the story is about a greaser who crosses into a land of faerie political mess OZ style. He's drafted via a cursed magic glove to escort a faerie princess (mother of God I'm already reading this and groaning to myself) across the continental US to Hollywood, where ancient wisdom and the means to all of the characters' redemption resides. Along the way there's a theological robot born out of Roswell tech and Alan Turing, a pranktivist Beatnik, a pre-60s subculture/guerilla circus, goblin pirates and faceless reality antibodies. They're not just props or clever bits for cleverness's sake. Most of the research that I've drowned myself in was in an effort to respect all the quirky bits and do them justice within the plot.
I've tried to write it including and incorporating all the things I would enjoy in a story. I mean ultimately, it's been a blast for me and no one else. And yeah, at its heart, it's definitely always wanted to be a comic book, with all the genuine but over the top qualities that only a comic book narrative could get away with.
But of late, I feel completely drained from this thing. More and more, as I do the writing, as it moves from my imagination to either my clumsy portrayal or the clumsy inherency of the story itself (I'm spun around so much I don't know which it is) to me it seems chock full of suffocating gimmicks. I liked all the quirks when I first constructed them. Sure they were a bit over the top in existence, but they were concepts I felt were part of the story and were challenging to move around in and connect to one another. Any challenging writing is an obstacle course or a game of outwitting oneself and one's ideas to cross the finish line. It's been a pain in the ass but thus far it's been a bit of fun.
But somehow some voice of criticism has snuck in to my head and lambasted every quirky fun device I've inserted into this thing as suffocating. Trite. Full of ungodly pretension. And I'm paralyzed by the question of whether this criticism has any merit... or whether I just need to take a break from the thing for a little while.
I'd plead that I need an editor to maybe help me trim the fat off but I truly have so little but plotwork to offer to them.
Is any of this making any sense? Are there any writers out there that could give a brother advice in a situation like this? |
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