Eat the Rich: Day 38

It's happened before.  It'll probably happen again.  It happened today.  I've lost my mojo.

When I started Eat the Rich, I thought it was great getting in three pages a day (I'm very proud of that pace), and having a hundred pages in about a month, and this and that.  It was a wonderful high.  And taking time off this weekend, I thought I'd come back to the story typing and picking like a motherfucker.

That didn't happen.

I thought, "Twenty pages is good.  Fifty pages is great.  A hundred pages, this thing could really take off."  Hell, I thought that reaching the hundredth page would put me in the clear for sure.  It didn't.  I found myself struggling to get the story across.  Those three pages came out sounding forced.  And then, this morning, I thought how the story was boring me.

I feel bad about this.  I really do.  I've got friends who were really hoping to read this.  But if Eat the Rich bores me, it'll bore the reader too.  Always trust that rule: if you're bored, the readers will notice it and feel the same way.

Now, granted, it's a month of my time gone, but it could have been worse.  It could have been a few years.  When a story doesn't work, I step back and think of the pros and cons, and hopefully learn something.

Pros.  I know that I can work very diligently.  Just about every day, I'd tell myself that I'd meet my three-page quota come Hell or high water.  For the most part, this was done.  Early on, I committed to two pages a day, but then I upped the dosage.  So as far as getting the work done, I feel very good about that.

Cons.  I strayed too far from the premise of cannibalistic celebrities.  That was a cool idea to me, but after the first big murder scene around eighty or ninety pages in, the story shifted from cannibalism to murder and covering up that murder.  I don't like murder stories.  I don't think they're bad.  I just don't find them interesting.  Again, boredom is infectious.

Once again, I'm proud that I got through a hundred pages of Eat the Rich considering that I was making it up as I went along, but I think I need to try something else.

We'll see what happens.