Preemptive Retaliation

I’m having trouble thinking on what I should be writing next. I have two serious projects in the pipeline, and then a third one incubating away at the back of my mind. That one is crazy and fun and convoluted and impossible, but I’ll get round to it one day.

The other two are the ones that are kind of battling it out in my mind right now. One is the detective novel that I’ve spent years thinking through; planning and replanning and redoing the whole thing from scratch again. The other is the relatively newer film book, all about people stuck in a room with a videocamera trying to get the perfect shot in a shitty indie film. They are both very different in tone and style and feel, and they are both vying for attention in my mind and it’s annoying.

The detective story always seems to come out on top, but its victory isn’t set. I think of plot twists and turns and ways to work in certain characters or ideas, but then I listen to a sad song about being fucked up or alcoholism and I can’t help but think of those sad characters sitting in that room, quoting obscure films and trying to pretend their lives make sense. It just feels more natural for me to write like that, to write about angst and depression and people being dicks. The detective story is great fun, and is something I like doing, but it doesn’t quite feel me.

When I was eighteen and full of gusto and no sense, I wrote an epic sci-fi story about people murdering each other on a tv show, all possible because of The Imagination Machine. It was terrible. Badly paced, insanely plotted, and incredibly misogynistic, but I loved it. It was my story, my 20,000 word novel, my pile of pages that I created. Saying that, I never would’ve tried to publish it. The reason being is that it wasn’t in the style that I enjoyed writing the most. It wasn’t the Salinger-esque internal struggle and real world sense that I wanted to be my first published best-seller film-adapted book. Fuck, I’m pretty sure I said it wasn’t indie enough, but I was eighteen so maybe you can forgive me for that.

The problem is that I’m having the same problem with the detective story. It doesn’t feel like me. It doesn’t speak the story that I know how to tell so well. It’s different, and strange, and familiar at the same time. The issue this time is not that I don’t feel it’s not indie enough… I just don’t really think it’s real? It’s a full length novel, of thousands and thousands of words, but it doesn’t feel quite real to me. It feels like practice, like a test, like nothing will ever come from it. And so I’m drawn back to the morose new adult adventure in being a terrible person story I’ve got noted down. A story that can grow and make a statement about the world and who we are. 

And I want to move onto that story… but I don’t want to lose the detective one yet. 

God, the answer to this is so simple. Either I commit to the detective story and move on afterwards, or I shelve it while I work through the other one. It’s a coin flip. A fifty fifty decision. Yet I’m having a damn hard time deciding.