Mercy Killings

Hello, gentle readers.

As I write this, I am wondering if I have made a huge mistake.

Not five minutes ago, I deleted two stories. One, I had just started. The other, I started last year. Yes, one was the sequel to Dawnwind: Last Man Standing.

At 30,000 words, that story was dead in the water.

I think it’s time I fessed up to that and accepted the fact that it was never going to progress as it was written.

The second story was a sequel to The Marvelous Land of Ap, and was deleted because, to be honest, I couldn’t make up my mind where to go with the damned story.

I know, I know. I can hear the critics now:


"Why don’t you ever plot your stories out? You might not have so much trouble if you did that. Aren’t you a professional? You should know this."
To which I respond with a firmly raised middle finger and the words, "Piss off, you little shit. You think it’s easy writing a decent story? Fine! You do it! You sit down every day for a year and slave to write something that’s good, according to an outline set in stone and see just how long you stick to it. You don’t get to make any changes because you’ve written an outline and that means its perfect and there can be no changes even if you get an idea for a better ending or a change in character that you feel would make the story so much better. Oh no, sweety. Just stick to your outline, keep doing the literary equivalent of Paint-By-Numbers and call me when they haul your ass off to the loony bin, because I want to point and laugh."

Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I went off on a bit of a rant there, didn’t I?

I’m not happy about deleting my work, but I think it was a necessary thing. Neither story was progressing. They were just sort of there, taking up space on my hard drive. I had started to actually loathe opening my files and seeing the Dawnwind sequel just sitting there.

So, these were not executions. These were mercy killings.

For my sake, if not the stories.

And for the sake of the readers who would have been subjected to that crap.

We’re starting fresh, going back to square one.

So, what’s next?

New beginnings.