Inkhaven

it's okay. we're safe here.

The Great Trunking of the Past

December15
So with the help of a friend I finally made a decision that I have been wrestling with for a while now: what to do with these old stories.
I’ve been doing the submission/rejection thing with them. They’re all stories that I started years ago, some as long ago as five years. I put a lot of time into each of them, making them the best I could given my abilities at the time. Today they don’t really hold up. Some of them I still like for personal reasons. But frankly they’re starting to depress me, and I don’t think they represent who am I as a writer anymore.
A few of them I just ‘finished’ in early 2009, and those are the tough ones to let go of, because they feel new still. They don’t have the long list of rejections under their names in my submission log, but they are deeply flawed and right now I don’t want to labor over old stuff, I want to move on and create new stories.
So I am trunking them. I will be starting fresh in 2010. Two of them are still out there, but I don’t think it will be long before they’re rejected, and they’ll be moved into a folder of stuff to revisit some day if I’m ever moved to do so.
Even as I write this, I’m still waffling. I could go try to fix that one again, I could send it back through critique, I could…
I could stop spending this kind of mental energy on it and move forward. It’s dragging me down.
Onward.

So with the help of a friend I finally made a decision that I have been wrestling with for a while now: what to do with these old stories.

I’ve been doing the submission/rejection thing with them. They’re all stories that I started years ago. I put a lot of time into each of them, work-shopping them, making them the best I could given my abilities at the time. Today they don’t really hold up. Some of them I still like for personal reasons, but frankly they’re starting to depress me, and I don’t think they represent who am I as a writer anymore.

A few of them I just ‘finished’ in early 2009, and those are the tough ones to let go of, because they feel new still. They don’t have the long list of rejections under their names in my submission log, but they are deeply flawed and right now I don’t want to labor over old stuff, I want to move on and create new stories.

So I am trunking them. I will start fresh in 2010. Two of them are still out there, but I don’t think it will be long before they’re rejected, and they’ll be moved into a folder of stuff to revisit some day if I’m ever moved to do so.

Even as I write this, I’m still waffling. I could go try to fix that one again, I could send it back through critique, I could…

I could stop spending this kind of mental energy on it and move forward. It’s dragging me down.

The Poppet Army gets a little R&R for a while.

Onward.

posted under Blog
One Comment to

“The Great Trunking of the Past”

  1. Avatar December 15th, 2009 at 1:34 am Adam Israel Says:

    I’m feeling the exact same way. I have older stories that don’t represent the writer I am today, and drafts from the past year or two that are closer to who I am now but still painfully flawed in many ways. Some of these have potential as a story and I’ll move to the revise pile. Others have an interesting idea but not enough of or the right story to support it; those will go into the trunk for a rainy day when I’m looking for plots to play with.

    I think I’d rather trunk than circulate something that I know is broken or flawed and not representative of my potential. Besides, it’s an easy decision to reverse if inspiration strikes.

Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer and habitual volunteer. She has been a “podtern” for Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy, an Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine, audio book reviewer for Audible.com, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and remains a co-blogger at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside Magazine, and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011, and Armored. She lives in a former Temperance colony on the central coast of California, where she sometimes gets to watch rocket launches with her husband and her two amazing daughters. Follow her on Twitter @inkhaven.