Rappy's Green Room

We Don't Talk About GG, No No No...

Once upon a time, a thirteen year old decided it would be fun to take her kingdom hearts fan fiction and turn it into a completely original work with her own world and characters. This has made a lot of people (namely, her) very tired and been widely regarded as a bad move. 

It will be a trilogy. Surely, she said, the whole series will be finished well before I graduate high school. And then I can write all these other story ideas I have. 

She did not finish the series before she graduated high school. Nor did she finish it while she was in college. Nor did she finish it before her little brother graduated college. She is turning 26 this year, and an almost uncountable amount of drafts later.... she is once again bashing her skull against an unfinished draft of book one.

Book one. In what has turned into a four book series with a prequel. And my stupid perfectionist brain will never consider it good enough. And my stupid stubborn heart will never let me let it go. Like. Ok. I've almost been working on this series for the amount of years I'd BEEN ALIVE when I first started writing it. I truly, genuinely, do not know a life that doesn't involve GG (also known as AGOPAP to any more recent readers who don't know the original title) or its characters. These characters feel like people to me, people who I owe a complete story. 

I am so close to having yet another completed draft of book one, and I hate it. I want to get to book two so so so so badly, but I know for a fact that I will end up rewriting book one AGAIN before I turn 30. And I know in my soul that writing for Wattpad is part of the problem. 

One option would be to scrap GG completely. Chalk it up to a failed brain experiment that looks good in my head but was never going to work the way I want it to on paper. Give it a proper funeral with tears (truly not sure if those tears would be happy or sad, and that in and of itself is sad) and move on to writing other things. 

Another option would be to stop writing this dead end draft (I've written myself into a very stupid corner that nothing but a serious rewrite or a lot of "don't look at the massive plot hole behind the curtain" hand-waving can get me out of) and yet again start over from the beginning of book one, this time taking the whole series in a completely different, as-yet-uncharted direction that's been nagging the back of my brain for over two years now. 

And of course, hand-waving is an option as well. I can let this draft spiral to its flaming-dragon-corpse of a conclusion for the sake of marking it as complete on Wattpad. I can hand wave all the issues with a "sorry, just imagine this, this, and this were different" and then dive into writing book two so that I can finally just see it done, see book two on paper, and stop forcing the poor souls that are my recurring readers to read yet another draft of book one. But that of course runs the risk of, as has happened previously, me getting a dozen or so chapters into book two and realizing its not going to work. 

It genuinely feels like my options are cut a limb off, disappoint my friends/readers/self yet again, or keep pushing this boulder pretending that There Is No War In Ba Sing Se and hating myself and my work regardless of what I choose. 

 Something has to give, and I don't know what it should be. 

For now, Im just sort of ignoring the way the most recent GG doc stares at me every time I open Pages on my laptop to work on something else. Idk what the point of this ramble was, but I just wanted to express what's going on in my brain. 

I'm so tired.  

- Dino