Dissecting What Went Wrong

In the continuing saga of what to do with Airworld, I believe I have figured out why I don’t particularly want to continue it.

Somewhere along the way, the story stopped being fun to write.

It seems pretty obvious in retrospect. If it was fun to write, obviously I’d still be writing it. But what happened? This exact thing was something that Rachel Aaron addressed in her NaNoWriMo question-and-answer thread again and again. She advised not to continue writing something that wasn’t fun. She also advised that you should figure out why it isn’t fun to write, because it probably indicates a problem that needs to be fixed.

So after some thought, I think I know exactly when it stopped being fun: It was November 16, at the precise moment when Falclef rescued Naobi from the trial in Leavon.

I recall thinking at the time that there was something “off” about that rescue. I now realize what the problem was. Up until that point, Naobi was driving the story. She made the decisions that moved the plot along, be they good, bad, or indifferent. But when Falclef came along, she was helplessly carried away into a whole new setting and a whole new situation, getting tangled up with a rebel Order faction fighting a bigger war.

In my attempts to outline the rest of the story, I came up with a plot that took Naobi and Cheton away from Koerl and Falclef and that whole faction of rebel Order folk. I was overjoyed to get them back on their own, and now I realize that it’s because the rebel Order war with Dark Horizon is a whole different story.

Whew. Glad I figured that out.

Now I just need to figure out how to fix it.