Lockdown, Day 2

I've been officially house-bound for almost two days now (though I was severely limiting interactions before that, but I can't say I was in lockdown yet because I was still working until the middle of this week).

Ordinarily I would have jumped at the chance to have so much free time -- all the dancing! all the writing! all the music! all the choreography! But after the past year or so, burnout talked louder than the joy of opportunity.

I knew the lockdown was coming, though, and slowly I came to terms with the idea of creating things again. I started with a crochet project -- no-one's ever told me I was worthless for crocheting, so it was a safe but still creative option that at least kept me from scrolling Facebook 24/7.

After two days of planning to do it, today I officially started the rewrite of Kyrie. Not 'adding scenes,' not 'revising,' rewriting. Top-to-bottom rewriting the novel. I'll insert the newly polished scenes as I come to them, but I need to write the entire story out in chronological order again. Doing it out of order does not make sense in my brain and I have accepted defeat on that front. (Also it's much harder to see where the holes are if you're piecing it together anyway.) I have a month-by-month timeline of the novel's events that I'm referring to, and let me tell you, that's been a massive help so far -- knowing at a glance what to plant and what to foreshadow and where to do it. There are almost no flashbacks in this entire novel, so this should work fairly well.

I was telling my fiancé about it over FaceTime today while on a writing break. As I was talking, I realised I had never really verbalised the core of this particular story before. I've done that with some of my other novels, but this one I kept very close to my heart. I rarely -- if ever -- refer to it in real life (though I talk about it almost incessantly on this blog). I warned him at first that he might find it sad (because 99% of what I create is sad and this is starting to bug him), then plunged into it.

After I'd explained the general idea, he said, "That actually doesn't sound very sad."

I was surprised. Two of the characters suffer depression and one dies. "Really?"

"Yeah," he said. "It sounds like something a lot of people could relate to. I'd buy it." He went on to say that he liked how the main character changes for the better because of the story's events and how he eventually stands up to the villain. He seemed quite excited about the whole thing. And for the first time in a very long time, I began to think this might be a story worth telling.

After five and a half years of tweaking and changing and half-living-in the same story, I was starting to think my concept was unoriginal, if not overdone. I wanted it to sound like a story that really could happen in real life, but with that comes the risk of writing something unremarkable. But even the subtle change in the protagonist excited my fiancé, which in turn excited me. Maybe this isn't a dumb story. Maybe people would enjoy it.

And maybe this is the year I actually get a complete second draft of this thing done.