The Slow Death of the Desk Drawer

Weekly Wordcount: Negligable. Done a little editing. 26,000 total.
This Week's Reads: Beloved. In progress: Embassytown, Assassins
To read: Villains by Necessity (It just arrived, and it is in super nice condition. I am excited.)

Desk Drawer Projects

Once upon a time, two summers ago, I wrote a novel for a school thing. This was an inherently bad idea, because I set upon the project from the lens of wondering what the school like to see - not what would I like to write. 

This story was not a fun romp. It was a turgid, pretentious piece of work, an uneasy mix of college lore, depression, and the ways in which people are pathetic. All is tainted with modernism. The biggest influences were Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and the memory of a hurricane that left my house powerless for a week.

I have long wondered what to do with the thing. It sits there, in that metaphorical desk drawer (it's on my computer, in a folder somewhere). I take it out once in a while and see if enough time has passed, and has revealed to me how to fix the story. Every six months or so I think I am ready to renew the project, to finalize it once and for all, and turn it into an ebook. But I can't, because it doesn't quite work. 

Why not?

It lacks tension, stakes. The characters are bitchy. And what is the conflict? The characters are their own worst enemies. Who cares about hurricanes and fires? There is no connection between internal and external conflicts. Everyone fights themselves and mopes about the state of things around them. 

It's a day, a tense day. It might help the thing to deal with the consequences. My current pet theory is to interlace another day, or series of days, three weeks in the future.

And then everything is reveled to be zombies. Zombies are the cure for modernism.