Blood, Sweat and Epiphanies

This year, as I'm sure you all know, I've decided to do all 201 writing exercises in Brian Kiteley's The 3 A.M. Epiphany. (I've been calling them my epiphanies, and you can check them at here)

So far they've been really hard.  Some days I stare at the exercise and think 'What?  I can't do that!  Who can do that?'  I've had stories where I could only use I or me twice in the entire thing.  I've had to write from the POV of someone who told a story that wasn't true.  I've had to write from the perspective an entire family.  I'm telling you, it's been really freaking hard.

Today's assignment is to take an old story that I've written and redo it as a first person perspective.  And, while I'm at it, count how many she's I had and cut that in half.  It's probably one of the easier assignments I've had so far, and for a second I thought 'Finally!  I can get this done in no time!'

Nope.  I'm stuck.  What am I stuck on, you ask?  Quite simple: I can't decide which story to rewrite.

I know, it's pathetic.  It's not like I have a shortage of stories or novels.  They're all sitting there on my hard drive wondering if I'm ever going to dust them off and look at them again.  Honestly, I didn't think I would for most of them.  Now I have delve down into the depths of the books that needed far too much work to even make them worthy of critique group.

I have to pick out one of the novels that I didn't want to work with anymore and work on it.  I have to face the characters that I've been ignoring for months, or even years.  What will I say to them?  Will they understand?  Will they hate me forever?

So, rather than facing that decision, I decided to write my blog post super early in the day.

I'm a coward.  I know it, you know it, let's get past it, shall we?

I know I can't put it off for the entire day. (Okay, that's a lie.  I probably could put it off for the entire day.  There is a backlog of shows on the PVR I could watch, and if I really wanted to, I could just do a whole bunch of editing and act like that was what I was going to do all along, but I don't want to.)  I just need to suck it up and find a story that I want to work on again and hope that my characters are still willing to talk to me.

Alright, I'm going to go for it.  Dangerous Waters it is.  I hope that this change will inspire me to get back into that book, because I really did love it.  I even have a map of that world, and every time I look at it I feel a little guilty that I shelved it.

Time to get back to my epiphany.  Come on over and see how it turns out?  Maybe you'll be inspired to do a couple of epiphanies yourself.