My book:

I like the beginning.  The characters are strong, they do interesting things.  About two thirds of the way through (maybe more like halfway through) it turns to putty, this frenetic game of cat and mouse where everyone becomes a cut out of who they were before, where secondary characters are only there to support the protagonists and they can’t stand on their own two feet.

I suspect this comes from the book diverging from a human drama into a sci-fi story.  I can write about emotions and things with weird tingles, but when we step into real genre territory, I loose my footing.  The action scenes are weak, the plot is paper thin, all I have are the characters, who, right now, are looking at me, squinting, and asking “what the fuck?”

I puked out a completed draft, and have moseyed back to the beginning.  When I felt this way about the werewolf book, (let’s take a plunge and call it by the title, since it has one) Unfortunate Son (Gah, I hate titles, it gives me a squeamish feeling in my stomach seeing it on the page) I let it sit until I was ready to come back to it with a clear head.  About six months.  The Space Puma book, which does not have a title, I’ve been worrying at for school, which has bled every drop of fun out of it.  Re-reading the beginning, letting me see my characters as they started, has been slightly helpful; it makes me remember what I like about them.

But then I look at the whole book spread out before me and wonder how I am going to do it.  Unfortunate Son always had the advantage of being split into three pieces, which made editing easier.  Sometimes I wonder if the entire problem with the Space Puma book is that I just want to be working on the Werewolf one.  While deliberately not thinking about it, I’ve had some great ideas.  I wish I could table the aliens for six months or so, work on the werewolves.  I can only surmise that ignoring the aliens would light fires in my imagination about them.  But the aliens are my thesis, and they demand my attention.

I used to think about the characters before I fell asleep, slow times at work, in the car, now I think about nothing (Except job hunting and how much I dislike my job—this is also, very likely, contributing to my lackluster approach to the aliens.)

I’m having my writing group here at home read the whole book for me, and we’re going to talk about it.  This should jump start my imagination, hopefully I can take the whole back end of the book in another direction.  They helped me so much with the werewolf book—I mean Unfortunate Son (cringe), when I think about how different that is from it’s first draft, I feel inspired that the aliens are savable, too.