April 09, 2017This is a note of apology to all my readers, however few they might be. It has been more than three weeks since I last updated and I have not even reached a stage where I can confidently state that I shall update in the next few days.
I apologise for the slow pace of the updates, which as one reader so nicely put it, kills the suspense factor. I could write a number of reasons but in the end I felt they only sound like excuses. So I shall simply write out my confusion.
When I started this story in April last year, it was a vague idea that kept bouncing in my head. Today a year later, after only six chapters completed, and fourteen pending to be done the idea and story line are still haunting me. I start posting when I had, what I thought, was a reasonably decent draft. Only when I actually posted the first two chapters, did I realise the mammoth task I had, the story I envisage runs over twenty five years, and present would cover five years and there were around more than a dozen characters. There were to many threads that I had started weaving in and could not leave them hanging loose. That started putting pressure on me.
It was only when I posted a new OS, a couple of days back which took me less than two days to finish (around 5000 words) from concept to finish, including the banner, that I finally realised something. If I could take two days for an OS of 5000 words, where not a single word had been penned before, why did it take me so long to update a chapter? Even if it is more than 10,000 words, as a draft was already in place it should take me a maximum of a week. Why am I struggling so much?
And in that question I found I my answer - it was taking time because I was struggling and since I struggled I had to exert extra effort, which meant that my writing was no longer smooth. I also realised that a large part of this struggle were my own expectations.
I put in a lot of research and work into this story, convinced that this would be my magnum opus (that should give you an idea of my egoistic thinking) and now it is turning out to be my swan song. I put in long hours, polishing and smoothing each chapter and would post it with great expectations. I would wake up after posting, too exhausted to immediately start the next chapter and quite disappointed with what I felt was a poor response. Those were the days when I could not even put a single word to paper and felt like giving it up.
Today when I realised where I went wrong, I make a few resolutions.
I will write this story out but will not pressurise myself.
I will not wait to complete the whole chapter for when I start on a chapter, the first few paragraphs itself give me an idea as to how long it would be, if I know that it will cross the 10,000 words mark and I have to split the chapter into two posts, I shall post the first part as soon as I finish it. After all the strict division into chapters is my personal fetish not a necessity of the story.
I will not be sending any pms for any updates. There are a few reasons, the primary one being, I set too many expectations which is unfair to both the readers and myself. I have learnt that half of my silent readers are not even on my pm list and most of my loving readers who do read and comment, do not even wait / open the pms. That means that the pms I sent only clutter the inboxes.
I will be prompt and quick in responding to my readers' comments. This another bad habit of mine, procrastinating on replies, if I have time to read them and I keep repeating that I love reading my readers' comments, the least I can do is show them, which is by promptly replying to their comments. Every one of us has a real life and real time commitments, so I shall no longer say I am busy or preoccupied to reply.
I will not give up on either this story or myself. It is because I chanced on this quote which touched me with its simple yet profound message "Magic happens when you do not give up even though you want to. The Universe always falls in love with a stubborn heart" I want to see the magic, and no, it is not waking up one day to find that the entire fandom has suddenly discovered this attempt of mine at a novel and decided to grace my thread, with over hundreds of likes and the pages flooded with comments. It would be nice ( a bland understatement, it would me have be doing a very long Red Indian dance, whooping in joy) but being realistic, that is not the magic I seek. I want to wake up one day finding that I have finally completed the tale, in my time and in my way, a story which did justice to the ideas I had and is what I wanted to tell.
I will finish this tale. This is a promise to myself, to the readers who have been with me since the beginning, to those who have left in between and to those future ones who might join me at a later date. I hope to see at least some of you at the end.
And thank you for reading my story so far and this long winding note of apology.
Nyna
Edited by Nynaeve - 7 years ago
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