Be Gone From Me

It meant staying up a bit later than I had intended, but I finished the revisions for Carson's Learning last night. It was a necessity. Over the weekend, I managed to reach that point in a story when you despise every word, every image, every plot point. I pushed myself to finish the revision, though, working mostly on blind faith that my subconscious (aka the Muse) knew what it was doing. Honestly, there are changes I made last night that I have no idea if they make sense for the story. Hell, I could've suddenly made the ending a big deus ex machina cliche and had the characters turn out to be robots in someone's futuristic version of The Sims, and I probably would've written that in with the same "gee, I hope I started threads for this stuff earlier in the story" attitude I had last night. After I collapsed in bed, I tried to summon up some positive thought for CL. I think I managed to tell myself that I had done very well with the last lines of the last two scenes before the negative tirade of what I hadn't done very well drowned it out. And then the jitters started: what if this does get published? Nevermind the fact that I'm submitting it to an anthology whose sole purpose is to seek out fiction that breaks genre rules and boundaries, I was suddenly worried that CL had BROKEN GENRE RULES AND BOUNDARIES! What had I done? If I can't put it into its niche, how can I sell it? And even if I can sell it, how will readers know what to do with it? And even if readers know what to do with it, it's going to get ridiculed by peers and industry pros because it has no niche. And...and...and....

So I have sent this bad boy far away from me, into Andi's capable hands for a critique. I'm trying hard not to say good riddance to bad rubbish because I know I love this story, and I know I can make it good enough to sell (that is, I can do so once I have Andi's far more objective comments to assist with the final revisions). But I also know that if I see so much as a page from this story right now, I will shred it gleefully into teeny, tiny pieces and sprinkle them into a toilet.