Writing : Roadtrip WIP

I don't know, but today I find myself feeling a bit nostalgic for one of my abandoned stories. One that was absolute hell to write the first draft of - I was too close to the themes, the details. My wounds weren't healed enough to go poking at them, and for the first time I didn't have the support structure to put checks on whether what I was doing was a good idea or not. Nobody said the key 'you don't sound very excited about that idea' and I suffered for it. There's the lesson there - having friends-that-are-also-writers is critical for being a writer. The last couple of years I had to learn how to be a writer all over again, from scratch.

But even though it was an awful experience, I won't have started it at all if I hadn't liked the core of the idea. I still do - gothic americana zombie apocalypse roadtrip. Andrew Wyeth aesthetic and lonely, quiet survival instead of Survivalist nonsense; time's persistent march forward against all will. The fragility of technology and the permanence of its changes; something utterly modern and american instead of my usual fantasy and far off science fiction.

And I think the pieces of it are starting to fall together now. It doesn't hurt so much, and I see the shape of the story so much better. Changes in the world have, unfortunately, provided more of a landscape for the setting. It might be darker now, and it definitely as a vastly different ending(the first was Shit.) It would be a story for the world of Now, about the sadness and horror of an open road. I'm not sure if I want to set aside everything else to work on it, but it's coming together in the background.