A while back, I backed a kickstarter, and forgot about it. This is like trading in the futures market and forgetting about it – Sudden Deliveries Will Happen. In my case, a writing workshop. (This is better than a guy I know who went on vacation with his wife, and returned to find a future he’d forgotten he held had matured, and they had, as per contract, delivered. Several tons of potatoes… to his front yard.)

Welp, great, let’s tackle this learning curve, as we can get it all in before the next surgery… except there’s one niggling little problem, that I learned from the last workshop I did: if I use a WIP for my workshop piece, somewhere in the middle of tearing it apart, examining the structure, plotting it all out, etc… it dies on me. The backbrain goes “Well, if you know how it all goes, then the story’s told, and there’s no point in creating words anymore.”

I’m still recovering from that, and struggling to make any headway on the story I used last time. So, what’s an author to do?

Then I had a Bright Idea! I’ll just grab something I stalled on years ago, that moved from a WIP to a W-Not-IP (WNIP), to a Dead-WIP (DWIP). That way, I can take it apart, examine the structure, rewrite bits on demand, and not have to care, because it was dead when I started!

…You know how this goes, right?

It had some intractable worldbuilding issues, and some worldbuilding on hold for more research. I solved that when required by just tossing the old worldbuilding entirely and setting it in the world I just did for True Colours. It had some structural issues. I …didn’t so much solve those as note down what they were, and toss around a few ideas for fixing that didn’t pan out as I rewrote the clunkier old prose into little excerpts for the homework.

But it was still dead. Not live. Not actually making progress.

…and then I got this wild hair: why not transcribe / rewrite the whole thing and give it as a parting gift to the person in the workshop who really wanted it? It wasn’t ever going to be finished, but it’d amuse them. So I started, but it was like wading through ankle-high mud with the tide coming in, due to aforementioned structural issues,

Naturally, I bitched to an alpha reader, because I’m female, I vent. That dear, sweet, sarcastic, helpful, stabby little alpha reader whom I was talking about it to went “Oh, you just have the existing chapters out of order. You need to put them as follows…”

She wasn’t wrong. And my brain went “If it’s in this order, then you need to put an extra chapter here to make it flow correctly, and here’s what it is!”

And suddenly it’s a Work In Progress again.

…That wasn’t supposed to happen. The Learning Exercise story, True Colours, definitely wasn’t supposed to have a sequel.

Runs screaming into the night.