Tell us why you stopped working on it, or why the work is not advancing.
Tell us what people in this group or on Writing.Com could do to help you see your project through to the end.
By “have been working on,” I suppose “only in my head” counts.
There was a NaNo project I did lo these many years ago. It’s meant to be a science fiction novel set in the next century, where human travel outside the Earth-Moon system is still not done for various technical and political reasons. Without giving away too much, the story is mostly about one pilot who breaks that barrier in a newly designed ship, built in secret and in contravention of international laws, in order to retrieve an ice asteroid that will make her orbital community more self-reliant and less dependent on Earth or Luna (such self-sufficiency is, of course, what those laws were written to prevent).
How long ago? I don’t know. It’s gotta be going on 20 years now. This is how I know I’m just not cut out to be a real writer: not because of lack of writing ability or ideas, but an utter inability to see things through.
Why did I stop working on it? Well, for starters, every time I looked at it as an editing project, I found something less like work to do. For finishers, the political milieu of the story is: a conservative, fascist, racist, protectionist hybrid corpo-theocracy has taken over most of the US, and, after Civil War II, the US is no longer the US but fractured into, basically, Good States (California, New York, etc.) and Bad States (Texas, Florida, etc.) That’s not actually what they’re called, but that’s the idea. Other countries are aligned with one or the other, but the biggest global power in the novel is a different, rival theocracy to the one in the former US.
Since I started writing the story, the US started heading for Civil War II, thanks to a conservative, fascist, racist, protectionist hybrid corpo-theocracy, so the milieu I envisioned has gone from “yeah, right” science fiction to “it took no genius to predict that” science fiction. So that’s why I’m not working on it now, apart from sheer laziness: my ability to do so without cackling at just how spot on my political, if not technological, projections were, would get in the way. It pays to be a pessimist; you can always find something to cackle about.
Tell us what people in this group or on Writing.Com could do to help you see your project through to the end.
If anyone could “help” me, I’d have completed it already. No, at some point, I simply gave up all hope of ever finishing that, or the three other novels I have in draft form, all promising, none actually finished.
(And that's still less than 500 words except for the italicized bits, which were just the assignments.)
