OK. I need to finish this story OR decide that it's not working and table it. That's OK. Sometimes a story won't work and I can try again.

To cheer myself up about this I should collect the short stories I consider "complete" and working into one document.

So, today I will do one of those two tasks.

And if the story I was not allowed to talk about is tabled? It's gone forever. I need to raise the stakes here.

When I read multiple novels by authors that I admire I notice how they seem to write the same story over and over. This isn't a bad thing, but I do think, at some level, when you want to write, there is this one story that you need to tell and you keep coming at it from different angles.

And it's easy to forget that people love to hear that same old favorite story told again. So, if I have to toss 20 pages of story it's not so sad. I got better at telling the story from writing them.