No, seriously, I am Emo McEmoface and this post is 100% whinge.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.  >_>

You guys, I’ve been working on Tooth and Claw since January.  It’s sitting at 6400 words (down from 8000ish;  I chopped a couple of scenes out for rewriting and haven’t done said rewriting yet).  It’s still not done.  In fact, it is nowhere near done.  It’s not even a complete rough draft.  It’s like the story that refuses to be finished and I just can’t find that spark I thought I had before.  The basic elements of the story are there, it’s just…I can’t finish the thing.  It’s like the story itself doesn’t want to be finished.

And it’s like this every time I write.  I know I’m no great writer.  I’m average at best, with the occasional oh-this-was-actually-really-good moment.  I don’t have any innate sense of how to write a story.  I am not gifted.  I am not talented.  I fight for every word I write.  “Blood, sweat, and tears”?  Oh yes, in the most literal sense.  I don’t expect writing to be easy, nothing worth doing is ever easy, but for months now it’s been all struggle and agony with nothing to balance it out, not even the simple accomplishment of just finishing a story.  I don’t even know why I bother.  Just…why?

What the hell do you do when the fire fades and you find yourself losing your grasp on a story you’ve come to care about so deeply?  This is only a fanfic, it’ll never be anything special, but I want to finish it – hell, at this point just finishing the bloody rough draft would be a major moral victory.  I can’t just let it die, but what can I do?  Am I doomed to go through this with every story I write?

I don’t know.  I just don’t know.

/frustrated face.