'Eidolon' Being No More

I do think writers should go back and reread their books after some distance of time. I recently did that with A Castle for Rowena and found I'm extremely proud of that book (despite spotting a handful of surface errors that escaped me during edits). On the other hand, I've also reread Eidolon and was immediately reminded of my difficulties writing that book, and things pretty much escalated from there.

You see, I had high hopes initially for my Curiosities collection because the idea of desperate wishes being made on cursed objects sounded really promising, and I was swimming in inspiration when I worked on Dollhouse. Then the well started to dry up when I got around to writing Automata until I had nothing left to work with afterwards. 

I was foolish enough to purchase the cover image for Eidolon and even putting together cover art for it BEFORE any work could be done on it. So I basically trapped myself into a situation where I felt obligated to write for that book cover, and the story ended up suffering through the most number of false starts of any book I've written since 2008. Eventually I shelved the document and grieved over the fate of Curiosities until some time later when the nugget of an idea tried to push its way out, and I grabbed hold of it in desperation. 

And so there it went, another revamping of the document, and I thought I finally had it worked out. The story got written, but over the course of it, I eventually realized it was a mistake to resurrect a plot that wasn't working out. But I stuck to it because pride was on the line, and I also didn't want to leave the collection barely populated with only two books. 

In essence, I forced it. Then I finished it and barely gave the file the attention it really needed during revisions and edits. By the time it was published, I didn't have much confidence in it but was still pretty deluded enough to leave it be and not acknowledge the mistake of forcing it into existence. 

It was a story that didn't want to see the light of day, judging from the number of times I had to start over. It certainly fought me all the way to the end five chapters in. But I didn't care as long as I had something to add to the collection. So when I cracked the e-book open and reread it, I was embarrassed by all those errors in logic (and mechanics) that I allowed to slide out of exhaustion from dealing with the book. 

And I've had enough distance of time to be ruthless about my own work, and this will be a book I'm not hesitating to delist in both print and digital formats. It's also getting deleted from my backlist via Draft2Digital. 

It's inevitable in any creative venture that you'll end up with one or two duds (rude, I know, but I'm blunt that way when it comes to my own work), and this is a sore lesson I need to learn. It's okay to throw in the towel at any point if something isn't working. Don't force it. Don't overthink it into existence. Don't come up with flimsy justifications for it. And if a collection only has two good books, leave it be.  

Maybe -- just maybe -- down the line I might be able to reuse the first five chapters for a completely different story for the Grotesqueries collection, but I know better than to hold on to that thought. It's a shame, though, that things didn't work out the way I wanted, but it's all for the best, and I'm not just saying that to make myself feel better. I've already moved on.