Distracted Writing

So I've been working on this novel for like...seven years.
Let's do some math. I am 21.

Seven years ago I was deep into roleplaying this story with Non-Dog BFF. It was August. A Friday in August to be precise, and the next morning I had to be up bright and early for the farmers market. Friend and I put together our redonkulous characters and started weaving this very silly story together. A few months later I felt it would be good to juice it up and give it some sensibleness.

We continued to work on the writing/roleplaying part until somewhere into 2005 even early 2006. For one reason or another we fell out of contact. The characters were still drawn a lot, but Draft 2 of the story was fading away.

2007 hit. It was summer and I was with my family in the middle of Wyoming, driving a really cool RV we had rented. That was the peak of my mopey-stage. As suggested by my therapist, I was writing in a journal. It wasn't helping though, as the writing was all angry, depressive words. Instead I read books about Modern-Day Frankenstein. It got me thinking about our forgotten story again. Thus Draft 3 was born, and I had soon forgotten my woes and spent the entire drive back to Michigan plugging away 25 pages of script.

Draft 3 took me until 2010. I spent countless hours writing, refining, writing. In the end I had about 150 pages of words, yet I still hadn't reached my climax. Pre-Indy, I sat down for a week and wrote about 10k words, under a cloak of Gin. As time went on though, I re-read it, gravely dissatisfied with my contradictions and lack of character structure. Instead of editing, I just bombed the project and gave in to draft 4.

My fourth draft so far has around 20,000 words, and I haven't even chipped away at what I intended to write. It very well could be a 400 page novel, which I won't fight.

Editing has been an issue. I can reread a chapter 20 times, and on the 21 time I finally notice that I wrote some word that is only recognized by the Dutch and means nothing unless you're Yoda. And I lack the motivation to continue writing. I keep getting stuck. I fear my own writing being public. If one copy was ever made of it, I'd be happy. Perhaps it's just the fear speaking.

And the time I took into writing this, could have been time used on writing a story. What a fail.

The entire story makes sense in my head. It's all planned, it's just spewing it out.

This is also stupid. Just the fact that Andrew can read over my shoulder prevents me from working on it. I have spent so much time just staring at him play Skyrim, that I could have written so much by now. I could be halfway done.

Back to the Snowflake Method for me.