 Hello and welcome back to my channel. My name is Jackie. I'm an aspiring writer, and I had an interesting revelation in the past week. So I was talking to one of my friends from back home who is an incredible coach and she is planning to transition into being a book coach and as part of that process she is doing a new accreditation. And one of the practicums in her accreditation is to review a completed draft of a manuscript and give it So she asked me, did I have a completed draft that she could look at? And I thought, I do. I have powerless, which is my YA Superheroes Meet the Russian Mafia, and it's about 75,000 words. So I mentioned that and I said, look, I've got this. It's obviously needs some work still, but it is a complete draft. It's enough for you to critique. I would just like to go through it before I send it to you because there's some beta reader feedback I haven't addressed and a few things that need to be rewritten. And she was like, yeah, that's totally fine. And what was interesting was as soon as I started thinking about powerless, I was like, oh my god, I'm so excited to start working on this book again. I mean, I got the beta reader feedback in September, I think, or maybe October. And I haven't really looked at this book since then. Like I made a list of everything that needed to be updated, but then I got into trying the anatomy of the story and then I got into my fantasy hot mess and all of that has taken so much longer than I originally thought. So it's been about six months and as soon as I started thinking about writing this book again, I was suddenly so excited and so motivated. And then yesterday I sat down for the first time to look at it. And I knew there were four chapters that needed to be rewritten and the rest of the changes are probably minor tweaks throughout the book. And the first two chapters I got through in, I don't know, a couple of hours and it went really well. And I even got to include some of the original content, but with some extra context, it made so much more sense. And it was just so much easier than my fantasy hot mess. My fantasy hot mess is my book that I first wrote when I was like 19 or 20 in university. And I revisited it in 2019. And then at the end of last year, I started trying to pick it apart and fix it with the anatomy of story. And I originally tried writing it in a week over the Christmas week, which did not happen. But that got me started. And for the next two months, so sort of from Christmas until the end of February, I was working on it quite consistently and trying to get through it. And while there were some things that went really well, like one of the things I tried was just writing the first part of the book from one character's point of view instead of constantly jumping back and forth. And that was something that worked well. At the end of it, I felt like I was still stuck. I realized my second point of view character hadn't really been built out enough. I wasn't sure whether I should remove him from the book entirely or keep working on how I could flesh him out more. And after two months, even though I'd put in quite a few hours, I'd written and rewritten scenes over and over again, I hadn't actually progressed any further in the story. I was at the exact same place that I was at the end of 2020. And that might not even be a bad thing. Maybe that's just the process that this particular book needs to go through to get written. But it is very time consuming and frustrating not to have made much progress. So for the past couple of weeks, I haven't really done anything until this conversation. And then it was just so interesting to see how easy it was to get into powerless. And it got me thinking about how do you know when it's time to let a project go or when it's time to put a project on hold? And I think one of the things is clearly, is it working? Like, are you making meaningful progress? And I got into the point where I felt like I had stopped making meaningful progress by the end of February. I couldn't figure out what to do with Aubrey. I couldn't move forward in the story until I'd done that. And I was doing a lot of thinking that it was going in circles. I wasn't really getting anywhere. I think a second thing to look for is the level of enthusiasm or excitement you have, because even though I love my fantasy hot mess, I hope someday I can find a way to make it work, hopefully still this year. It was really getting hard. It was starting to feel like a chore. I wasn't enthusiastic about writing it anymore. It felt like I was just gritting my teeth and getting through it. And I do think there is some value in gritting your teeth and getting through it or having something as a routine because to be a professional writer, like, you're probably not always going to be excited about what you're working on. It is going to be a job. And I have a job. I have a full-time job, and I'm not excited about going there every day, but I still do because that's what you do. So if writing is a job, you shouldn't expect to feel excited every day. And that was the way I tried to think of it. I tried to think of it like a full-time job or even going to the gym, like, now gyms are closed, so I'm not going, but generally when gyms are open, I go four times a week. And it doesn't matter if I feel like it or not, that's my routine. And I go there, I have my hour and a half, and then I come home. And I figured if I was doing something similar to writing, like, if I had my regular routine, I was just chipping away at it, even if I wasn't always feeling great about it, even if what I wrote wasn't always inspired, at least I would be moving forward. But at the same time, I feel like there's only so far you can push yourself if you're struggling and it's not working. Like with the gym, sometimes you need to take a break to let your body recover. And the same thing with work, like, we have holiday leave for a reason. You're supposed to take time off to let your brain have a break so you can come back with new energy and more enthusiasm. So I think if you're working on a fiction project and you don't have that enthusiasm and you've been, like, slugging away at it for weeks, maybe it is time to take a break. And then I think the third thing is relating to external pressures almost. That could be opportunities or deadlines. So if you have a traditional publishing contract and there's a deadline by which you need to get your book to the editor, then it doesn't really matter if you're not feeling me enthusiasm or even if it's not working, you sort of have to keep plotting away in order to meet that deadline. Similarly, if you have an opportunity. So in my case, it was sort of the reverse. I didn't have the opportunity for fantasy hot mess, but for powerless, an opportunity came up to work with a book coach for free. And when we get started, I will do another video on that process. But I had an opportunity, which sort of justified putting away a fantasy hot mess for a while, and picking up this old project that I'm so excited to be working on again. So those are the three things I had in mind when I thought about putting this project on hold when it comes to giving up on a project entirely. And I don't like the word giving up because it's a little bit judgmental. Like it sounds like you're not doing it because you're not strong enough or you don't have the motivation. Like it's giving up can seem like a failure on your part as an author. And I don't think that's the case. Like sometimes you could decide not to continue pursuing a project because it's not working or it's not where your career is going. There are a number of valid reasons to give up entirely. And that's not the stage I'm at with fantasy hot mess. And in fact, a lot of the things I've sort of dabbled in over the years or a lot of the ideas I have, they're not ones that I've written off entirely. They're just sort of there in the background waiting for their time for me to work on them. So I'd be curious to hear from you. Do you have a project that you've given up on entirely or decided to put to rest? And how did you make that decision? Was it the same three factors? Was it it wasn't working? Was it lack of enthusiasm? Was it opportunities or deadlines or external forces that meant you had to work on something else? Or were there other things you took into consideration because choosing to stop working on something entirely is different to deciding to put it on hold temporarily. So please let me know if you've had situations like this and how you approach them in the comments below. If you liked this video, please like, subscribe, hit the notification bell, and I will see you next week. Bye.