Thoughts on RE/CONSTRUCT

So I've decided to let go of RE/CONSTRUCT (a supernatural thriller I started years ago) for now. If you've been around for a while, you might remember it (but odds are you probably don't). Here's the cover I put together for the WIP intro ages ago:

It's been ages since I spoke about RE/CONSTRUCT, so for those who don't know what it's about (or just don't remember the details), the premise is this:

A group of inebriated teens driving home from a graduation party get into a bad car accident. The driver of the car, Adam, wakes up to find himself repeating senior year again.

But his friends have disappeared - everyone looks at him like he's got two heads when he asks about them, because apparently they never existed. And there's a new girl Ria that he's 99.999% sure wasn't there before, but who everyone knows - and he gets it in his mind that this means she's somehow connected to whatever weird thing has happened. He tries to figure things out, and realizes that no matter what he does, he ends up restarting senior year once the year is through.

The whole time loop thing - the main character repeating the year again and again and trying to find out what had happened to erase his friends from existence - gave me so much grief. Mainly because it was just completely unguided - just shots in the dark for my MC. There's no guiding information to let the MC know where to even start looking - he's just gotta try different things and hope that this time he'll fix the endless loop and somehow have his friends return to existence. Which could theoretically take him hundreds of years? Why did I do this to my MC??

The plot itself is a mess and I have no idea where to take it, so that needs a whole revamp. I think there was something I was trying to say there about the absurdity of the event and how maybe not everything needs to have a meaning or a reason for happening, but. Hm. I just don't think I'm getting that down right. Something about cosmic indifference. Except... I don't think there is such a thing, and maybe that's why I'm struggling with this story so much. 

(Actually, I might be on to something here. I think there are a lot of things I put in the story that I fundamentally disagree with, and I don't really... want the story to be putting out those ideas? I don't mind challenging them, but supporting them through the story is a no-go for me.)

And then there's the mysterious character Ria. 

Ria is 'added' to the MC's life when he restarts the year and is subsequently there for every repetition of the year. It definitely is cool to have three whole characters vanish out of existence and a new one pop into existence, but she's a complete mystery to me, too, because I have no idea what her existence in the repeat-years means, or where she was in the original timeline. I think when I added her character, I was definitely going somewhere with that, but now... 

Anyway, I'm just gonna have to accept that I'm not ready to write this story yet, and that whenever or if ever I decide to go back to it, it would have to undergo major changes and edits. It's not that I'm shelving the story - it's that I'm putting it in a treasure chest and burying it in the backyard. Not completely out - but the chance of me being able to get back to it is slim. Maybe one day, I'll take a shovel, dig it out, and find a diamond in the rough that I can turn into something awesome. For now, though... Yeah, it's not looking like that.

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Check out the eerie suspense novella Apartment here.

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