
Argh, why is my unexpected love Cotton Candy Bingo fill being so impossible to write??? I have been working on it for... it feels like nearly two weeks now, and it's still only 1,300 words long. I also have 1,100 words worth of deleted scenes. That is almost as much non-story as story, which is ridiculous.
One problem is research. You know those stories where you read an entire 500 page super-dense technical reference book for a throwaway bit of verisimilitude in one sentence? It's not quite that bad, but along those lines.
Another problem is tone. I keep sliding away from fluff and normal family teasing into something either angsty or outright vicious, which is not what I am aiming for AT ALL. I don't know if this is related to real-life frustration or if it has other causes.
A third problem is length. This ficlet is the kind of thing that could all too easily slide into being the opening scene of a novella, but I do not want to write that novella. It's not that I think it would be a bad novella, and under other circumstances I might deliberately set out to write something along similar lines, but it's not my goal here and I resent the phantom novella constantly trying to sneak in and disrupt the structure of my tiny short story.
Nrgh.
I think I will go have dinner and then do some work on a meme or something. Maybe that will unstick my brain.