No writing yesterday.

I'm in a rough spot right now, can't tell what to do. The backstory isn't coming out in the MC's voice. That means it's like a lot of little dead ends. I can't even use them in the ms, if they're like this. There's so much of it (backstory), and it has its own little arc, so I don't feel that I can cut it up and sprinkle it around to hide that it's a different voice and style.

But the backstory is part of this character's arc--his "journey" starts way in the past, and is completed in present day--so it's not like either the backstory or the regular story will stand alone as a book. Not sure what to do.

In the back of my head, I'd thought for a long time about trying this as a graphic novel script, because that's a way to give equal weight to present and past (and parallel unrelated storylines in the present) without worrying about losing the reader. And the idea of working on it as a GN really appeals to me; I think I might not have to worry so much about reining in the darker aspects of it. Plus I could really look forward to working through some of these scenes visually, if I let myself.

But I've already got a GN script that obviously isn't quite right, and the thought of having two crappy GN scripts sitting around is more than I can bear.

And anyway, then the MC's voice came on super strong, and that seemed to indicate the story needs to be told as a regular prose novel.

But now not all of it wants to go that way.

One thing that occurs to me is that this book may be about pov and how the MC's guilt and anger colors his perceptions. Maybe I need to figure out more about what I want to say about that. I think I do want to say something about that, because it's an important subject to me. I'm just not sure what I want to say, exactly. Is it enough to just have him see more clearly, at the end?

And if that's a big point the book is trying to make, then how should the backstory be presented? And what about the parallel story of the stray--I was going to cut that, but maybe it should be used. Should I rethink the whole thing in terms of this idea--and rethink format? Maybe be more open to how this story needs to present itself?

H*ll if I know. I'm totally confused. I'm going to go eat a hamburger.