Wandering off the Edge

I have a copy of minecraft PE. I use it to design castles and such for my stories so I have an actual building to wander through if I forget details. Castles, and mazes, and caves, oh my.

Last night my brain was obsessing over it. PE is a limited version, and only has a small "world," so if you reach the programmed edge everything just...stops. You fall off the edge, you're sunk.

Anyway, last night I kept dreaming it. Over and over, I'd fall off the edge. Then I'd be back digging or building again, and fall off the edge. You think my brain is trying to tell me something?

Writing is that way sometimes.

Most people tend to write in a straight line. A goes to G goes to Z, with few detours.

I wander off to 2 and 22, find a detour into G and then take off into the stratosphere riding @. At some point I get to z, but that z may not be on the same line as the A I started from. So it takes a lot more editing after the fact.

But sometimes I wander off the edge. I started a story probably 30 years ago that still runs around in my brain. Of course it's changed drastically in the meantime, but I finally realized that I'd run off the edge. Every time I look at the story I see new possibilities, new places it could go. Every draft is so drastically different from the drafts before that I finally had to acknowledge that the story is going nowhere.

I love the characters, the situation has a lot of potential, but as far as the story goes I'm flailing in open air.

At some point I'll probably go back and rewrite again, but at the moment it's just not worth the time it would take to flail my way back to solid ground, find an edge that won't crumble and start building again.

I have too many other projects going to give it the work it deserves. So I'll just quietly close out that "world" and work on something else.