Do you think you will continue city of bears this year or are you completely giving up on the series?

I’m at a bit of an impasse, actually, caught between two aspects of the story. On one hand, I very much love the story, and I really really want to finish it. On the other hand, I hate the format it’s in, and want to tell the whole thing differently, from scratch, from the beginning, with a different narrative design. It’s a problem.

The main issue is that I’ve written that whole series in large chunks at very different parts of my writing skill set. From the beginning, with Big Bears on Campus, it was never meant to be as long as it ended up being–it wasn’t even supposed to be a narrative at all. Just a collection of loosely connected vignettes around the theme of a changing college–nothing more. The narrative that emerged was totally unexpected but welcomed, so I decided to build on it.

The second part, Bear Boutique, was the first novella I’d ever written, and my first exercise in long form writing. It isn’t very good–there are loose ends, and I think a lot of the interactions between characters are contrived and poorly constructed. That said, for a first try, it wasn’t awful–but I don’t consider it, at this point, to be very good work.

The third part, Special Delivery, was my first experiment in commissions, and it shows. The vignettes have little connection to each other. I adore some sections and I loathe others. Most of them are worthless and I’d throw them out at the first chance, while others I would have developed into fuller story lines to help support the longer narrative I saw emerging from it.

The fourth part, Rising Powers, was my attempt to pull it all together into a conclusion. It is working…kind of. Still, there are too many loose ends to pick up, I feel like I’ve lost control over the plot, and I don’t really have any end in sight. I can soldier on with it, but I honestly think it would be better to cut my losses and start again, from the beginning, and retell the whole fucking story as it is in my head now. That said, that’s a huge fucking task, and not one I’m ready for. It’s definitely on hiatus, but I swear to fuckingod I’ll finish it one day.