Welcome to The Elsewhere, where a never-was writer talks about the craft, the art, the science of something that this kitty has not yet mastered, and perhaps never will.

On Project Gotham Racing 3, you can set up the game to show a 'ghost' car, either your best time, or the best of the best from online races on that track. This way, you can see how it's done when done right.

I suck at PGR3, btw. I suck at all racing games. I'm not particularly good at most vidgames, but I love the hyperviolence ones such as the fist-meets-face fighting games. I'm as bad at first person shooters as I am at racing games, but the hyperviolence again appeals to me.

Ahem.

That's a digression. I do that a lot when I write SoC. For me, racing the ghost of the very best recorded race on that track, from all the millions of games played by thousands of gamers online, is just folly. Some western ended with the old gunsell counseling the young bravo, "There's always someone faster, kid."

Racing my own ghost can be learning, or can be frustrating. For me, it was ultimately self-destructive. To start with, hindsight is not 20/20. In some cases, objects in the rear view mirror can appear shinier than they are. (And, of course other objects are shinier than they appear.)

I've written many stories. Most of them, like most of my races in PGR3, suck. Most of the exceptions aren't that great, but work. If we're talking racing games, the first category didn't even cross the finish line before time ran out. The exceptions crossed it, but not in the top three or five to be worth mentioning.

Even the ones that are memorable, they're flawed. They're just flawed less, or in areas where it's not as visible, etc. But they make challenging ghosts to race against. Perhaps too challenging.

I've written many stories. The ones that are memorable ought be guides, inspiration. Instead, I held them up to be bars, goals.

One in particular, a novella entitled "Evil Takes Many Forms" was written in a serial SoC fashion, much like "Callan and Sian." It was hyperviolent, self-indulgent, clumsy, over-reaching. It sucked.

But, it had an ending that utterly sang. It moved me to tears, and not just because the flushinlugging thing was finally over. It was not just me. It was posted to a webforum, a fairly large one. It amassed a respectable readership, certainly not one of the largest on site, then or before. When it ended, the accolades were many, and loud. They gave me the best feeling I can talk about in polite company.

Thanks to Reenie for unearthing this memory, for some of those congratulatory posts read the story somewhat differently than I intended it. That was when I realized a few truths (note: my truths, not Big-T-Truths. they may not work for you, probably won't.)

• If the story doesn't work the way I want it, the onus is on me, the author, to either get it right, or get it to the right people. Or, to nod and smile.
  
  
• It's great to see the work do something, anything in another heart. (I mean, if you see your work twisted into something unrecognizable and anathemic to your beliefs, that's beyond the pale. I'm not talking about that extreme.)
  
  
• There's never enough time to do it right; there's always enough time to do it over. That's an adage from the computer industry, but it applies to writing as well. Re-doing a story from the ground up usually is a black hole for me.
  
  
• The most important one: writing can be transcendental for the author. The ending sang that loudly to me, gave voice and form to hopes I couldn't see deep enough into me to recognize. From that contrived situation, from those stiff words of dialogue, came this desire to live life.

One final word. That story became by 'ghost' to race by for a while. Not the self-indulgent claptrap leading up to the ending. Not even the ending itself. The feeling of accomplishment, the emotional payload after I wrote it, after my intended reader read it.

It was a hard and unyielding guide, and one that gave no quarter. It left me frustrated and stifled, untimately unwilling to write because nothing else met its bar and that bled the satisfaction out of this whole endeavour.

Sometime recently, I realized that it was a ghost, not a requirement. A ghost is inherently both aethereal and a deception. It is something that is not there. The story sucked, the ending was good. The emotional payload was very good (at least for me) but that's no map to the next one.

A ghost is just that, something that happened here before, a memory. It has no power over the now, and no right to demand I do something a particular way, or to a particular standard.