u/fpflibraryaccount

Well I told myself years ago that I would never get to this spot, but here we are. I am in the middle of multiple series, have a few stubs of novels, shorts and novellas sitting on a hard-drive and the nagging realization that I'm not going to live forever. I'm not sure how to focus in and get all of this done (I'm sitting on about six books, eight novellas and ten short stories, all completed more or less). I'm getting pretty good about my 3k (minimum) daily word count, but this is kind of compounding the problem. I have the opposite of writer's block and my list of 'fleshed-out enough to start' ideas just keeps getting bigger. Worried this is going to ruin my mental health and keep me from finishing what I realistically can in a lifetime. Hope this isn't too stream of consciousness. Just needed it out of my head and figured some discussion probably couldn't hurt either.

I grew up during the advent of mass shootings involving young people at the same time I worked at a summer camp. I remember getting really nervous when random cars or people would show up, unexpectedly, acting sketchy or difficult. I used to have this insane, reoccurring worry that someone would attack the camp. This was always followed by some mental acknowledgement that we had archery equipment. Now, luckily, even as a teenage camp counselor, I knew that was some weird, American-Action-Movie impulse, and that in reality my job would obviously be to lead my kids as far away from the camp and into the surrounding neighborhoods as I could. This was never something I questioned, the whole 'technically we do have weapons' thing was just something that would flash through my mind from time to time before being suppressed by the rational part of my brain going through actual emergency procedures.

I wrote a story, years later, about something like that taking place at a camp very different from the one I worked at where one of the counselors makes that wrong-headed decision to 'defend the camp', not just get the fuck out of there. My hope was that half the readers (the mature half) would see the train wreck coming from a mile away and understand the story was a commentary on something sick in our society, not an action story or some sort of Die Hard-esque thriller, while the other half would let themselves read it as such (exciting, correct) until the end, when all of the sobering realities hit the reader at once and it is clear their is no attainable victory, no ideal outcomes, just another nightmare scenario with little to no explanation behind it. It's just a horrible thing, made more horrible by a miscalculation on our protagonist's part. As much as I believe it holds up, I don't trust people not to read it as some glorification of violence and I'd be horrified if it spawned some copycat type thing (it is not based on any real event, which was meant to be respectful, but in reality might just give someone ideas). There is nothing remotely similar in my body of work and I think it was genuinely born out of a long held fear I had after growing up in a specific time and place.

Anyone else have something like that sitting unpublished somewhere?