Pains of Writing Truth

I've been working on a novel I started some time ago. It's loosely based on some real, painful experiences. I find that after I've finished a truly emotional part of the story, I have to take a few days off before returning to it. While the work is draining, it is also cathartic. I find that as I look at the story from various perspectives, I am beginning to understand and forgive, to some extent, the actions of others.

Sometimes I wonder if there is any point to writing something contemporary, when I have dozens of science fiction and fantasy stories and novels that I could be polishing up to submit. Maybe those are good things to do on the days when I find the new novel is too difficult to aproach.

Bracer is a character from several stories I had published in Marion Zimmer Bradley anthologies. In the first story I had published, she and her partner are trying to force information from a dying soldier. All they learn is that the man may be the son Bracer abandoned as an infant. I later wrote the story of her abandoning the child, and after doing that, I realized she would have wanted to discover if the man was, indeed, her son. The story had twists and turns I didn't anticipate when I started. By the time I was finished, I had outlines for four novels. I only wrote the first two, but when I was unable to sell the first one, I gave up the project and turned to something else.

The other project also has four distinct stories outlined. This series was your standard D&D type quest, though I felt it had a few unique elements. Again, I wrote the complete first novel and much of the second. Not being able to sell it, either, I went back to working on short stories, since I had been having some success with those.

Every so often, though, an idea comes to me that is too complex to be a short story. My files hold several other novels that I could, and probably should, work on. I have two historical fantasies that involve a great deal of research. Sometimes research is frustrating because I go in one direction with my story, then later studies reveal facts that conflict with what I have already written. Sometimes, I wonder how important it is to be factual when you are writing fantasy.