At the moment I am working on two different stories, the Book of Going Forth By Night/Rites of Exorcism urban fantasy and Falling Into Sky (aka Boy and Fox), which is a fairy tale. The former is much easier to write since my writing style tends to be more dialogue-heavy and the story is quick and fast-paced. Fantasy-pulp, in some ways, which I'm perfectly okay with. I get about 2K+ a day done on it when I work on it.
Boy and Fox, on the other hand, leads to 1K a day, at best. I have to remind myself to shift focus to the narrator, focus on the description and be vigilant on how things Mean Something in the story. It has a heavy icing of literary on it that I resisted in some drafts as cliche but am trying to work with again, largely by paring the setting down. It is very much outside my comfort-zone genre of 'urban weirdness' and as such comes much, much slower than other stories I do.
It is also the only story I've done where the alpha/beta readers of the Writing Group didn't see entire chapters of it because I'd decided they didn't fit the story any longer. I have about 4 versions of it, and have deleted more than I've ever kept, which is absurd even by my standards, and eventually the edit as I write and change future bits to fit that all came to the writing group having caught up with the story, which by then had lost focus and fallen apart.
The end result is to make me wonder how much harder it is for others to write outside their (sub)genre, both in terms of ideas and productivity.
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