This book is gonna be the death of me-the flippin death of me!

When I first started writing this book again about two years ago, I wrote about 55k words. It was a completely different story with the same characters and sorta the same idea.
So why am I struggling so hard to get past 30k words? I developed the characters. You can bloody feel them. They’re alive and they’re relatable. But there’s still stuff missing. Too much is missing. There're holes — holes in the story to fill. With a little touching up, it could be a novella.
I’m not okay with my first book being a novella, I’m really not.
Maybe there’s something to this planning thing after all.