I’m trying to string together the last section of this manuscript and, admittedly, it just isn’t coming into my head at the moment so I thought I’d take a break and update here again. Yes, that’s right: ‘last section’. The end is now very clearly in sight but while I can picture that ending in my head, I still have to somehow get it there. I was hoping to make somewhat more progress on it today than I managed (about 2.5K on a non-kid day) but my Muse seems to have hit some sort of wall again. Nothing is waking her up today – not little breaks, not a coffee, not a walk. On the one hand I’m annoyed because now I’m not likely to be given another long opportunity to work on this until Tuesday. On the other hand, sometimes taking a few days where I can’t work gets the storyline sorted out in my head so that I can sit down and write with no issue once I have the chance. I suspect I have about 10K to go, give or take a few K…that fact might be scaring my Muse a bit too. I’ve been so non-stop with this since new year’s (hell, since the conference, really, I just rebooted it at the beginning of the year) that the thought of hitting The End (as it were) is somewhat daunting.
This morning I had a revelation that has eased some of my stress about this whole thing. I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the side story was going to require rewriting, since that character’s motivation has changed. I had the idea today, however, that perhaps what I should be doing is dropping that side story completely. This is a compelling idea for a few reasons. First, it will work better with the ending I’ve envisioned (I wanted to tell it from one angle, but it really made more sense coming from the side story angle). Second, those scenes can all easily come into play in the sequel which means that I already have a lot of material to work with when I get to working on that (sometime in 2015). And lastly, it solves some of that pesky wordcount problem. I pulled those sections into a separate file today and the MS dropped to 102K. Yes, I still have 10-20K to write (I think), but still…as it was previously sitting at about 125K, this is encouraging. And while that might not be the most compelling reason to pull those sections, it’s certainly an added bonus.
And yes, the whole thing is finally beginning to arc into a trilogy in my head.
So now I just need my Muse to step up and bring that last section together in my head. Who knows…I just might pull this off.
Fictional Impulse 