Tonight, I will do either the most ingenious, awesome thing that I have ever done in this history of this book, or the dumbest, most confusing thing that I could possibly do in the history of this book.
The suspense. It’ll kill us all, I know.
All of the big holes have been filled in. The party conflict scene and new prologue are written, and while they may change, they’re done enough to be out of the way. So the last huge thing left before I drive myself up the wall with line editing forever is the restructure. While I’m not moving around huge portions of the text, I’m figuring out where the flashback material really belongs, which memories are the right ones, how long they should be, and where to put some of the displaced material from the prologue.
The best way to do this? Write every scene on a Post-It note – blue for linear present, red for sister flashbacks – and put them all up on a wall. Then, rearrange until it all fits together. Totally brilliant or totally crazy. I even have little orange flags for chapter breaks.
I feel like I’ll either experience incredible clarity that’ll really kick me into the very last stage, or I’ll confuse myself so much that this blog will end up as a glorified box of self-pity Kleenex for the next week until I pull myself back down to earth. Photo will be taken, of course. Bottoms (Post-Its) up.
M
