Chapters 14 and 15 are DONE!

Thank God! I've been working on these chapters for a couple of weeks now. I thought I had them done two weeks ago, but then I decided that they were all wrong. Well, not all wrong, but they just didn't quite fit. These chapters, as I mentioned before, are critical to the development of the romance between the two main characters. Chapter 16 is just as critical actually, but I'll start working on that one in a couple of days. I think I need a little bit of a break first.

I wrote and rewrote these chapters constantly the past two weeks...tweaking dialog here and there to make it all work out. I think it works now, I really do. I just need a couple of my editors to read these two chapters as well. I hope they think the chapters work. I really, really do.

MIA

So I haven't posted a new entry in a while. That's because I've been stuck for weeks. The last time I posted, I thought I'd finish 14, 15, and 16 in the space of one weekend. But then I just got stuck. I wasn't happy with 14 and 15. I redid a large portion of them and I'm just not happy with them. See 14, 15, and 16 are the three crucial chapters for the relationship between the two main characters. It sets the tone for where they going from here. If I don't get these right, I'll be hard pressed to finish the last chapters.

I'm definitely making progress. And while I'm stuck, I've added some good stuff back in the earlier chapters. One of my editors (the most logical one) keeps guessing who the mole is. She's been wrong every time, but tonight she guessed that the one person she had been focusing on wasn't the mole. Now I was kind of hoping she'd keep on believing that this person was the mole. So I'm thinking of going back and tweaking a bit more to turn her focus back to this person.

Anyway, I think I'll be able to finish 14 and 15 this week. I hope so anyway. I really want to move on.

Speeding up

So after several days of struggling with Chapter 14, I've now finished it and am almost done with 15 in the space of one afternoon. How the hell did that happen? I have no idea. Maybe it was the manicure I had today. Maybe it was sleeping in. Maybe it was the three cups of expensive, highly caffeinated coffee I had this morning...

I have a feeling that one of these days soon, I'm going to hit the wall again. The same wall I hit over and over from last weekend until today. At this point I'm taking anything I can get. If I can get through 15 tonight (even though it's past 11 now) I'll consider it a phenomenally successful day.

Chapter 16 is a very emotional chapter. I know it will be hard to edit. It's not emotional like Chapter 9, but it's a key chapter in the relationship between the heroine and her love interest. If it's not perfect (or close to it), the reader won't believe their relationship. I'll probably take several days on this chapter and go through several revisions.

It's late, and I really want to finish Chapter 15.

G'night.

Altering the Plan

So I started the middle of the book before I wrote the beginning. While I don't regret that decision at all...it helped me decide where the beginning needed to start...it is making Chapter 14 a bit of a challenge. I was pretty happy with Chapter 14 before I started editing Chapters 11-13, but based on some feedback, there were a few things that really didn't make sense. So now that I'm changing those things, Chapter 14 just doesn't work.

So now I need to redo 14. It's not the end of the world, I think the story will be better now that I'm making these changes. However, it's going to be quite complicated for me to work around these changes unless I completely re-write this chapter. There are several key passages I NEED to have in this chapter. My current challenge is figuring out how to keep those passages in the new flow of the chapter.

I need to lock myself in a room for an hour or so with no distractions and really think this through. Now, to just find that room...and that hour.

A New Character

For the past few days I've been struggling with Chapter 12. In it, our heroine's love interest finally makes his full appearance. I have some bits and pieces of him in the earlier chapters, but not more than a paragraph here and there. For the rest of the book, though, he's present almost the entire time. One of my editors has a bit of a problem with this. After all, we've had 11 chapters to get to know the heroine as a pretty solitary person and now all of a sudden, we're supposed to believe that she falls in love with this guy we've barely met and he's there for the rest of the book.

Now this is my book. Not my editor's. There's a reason I believe my character can do this...in writing the back story I had a whole chapter at one point with the love interest back when they used to work together, 4 years before the book started. I tell the reader this, but I never show them. I could very easily just tell my editor to get over it, but I respect her opinion very much. She's the most talented writer I know (probably one of the most talented writers I've ever read, - though she doesn't believe me). So I'm going to have to go back over the earlier chapters and add a bit more here and there. I won't go insert the whole boring back story chapter, but I'll at least flesh out the earlier sections a bit more. But I'm not going to even think about that until after I've finished the rest of the book.

I think I'm almost done with Chapter 12...maybe one or two more read throughs and I'll have it. This was the hardest chapter for me to edit. I struggled over each sentence, each action. It had to be perfect. I know that's dangerous. My editor...my friend, tells me that I can't let it be precious to me, I have to just write. But I can't. It is precious, no matter how many times I tell myself it's not.

Anyway, I'm going back to Chapter 12 now...wish me luck!

Feelings

There are a lot of feelings and experiences my characters have over the course of the book. If you've read some of the other blog posts, you can probably infer some of them. There's pain for sure, lots of pain. Fear, excitement, worry, betrayal, concern, love, security, the list goes on and on. I've felt most of the things my characters have felt at one time or another. Granted, I've never been in the extreme circumstances they have been, but I can extrapolate.

I've been terrified that I was being followed (back in college...and I wasn't...but thought I was). I've lashed out and nearly punched someone when they startled me in the dark. I've worried about friends, planned major events, been betrayed, fallen in love, felt safe, and even felt pain so intense I thought I would die. (An HSG test would be an effective interrogation/torture method...I swear, I would have given up my deepest darkest secret to make that pain go away). Weirdly though, the one experience I've never had (in my adult memory) is waking up from anesthesia. I am quite surprised that this one experience is eluding me. I'm quite happy I've never had to experience it, but I have no idea how to write about it.

Could I work around it? Of course I could. I could just start the chapter with "She woke up in the hospital, alone and afraid." But I don't want to. Oh chances are I'll just put something simple like that in there eventually, but I'm sure I could describe it better. More than likely, I'll just try to describe being drunk. I think that's probably a close approximation and a feeling I have experienced. Regardless, I'm going to skip that paragraph for now and work on the rest of the chapter.

I'll end by saying that a couple of my friends will read this and say "Get over it and JUST WRITE!" Well, I will, don't worry about it. But this blog is a chance for me to get my feelings out. So that's exactly what I'm doing. :-)

Destruction of Strength

Well, it's done. I've completely destroyed my main character. Now I know, I've blogged about this before. I actually wrote the chapter that destroyed her months ago. Then I edited it. Made it more vile, more emotional. But last night, I gave it the final edits. I thought a lot about it. Sent it off to a trusted friend, thought about it some more. Now it's done. I have no desire to edit it again. Ever.

Now I get to start building the character back up again. This is the good part, the warm and fuzzy part. This is actually where I started writing the novel way back in October. The first chapter I wrote...the first line I wrote...is still pretty much intact (and damnit, it's going to stay that way). I love this chapter. It's not my favorite chapter in the book - that comes later. But it's a start on the character's reclamation of her strength, of her identity. She's a better person when this journey is through.

Oh...and I finally figured out how to fix Chapter 10 so I wasn't revealing that little plot twist I didn't want to reveal. I love it when a plan comes together!

Action!

I'm editing the second main action sequence in the book. This one is a bit more complicated than the first one because there are only five people involved and one of them is pretty badly injured. I've gone back and forth in my head many times over this chapter. The bad guys mostly need to live - so they can come back later and do more damage. The biggest problem I'm having is how to do that. I'd like to insert some tension, some interplay between our heroine and the baddest of the bad guys. It would be dramatic for her to have the opportunity to kill him but decide not to. It would also help the story out a bit later for reasons you'll have to read the book to find out. However, I'm having a hard time coming up with why she wouldn't just kill him. I have an idea, but it requires me to reveal something about the plotline I'm not quite ready to reveal yet. I need to move on, so I'm going to just go with it and let the ideas roll around in my head a bit to see if I can come up with something better to put in later.

-Struggling.