If you’re a writer, and you haven’t discovered the motherlode of Timothy Hallinan’s writer’s pages, go there now and bookmark it. His wise cousel has brought me back in from the ledge more than once, and I think he’s done it again.
What I’m currently struggling with in The Edit appears to be an architectural problem. When my protag encounters her first ‘crisis,’ she does the wrong thing — ‘wrong’ in the sense that she spends a lot of energy on one small part of the problem and ignores the rest of it. You know, the kind of thing that makes you scoff out loud when you’re reading a crime novel or watching a crime program and go ‘Why the hell didn’t she (insert sane response here).’
The rest of the story builds from that mistake. So…yeah.
There’s a lot I can salvage, so I don’t think I’m looking at a starting from blank page one, but it’s going to be foundation work: expensive, messy, and painful. And you lucky dogs will get to read all about it! Have you thanked the gods of blogs yet today, for sending me to you?
Just to reiterate, both for myself and any poor bastard who may be reading this, I started writing this novel purely for my own entertainment, and I swore to stop when it stopped being fun. It hasn’t stopped being fun; in fact, maybe I’m nuts, but the prospect of another re-write is actually making me sort of happy. Now if I could just quit my Day Job and do this full-time. Imagine the exponential increase in fun! And blog rants! It would be spectacular.