Writers block. It’s in the air. Last Wednesday my friend Jagi Lamplighter Wright wrote a blog entry about it. And for the last few weeks I’ve been struggling with it.
Since breaking through the block that barricaded the final scene in The Last Lord of Eden (as described in my blog post of September 13th and that of October 4th), I’ve gotten all tangled up in rewriting An Appointed Time. And so I’ve managed to do just about everything else, some of it high on my avoidance list, while An Appointed Time is opened up like a patient on the operating table. But I can’t bring myself to put An Appointed Time back together again in the new way. Even though it’s going to be ever so much better, honest.
Here’s how it happened.
About 66,000 words into The Last Lord of Eden, my protagonist rather forcefully let me know that he didn’t want to be a married man. And more to the point, his wife agreed. The problem is that I married the two of them off toward the end of An Appointed Time in a chapter that one of my friendly reviewers long ago suggested was just a little bit boring. The book will be better off without it.
However, as now written, An Appointed Time leads to this marriage as surely as the Yellow Brick Road leads to Oz. In order to have the option not to marry the two of them, I have to make changes that reverberate all the way back to the beginning of the book.
This has turned out to be a Good Thing, because the extent of the required rewrite also enabled me to scrap major parts of the first two chapters and begin the action where it should begin instead of way back in the back story where I tend to begin things.
And now that I have the patient opened up on the table, I see that I can consolidate two separate minor characters into one character, who will therefore become an interesting character in his own right. And this, in turn, gives our heroine a more believable motive for something she does that gets her into a lot of trouble.
So An Appointed Time is getting a revamp from start to finish. But it’s bloody hard work, all this throwing out of the good stuff I’ve written in order to make room for the even better stuff that will replace it. No wonder I’ve been avoiding it. This makes submitting the flex account receipts, rebalancing the retirement investments, following up on medical bills, making airline reservations, and preparing the documentation for 2009 taxes all look like enjoyable tasks.
I think I’m in trouble.