I only just recently remembered that this is supposed to be my icon for stories-in-progress. So out it comes, even though it’s less apropos for this YA book than it was for MNC. (Said YA is shambling towards a title, btw, though it hasn’t settled on one yet.)

I had an epiphany while long-distance driving yesterday. Gotta agree with Bear on this one; drives really are the bomb for story pondering. Anyway, I realized that I could probably reduce the suck in the early part of the book by taking three scenes whose intended purpose was to postpone a certain event by developing a different part of the plot, but which never quite justified their existence like they were supposed to, and moving them to just after the bit I’m writing now. Not only does this work (I think), it also looks like it will solve several unrelated ancillary problems. In fact, it feels kind of like this is the way it was always supposed to go, and I was just too dumb to realize before.

My hindbrain is smarter than I am, nine times out of ten.

So the scenes are relocated, though there are still Frankenstein seams where they got cut out and where they got pasted in that need fixing. Oh, but I just realized there was supposed to be [redacted] in the scene I wrote today, to set up the lead-in for the relocated scenes. Well, that can be tomorrow’s work. I’ve put in a good day’s effort inflicting pure, unadulterated high school trauma on Val; the physical blood, instead of the social kind, will have to wait.