The good news: there are two less-than-stellar scenes in Part Four that I’d kind of like to replace, and I just figured out what scenes ought to go there.

The bad news: they’re the next two scenes I was going to write for Part Five.

The result: since I need to make forward progress through the book regardless, and writing replacement scenes for existing book doesn’t count, Irrith gets the brunt of my not-even-half-baked idea for tonight. Which means she’s about to end up in a meeting with a bunch of people she really doesn’t like.

I just hope this doesn’t turn out to be a scene I’ll have to replace a few weeks from now . . . .

ETA: I don’t think I’ll have to replace it. Terrifying as it was to leap headfirst into a major plot twist without more than three minutes’ consideration and without having put in place the foundations it’s supposedly standing on, it feels very, very right. The stakes went up as if somebody put rockets on them. And those two scenes will do much better in Part Four than the stuff currently there, which was supposed to go somewhere and never did.