Phooey on you, insurmountability!

New blog entry:
Pens & pitchforks

Excerpt:
“oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo”

This was Sarah’s exact response when I gave her a couple-sentence synopsis of The Monster’s Daughter’s sequel. It mirrors my own sentiments when I read the book’s concluding paragraph about two weeks ago.

In my case, the feeling didn’t come out of the blue. It started in mid-March as a fleeting, almost imperceptible discomfort in the pit of my stomach when I read a scene about midway through the book. As I continued my first revision and moved nearer the book’s conclusion, my discomfort grew more and more pronounced.

It was a full week after I’d finished my first revision that I was able to pinpoint the source of it. In the same conversation excerpted at the beginning of this entry, I told Sarah, “i do believe life can be very shitty sometimes, but i am troubled by this degree of shittiness.”

During and after that conversation with Sarah, I despaired at the prospect of having to scrap the book in its entirety. If I had to do that, I’d have to do the same for the third book. Despite Sarah’s suggestions there were many ways to avoid a total rewrite of TMD 2, I knew there was absolutely no way I could keep the story’s core and simply retool it. None! I’d have to do a total rewrite.

Oh, how I despaired!