Why can't I just leave it alone?
Like a scab that needs picking, or a loose tooth. It's endless.
In the debate with myself about whether or not to put the chapter headings back into Benfro book two, I went through the whole story reminding myself exactly what happened in each chapter, drawing up a single-line summary of each section (there were ninety-six of them, as it turned out).
This was a useful exercise, as it highlighted a couple of problems with what I thought was a perfectly good manuscript. First, there were too many chapters (48), all of them too short (average seven pages, some only five). Second a major event in one stream of the story intersected with another at completely the wrong time. At least this problem was near the end of the book, so it only involved rejigging the last hundred pages, but I should have picked it up earlier.
So now I have half as many chapters, which leaves plenty of spare potential chapter headings. And the whole thing works at the climax a lot better, which is good. But I've still got to decide which heading goes with which chapter, and possible write a few new ones, and I'm determined that this manuscript will be in the post at eleven tomorrow morning.
So what the hell am I doing blogging? Stop distracting me, all of you.
In the debate with myself about whether or not to put the chapter headings back into Benfro book two, I went through the whole story reminding myself exactly what happened in each chapter, drawing up a single-line summary of each section (there were ninety-six of them, as it turned out).
This was a useful exercise, as it highlighted a couple of problems with what I thought was a perfectly good manuscript. First, there were too many chapters (48), all of them too short (average seven pages, some only five). Second a major event in one stream of the story intersected with another at completely the wrong time. At least this problem was near the end of the book, so it only involved rejigging the last hundred pages, but I should have picked it up earlier.
So now I have half as many chapters, which leaves plenty of spare potential chapter headings. And the whole thing works at the climax a lot better, which is good. But I've still got to decide which heading goes with which chapter, and possible write a few new ones, and I'm determined that this manuscript will be in the post at eleven tomorrow morning.
So what the hell am I doing blogging? Stop distracting me, all of you.
Comments
(I think you're procrastinating so that you don't have to start on the next project.)