Up here in Portland, that is. First impression: wow, it’s not raining. 🙂
Because that was some adventure, getting out of San Francisco this morning! The storm there is fierce, epic, impressive….wet. But it’s lovely up here. I think I even saw blue sky earlier.
I lost two more pounds overnight, taking me just slightly below my recent range of fluctuation. Of course, that’s just Christmas cookies dealt with: we knew that would be easy. Now we can get down to the real problem.
But it’s all going well–I’m not overly hungry, or cranky, or weird-energy’d, or anything else I remember from the last time I did this. In fact, I continue a bit astonished that I’m not craving a drink. Very peculiar. I’m finding the food very satisfying–I just made a delicious coleslaw with walnuts for dinner, to have with skinless chicken thighs marinated in soy and a bunch of other yummy things. Om nom nom!
That’s the good news.
The bad news is, after arriving at Nuevo Rancho Lake, I settled in to edit those last 20 pages of Demonhead. I got to within 8 pages of being done… and realized the whole ending was completely broken. Two, maybe three scenes are missing: the whole climax, as written now, takes place off stage. The great emotional revelation just…happens, with no drama, no tension, nothing. An important character’s story arc doesn’t get tied off.
Who *wrote* this???
Anyway. I think I know how to fix it, or most of it. So I spent the afternoon brainstorming and asking various smart people for advice (Jay and Jak). I wrote one of the bridging half-scenes, then got a few paragraphs into the actual climax scene, when I realized I’d run out of steam–the pacing and voice was coming out all wrong. But I’d worked on it for about three hours at that point… that was probably enough. I’ll tackle it again tomorrow. Maybe it’ll be done by the end of the weekend.
Oh well. Far better to find this out now than after it had gone out into the world!