Breaking it Down

The foulness of yesterday's mood has passed and I have a day of nothingness stretching out before me. Senior Management is heading out to the golf course and the inmates are left to run the asylum. All my work is up to date so I plan on spending the day alternately uploading rent rolls to the intranet (oh will the fun never stop...) and continuing to try and figure out how to fix the tangled plot lines that have become the last third of my book.

I have taken my day sheet and separated out the scenes that deal with Connor's internal conflict. That's one of the areas I don't feel works. I set it all up perfectly but the resolution didn't follow through, the required character growth happened, but I didn't really show it to the degree I needed to. There's a huge gap in the middle where I should have paid attention to what was happening and feed off it, rather than just skim its surface. And what of Kate's issues? Are her motivations strong enough? Do her reactions to the situation make sense? In some cases I don't think I've made it clear enough to the reader, so I have to go in and beef that up.

Then, with all the cuts and edits, the actual ending needs to be untangled and put back together in a logical sequence tying up all the loose ends. That's the part I'm having the most trouble with. I realized that somehow Kate needs to redeem herself in the eyes of the townspeople. I have an idea of how to do that, but the logistics of working it so it doesn't become some hideous contrivance that doesn't make sense are proving to be more of a struggle than I had intended.

So while doing the brain-numbing work of uploading rent rolls I plan on setting my mind to figuring out the puzzle that has become the end of my book. If that does not work, then by the end of the day there will be a large pile of my hair ripped from my skull littering the floor of my pod.