Sniff! Sniff! Ewwwww.....What Did I Step in?

Peoples!!!!!

How is everyone today? I trust that ya'll had a great weekend and that nothing unseemly happened to you while you were experiencing that great weekend to begin with. And if something DID happen, spill the details...I need a good story idea.

Anywho, I am back after my much needed four day Cyber World break. It's an odd thing as I've heard the Cyber World occasionally described as "a good mental floss break" from the Real World. I suppose this time around, the Real World was "a good mental floss break" from the Cyber World.

So, let me tell you about what I did on my Real World vacation. Betcha find highly amusing, or slightly troubling.

The original idea for taking the mental floss break was to play catch up on my writing. I didn't catch up in my writing. Why? Because I found a major malfunction which is so far has taken me the better part of two days to fix.

How it happened was pretty ingenious on my part. I edit the living daylights out of my manuscript whenever I get a free moment, and Friday (the 1st) was no exception. I was sitting here in my den doing some editing when I noticed (funny how you find things for the first time months after you originally wrote it) that I had a continuity problem in two of my chapters. Somehow I managed to go from the evening of one day to the morning of the next day without really explaining why.

So after printing out the entire secondary plot (some 30 pages) and giving it a good read through, I sadly discovered that I got seriously lost while writing the interior. The basic problem was this: I have two different time frames going, one of which is covering 4 days, and the other which I originally envisioned covering exactly one day; and I was switching back and forth as needed within each chapter (also going from 1st to 3rd p.o.v. as well). The problem became that I was going into a second day with the secondary plot without explaining why (and trust me, this was so confusing that even I didn't understand it. If I didn't get it, chances were that no one who mattered would get it).

Suffice to say that I F'd up royally on the second plot. So back to the drawing board I went. I've spent the better part of Saturday and Sunday breaking out both parts within the chapters by putting date tags for each section within the chapter, which I hope will get me back on track to finish the novel. Especially since I'm at the equivalent of here at the original story.

And boys and girls, this isn't the first time I had this problem with a story, no sir. You would think that after making this my particular preference while writing, I would learn how to do it correctly from the mistakes made with my first book (did the exact same thing, except it didn't come out as well), but no. I didn't quite make the lesson stick, because I was 3/4 of the way done (about 80 pages/35,000 words) with the story before I found the critical errors.

The only writing, that I in fact did, was to tweak a-caked-in-mold-spores-that-are-being-eaten-by-dust-bunnies-story that I was going to use as a connector for a book called Life is a Highway (see example here). What I decided to do was to take those five connecting stories I wrote for that, and use them for FSG as connecting stories there. The first one should appear sometime in late February.

The only other item I completed that is worth mentioning, is that I finally loaded (but not begun training on yet) the Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Speech Recognition Software that I bought over the Christmas weekend. I'll elaborate more on this in the coming weeks, but suffice to say I've taken the first step adapting to what is sure to be a fascinating and yet tortuously slow decline of my body's various parts.

As they say, even the most thoroughly constructed plan can sometimes blow up in your face, leaving you drenched in....yeech, gray matter, red matter, white matter and often simply just plain matter.