As noted in yesterday’s post, today’s work has required me to gut the outline for Book 4, and rethink.
While I’ll be able to keep the scenes I’ve already written in Book Four, I won’t be able to keep much of any of the future scenes I’d planned.
Progress is slow, and also (big surprise) painful, because all changes to what I’d planned in Book 4 will have a domino effect on what I’d planned for Book 5, and once I finish the first draft of Book 4, I’m going to have to replot Book 5.
This is the price of the better idea — so before you turn your series upside down to chase this beast, you have to know that your “Better Idea” really is better.
This one is.
It is worth all the work it’s taking me to redo the final two outlines, because the single critical piece of information about the villain that my subconscious mind withheld from me through the writing of the first three books and the first quarter of the forth brings a depth and a power to the story that I hadn’t imagined was possible.
I already built the critical pieces of this story line into the first three books… without knowing I was doing it.
However, in Book 4, I started veering away from this secret I was keeping from myself and what it meant — and that was when my gut told me I’d gone in the wrong direction… and FINALLY told me its secret.
No words today. (There’s no point in counting outline Sentences because they don’t ever show up in the actual story).
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