I had a brainwave today relating to the book- there’s a set of scenes that introduces one of the main bad guys, and I knew instinctively that it wasn’t working, and I’d been trying to sort out a way of making work. Suddenly, on a walk in the woods today, I saw a way of doing it, which would involve some major shuffling around in what I’m referring to as the cliffhanger to part 2 of the book, leading into the final act. I saw it, and suddenly realised that it would read better, and be much more ‘novelistic’- alot of my storytelling devices are actually hi-jacked from television and comics, and there’s times when that kind of thing doesn’t work. So, I had a solution- trouble is, I couldn’t come up with a way of shuffling around the cliffhanger that wouldn’t suck the drama out of the scene. At the moment, it has a couple of clunky sections, but part 2 of the book ends on a genuine “Holy Crap, what the hell’s going to happen now?” moment that will hopefully have people screaming to get on to Part 3. I could change that to something more ‘literary’ that might have better technique- but I think it’d lose the storytelling energy that it’s got at the moment. I’m not saying there isn’t a way of doing it and not losing the energy- but I really think that unpicking a major chunk of the story, at a time when it’s actually starting to feel like it’s fitting together, would be a bad move. If I’d had this idea much, much earlier, I might have been able to do something with it- but it’s not the kind of idea you can introduce into a story without damaging the framework that’s already built. I’d rather concentrate on getting the story as it is to a standard that I’m proud of, rather than spend the next few months trying new configurations of plotting, and ending up essentially chasing my tail. This is a lesson for the next one- it’s too late for this one. I’m going to get this thing into shape, and I’m going to be proud of it…