The Breakfast Slog

Bob Mayer used to make me walk the terrain of whatever novel we were writing (translation: go walk around the setting), and as much as I bitched about it, he was right, it really helps.  So this morning I walked the terrain of Nita’s breakfast scene.

Yes, the same damn scene I’ve been trying to fix for months.   It’s too long, it goes nowhere, it’s infodumpy (which I now have a new horror of after watching Justice League) and it’s annoying the hell out of me.  But I need it there because it’s the first sober interaction between Nita and Nick, and it has to establish the foundation of the relationship.  I have accepted that I have a vulnerability problem with Nick ( he’s dead, so he’s invulnerable) and I have realized that I need a much bigger end to the scene and fixed that,, but it’s still all over the place.

So since it takes place at breakfast in a diner, I went to breakfast at my diner and ate the terrain.  

It was delicious.  I worked the whole time, splitting the scene into four parts (set up, escalation, complication, climax, although those two middle ones could have been swapped, no problem), and sorting out the subplots in color coding that have to keep spinning while Nita and Nick argue and eat.   Now all I have to do is rewrite the damn thing.  

I will have this sucker fixed before I go to sleep tonight, I swear.  This is just to let you know that I’ve been working.  Also my Grammarly report this week says that I am more productive than 99% of users, used 99% more unique words than most users, but I’m only 75% more accurate than most users.  Then they tempted me to buy the premium service because the advanced program found 1,320 more mistakes.

Why they think that’s a selling point is beyond me.

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