IWSG: BuNo and NaNo Mistakes

Happy Almost-Independence Day, everyone! I hope you have a fun but safe weekend planned.

It's Insecure Writer's Support Group Day. The first Wednesday of every month we post about our writer's trials and tribulations - and successes, too! Want to join? Go over to the host blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh's, HERE.

Have you ever screwed up a WiP so badly that you just wanted to scrap it and start over? That's where I'm at with A Guilty Ghost Surprised.

Here's where it all went wrong...

I did BuNoWriMo (same as NaNo, only in June) last year. I used an outline (I always need an outline - I'm not the least bit pantser oriented). But apparently, the outline wasn't detailed enough, because I finished the manuscript / items on the outline before I reached 50,000 words (it was more like 40K). So I did the only logical thing I could think of at the time - started writing extra scenes to make word count. Then I did what I thought was the next logical thing - I entered those scenes (5, 6, 7, 8?) into the manuscript where I thought they should go.

No problem, right?

Wrong!

Because now I have wacky things, like:

1)  Indigo explaining a cut on her face before she got the cut.
2)  The name of the ghost dog is used liberally before the name is even revealed.
3)  The mystery is solved in the middle of the book, while the investigation continues afterwards.

And trust me, it's some crappy-ass writing!!! A lot of telling when I should have been showing.  I'm feeling like a total amateur, LOL! It's completely my fault, of course. I wasn't thinking about how out of order it could get or how much rewriting would be involved. Little did I know that rush of satisfaction at the completion of BuNoWriMo was about to bite me in the butt and take a out a big chunk!

So now, I'm going through and writing a synopsis of each chapter (yeah, chapter numbers are not right, either) so I know where things are at and where they should be, and where transitions are needed and where I need to move the investigating chapters forward and the resolution chapters back.

*sigh*

So yeah, I've written and published a book. But I still have a lot to learn. And I will definitely chalk this one up to inexperience and a lesson learned.

Has this ever happened to you? How did you fix it?