Repent! Repent!
Okay, maybe the situation isn’t that dire but I realize I haven’t done a blog post in a couple weeks. Mostly this is due to my playing catch-up on revisions for my latest work.
Why ‘catch-up’? Well, when I moved into my new house recently, I accidentally packed the printed manuscript with all of my editing mark-ups in the bottom of one of my boxes.
“Which box?” you may next be asking.If I’d known that I wouldn’t need to be playing catch-up.
Nevertheless, I can now proudly say that I am over half-way completed with revisions and they are going swimmingly. The manuscript will be ready for Beta readers soon (On a side note, if you are interested in being such a reader, please let me know in the comments, on Facebook, or through the Contact page). Realizing I was half-way through carving up and remolding the first draft got me to thinking about being in the middle of things.
Stories, like characters and people in life, go through transitions. Right about the middle of a transition seems to be the precipice on which chaos is unleashed. In the early stage thins are organized and progressing smoothly. Your big move to a new job or house is all planned out. Your character has decided what they have to do to accomplish their goal. Your story seems to know exactly where its heading.
And then, inevitably, the half-way point comes, and the crap hits the fan. Suddenly the movers aren’t going to be here when they said they would. The character realizes there are more obstacles at work preventing them from reaching their goal. The story reveals that there have been more players at work than we realized.
Things get complicated.
What do you do when things get complicated? Well, you do what I mentioned as being a favorite activity of mine in an earlier blog post. You make order out of chaos. The only problem with doing so is that chaos breeds chaos and so things always move toward being less ordered long before they can begin to swing back around. The character must face down even more obstacles, create more obstacles for themselves, or realize that what they’ve been trying to accomplish is only part of the equation. The new players create more havoc for our hero than anyone would have thought. Or the movers drop the box with the antique china in it.
In short, when you’re half-way there, your really just getting started. So I guess I’d better go get started.
