I was rather social this weekend, going out both Friday and Saturday nights. Shocking, I know. Now it’s back to work, and I’ve got to rewrite a scene that I don’t think is working, but I’ve got to figure out what goes in that place.

This may be a case when it’s easier to write something entirely new than to “fix” what’s already there. I think it needs to be almost entirely new, and trying to rework what I’ve done keeps me from getting it to where it needs to be. A great deal of brainstorming may be required. But once I get past this hurdle, I think it will be fairly smooth sailing until the end, where the rewrites will have a big impact.

I was hoping to get these rewrites done this week, since I have music and art camp next week, and I know nothing much will get done then. But I spent more time than I planned working out the changes I wanted to make, since I ended up changing more than I expected. It makes the book so much better, though.

This book seems to have really taken over my brain, since I find myself drifting off to think about it when I try to read anything else. That’s a good sign (and possibly a bad sign about what I’m reading right now).

Now to figure out what needs to happen in this scene and what it should look like …

I’m back to rewriting the book I’ve been working on, off and on, for much of the year, and I think the break to revise another book was good for me because I had a nice breakthrough. The other night, something I was reading gave me an idea that might apply to my book. It would certainly add conflict to the story and make things more difficult for my character. But as I thought about it, I decided that it would really just add conflict to a part of the book that didn’t need it, that’s only a transition point, and it would mess up a lot of other things in the story.

Yesterday morning when I was trying to figure out the heroine’s character arc, I found myself thinking about it again. It occurred to me that it would actually add conflict to the ending, too. Maybe I needed to consider this idea. So I made a pro/con list about making this change, and I came up with about a page of pros and only a few cons, and the cons were superficial and easily addressed. While it did add conflict to that transition part, that part could still be quick and moved past to get to the real story, and it raised the stakes for the whole story, so that the heroine has a genuine reason to fear failure throughout the book, and she has reason to worry about whether what she does at the end will work.

Basically, I’m yanking away her support system, which always makes things tougher. I guess I’m too nice as an author. I don’t want to hurt my characters. I tend to play it safe as a person, and that usually makes its way into my stories. This is a case of a character not playing it safe, putting everything on the line for something she’s not sure she can even do, but she feels like she has to try.

I’m kind of excited about it now that I’ve overcome my initial resistance.

The funny thing is, it won’t require that much rewriting. There are a couple of scenes that have to go, and I’ll need to write a couple of new ones. Everything else will just require a subtle overlay, and then it makes what happens at the end work better. It’s almost as though I’ve been writing it this way all along and just needed to add the setup.

I love it when the brain works in mysterious ways.

As I try to inject a little more romance into this book, I’ve relied on music to help set the mood. Although I live my life mostly in silence, I do love music, and I use music as a creative tool for my writing. I have playlists for different moods and emotions, and I usually create some sort of soundtrack for each book, with a playlist of songs that remind me of characters, the setting, scenes, themes, or moods. It’s basically an audio collage. These are what I listen to when I’m walking in the morning, when I work around the house, or when I’m brainstorming.

But I don’t usually listen to these playlists while writing. Music with lyrics is a distraction because I stop to listen to the lyrics, or even sing along. I might listen to a particular song to set a mood right before writing, but I can’t listen to it while I’m writing.

While I’m writing a draft, I often listen to classical music, but I can’t listen to anything too familiar because I’ll stop to listen instead of writing. I use the “classical music for focus” station on Amazon Prime Music or one of their playlists. Then I only notice when they play something I know.

Unfortunately, when I’m editing or rewriting, I need silence. Any music is distracting then. But that makes it hard to set a mood when the revision is about adding emotion. I have to listen to it before I write, while I’m doing other things, or I can sometimes dig up the emotion a piece of music makes me feel by thinking about that music. I may assign songs to key scenes and keep those songs in mind when writing the scenes.

One thing I have to work on is remembering that I need to put it all on the page. I’m bad about having my own vivid mental images and feelings relating to what I’m writing and forgetting that my readers don’t have that. I need to transcribe what I’m seeing and feeling in order to convey that to readers. Since my imagination is overactive, I’ve always mentally fleshed out what I read. I’m sure a lot of other readers do that, but it is good for the author to give them clues to make the experience more vivid.

I got close to the end of the book I’ve been working on, then paused to make a list of things I need to go back and fix in revision in order to set up that ending. I ended up with a two-page list, and I decided that maybe I should wait to write that ending until after I’ve fixed all those things. Fixing those is bound to change things in a ripple effect, so I’d end up having to rewrite the ending. I’d practically be dealing with different characters by then.

I think a lot of this is because as I went into that final couple of scenes, I finally figured out some of the main things this book is about. I’m sticking pretty close to the planned plot, but my mental image of the scenes for that plot is very different now. The underlying emotion is different. The inner workings of the character arcs are different, as are the interrelationships of a lot of the characters. A character who was essentially a walk-on “extra” when I introduced him has ended up playing a pivotal role, which means I have to go back and develop him. Characters I thought were important and spent time on vanished along the way.

Basically, I got to the ending sequence of the book and finally realized what it was all really about and where all the characters are going. There’s a lot of that I didn’t set up. Also, what I thought would be the big, climactic scene that just needed the aftermath resolution afterward to end the book seems to be a whole sequence that should probably be the last quarter of the book, so I need to rework a lot of the middle to get the structure to work.

But I’m excited about this because I’ve felt the book “click” for me. I’ve made a lot of notes. Now I’ll be putting it aside to deal with revisions (I think — I don’t know exactly when I’ll be getting those notes) and to get some other stuff dealt with, and then I can dive back in and really make this story sing.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve written as much of this book as I did in the previous several months (though that was off and on, since I had other things to deal with along the way). Something I’ve realized is that while a certain amount of planning is good for me, too much can paralyze me.

I’m generally a plotter. I find it hard to start writing a book when I don’t know the ending and a few landmarks along the way. I thought it would improve my process and speed things up if I planned even more. I started outlining each scene along the way, figuring out the scene goal and conflicts, what was going on with the characters, how the emotional axis would shift, etc.

And that seemed to paralyze me. I wasn’t happy with those scenes once I wrote them. The more I tried to adhere to the outline, the worse it got. Most of the scenes ended up not using any of the stuff I planned, so I tried to re-plan. The whole book was slow going, and I kept having to go back and rework things.

Then I decided I needed to finish the book in a week or so and started just writing. I still did some planning, but instead of the “formal” analysis of stuff like scene goal and conflict, etc., it was more about what could happen in the scene. And the book started flying. I haven’t re-read what I’ve written in the past couple of weeks, but I suspect it has a lot more energy.

I may need to consider all those scene outlines when it comes time to revise, but it may be that this isn’t necessarily the best way for me to work. I’ve never really got the hang of “scenes.” I can’t seem to analyze down to that level. I do better when I just let instinct take over and write what needs to happen.

You’d think with as many books as I’ve written, I’d know what I’m doing by now. I try to keep learning and improving, but sometimes the thing I learn is that I’ve been doing what I need to do all along.

I made it to a little more than 6,500 words yesterday, so I’m still going strong. Whenever I do this kind of intense writing push, I find myself wondering why I don’t do this more often, and I get grand ideas about how much I could write if I worked at this level all the time. I’m not sure I could sustain this kind of intensity all the time, but even doing it a week or so a month would probably up my production.

I’m not doing a lot more than writing, but it’s not as though I’m letting everything else slide, either. I’ve been managing my morning walks and exercise in the evening. Yesterday I made yogurt and did laundry, and I’ve even been watching a little TV and reading. I don’t know if it’s the exercise or the intense writing, but I’ve been sleeping like the dead this week. I fall asleep pretty quickly and mostly sleep through the night. When I have the 3 a.m. wakeup, I fall back asleep quickly, and I wake up in the morning feeling rested, if a bit groggy.

One thing that the fast pace really helps is the flow of the book. I think I’ve been overanalyzing this story, and going full speed ahead has stopped some of that. There are scenes I’ll probably have to revise (or cut) later, but without stopping to analyze stuff like scene goal and the emotional pivot point, I think I actually get more lively scenes. It’s less “writing” and more “storytelling,” and it’s a lot more fun. It feels like play.

I’ll have to consider how I want to work going forward. Maybe do an intense week to get started, then a couple more “normal” weeks and then a “catch up on everything else” week.

I found out this morning that I’ll be getting another round of revision notes on the book for Audible at the end of the week, which means I really need to make progress on the book I’ve been working on before then. I’m going to try something wild and crazy called Book in a Week. That’s when you try to write as much of a book as possible in a week. It’s a combination of really digging in and focusing on writing and doing a fairly rough draft rather than a lot of wordsmithing. You’re spending as much time as possible on writing and you’re trying to get as much as possible written.

It’s a good week for doing this, since I have no real obligations this week, no errands that need to be run, not a lot of cooking to do, since I already have leftovers. I can put my head down and really get some writing done. I don’t know if I’ll get to the end of this draft, but I can at least get up to the climactic part of the book.

This will be an interesting challenge for me. We’ll see how much I can manage to get done. Stay tuned for results!

I’m trying something new with the book I’m working on: present-tense narration. It’s pretty common in YA, and people were talking about that at the conference I went to last month. I thought I’d at least see how it reads that way, and I was surprised by what a difference it made. It made everything a lot more immediate and forced me to tighten up a lot. So I guess that’s how this book is going to be.

It takes some getting used to writing that way. I’m still working on changing the parts that are already written, so I don’t know what it will be like composing. I’ll need to brainstorm the parts that lie ahead because the story seems to be shifting subtly in another direction than I originally planned.

But that’s a good sign because it means the story has almost become a living entity, taking on a life of its own. I’ve also reached the point when I almost resent having to do something else other than work on it.

I will have some research ahead of me, as I need to invent a sport that’s played using unicorns — something like polo but using the unique features of unicorns. I’ve discovered all sorts of interesting events while researching this. There’s polo, of course, which had its origins as a training exercise for cavalry (which is what this sport will be, too). There’s polocrosse, which is lacrosse played on horseback. There’s horseball, which is kind of like basketball played on horseback. And there’s a whole category of events that fit under the umbrella of “tent pegging.” There’s tent pegging itself, in which riders try to spear a small target with a lance while riding at full gallop (supposedly with origins in trying to damage an enemy’s camp while they’re asleep by pulling up their tent pegs, but apparently this is disputed), and then there are variations that resemble jousting training exercises, like spearing a ring with a lance or hitting a target with a lance. I think my sport will involve rings, with both rider and unicorn having to spear rings with lance/horn, or perhaps trying to get a ring around the opponents’ unicorns’ horns.

Sometimes it astonishes me that this is my job. “Whew, it was a hard day at work. I had to make up a unicorn sport.”