We dodged a bullet, weather-wise, yesterday. They were forecasting severe storms with baseball-sized hail, with one wave of it hitting during choir practice and the big wave hitting right at the time we’d be coming home from choir. They moved rehearsal earlier to try to avoid the big wave, and we just had to hope that the earlier wave would be more scattered. I only had two kids show up for children’s choir. We ended up not getting any of the earlier wave where I was, so I got home before there was any bad weather. The big wave seemed to be a lot slower than they expected and it wasn’t too severe by the time it hit us. Still, it was enough to wake me up when it hit just after midnight.

But that gave me a chance to think about the book. I’m currently struggling with a big disparity between the book that was in my head and the book I’m actually writing. The book I’m writing is probably better than what was in my head in a lot of respects. It has more conflict and more nuance and detail. But none of the scenes I had planned fit the story I’m writing. The big-picture plot is still good, but the scenes to carry out the plot no longer work.

I realized that when I was nearing the end of the scene I was writing and I didn’t know what would happen next, so I didn’t know how to end the scene. I went to look at my outline for the next few scenes, and none of them worked. I’d already dealt with some of the planned story beats, which eliminated some of the scenes, and there’s other stuff going on that I don’t have scenes planned for.

So that means I need to do a little regrouping today. I did figure out some things that can happen with the next scenes while I was being kept awake by thunder, but there’s some fine tuning to do.