Who Needs a Deadline?

*If you enjoyed my whip/WIP post from last week, check out my Candy Cane analogy on 42WD Publishing's blog.

Now on to this week.

I'm beginning to worry about the pace of this re-write. I spent most of last week working on chapter one, getting it to the point I felt comfortable enough to move on. Power writing seems to be out of reach for this round of drafting. I'm not thinking that's a good thing.

Once I was content with chapter one (took about another 5 days), I tried to move on to chapter two, but it kept eluding me. In this re-write, I have to figure out how the drastic changes to chapter one effect the interactions that follow. Also, I'm making the chapters content based rather than word-count based, so it changes the overall feel and flow as well. Breaking from one pattern to fall into another is proving trickier than I thought.

Yesterday I was able sit down and write for a solid block of time. This is not always possible with my 2-year-old son and 4-year-old nephew running around. Yesterday, however, they were quite content playing without fighting so all I had to do was keep an ear out, refill juice cups and kiss the random owie.

So I was able to write until it was time to make dinner when I put everything aside. I came back to writing after about 2 hours. I worked a little longer, but I kept feeling more and more discontent with what was going on. This was not what I wanted. It was too ... silent. Despite the information I was presenting, there was no forward movement in the story, and that just had to change.

So I re-read, cut, dissected and moved some words around before labeling it Chapter Three. A quick line explaining what I wanted to happen in chapter two, and off went my computer. I was too tired to focus on it anymore even though nothing had really been produced in all the hours I put into it.

This morning, not-quite-fresh, but ready to start again, I knew what I needed to do. I needed to brainstorm exactly what movement I want to happen, what forward movement do I want to see in this story. My brainstorms actually look like a bullet list littered with lines, arrows, curvy brackets, question marks, exclamation points, clouds and boxes circling words or terms, etc.

I'm almost ready to restart chapter two. It's been almost two weeks since I started this re-write. Are we seeing the problem with pacing? At this rate, it will take me two years to finish this second draft. This may drive me crazy. All I can do is hope something gives and I can get cracking that WIP instead of being stuck untangling the mess it's become.