I Blame the Delay on Environmental Factors

Nah, I'm not talking about snow. The torrential rains and temporary 60-degree weather (that dropped 30 degrees by nightfall) was bad enough. I cannot think of any other reason why I spent the past two days feeling, in turn, restless and lethargic.

Trying to churn out 90 pages in two days is a monumental task, for me. Needless to say, it didn't happen. I did, however, manage to outline the remaining scenes for the plot. So I know what's going to happen now -- thank you, Black, for finally bothering to share that with me -- and all that remains is to flesh them out. And then maybe go back through and plug in a few scenes that got cut into other areas of the story. Because only two sex scenes? Damn that's sparse. No worries, that Steaming Couch Scene made the cut.

Although I may need to fluff one in at the end, because as things stand the story will end without Black's gender being much clearer than mud, really. I think.

Might need some beta feedback on that. It's entirely possible that I'm not giving the reader/audience enough credit. It's not really necessary to thwack the reader over the head with the finer points -- I forget that sometimes, when I'm in the throes of writing and plotting and trying to untwist the hopeless mess of a story into something that resembles coherency.

I'm planning on making a dent in the climactic scenes over the next couple days, but I doubt the ms will reach its conclusion before Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, when I've a couple days off to slam-dunk it.

So I'm a week behind schedule. *cringes* I really must learn to OUTLINE my stories in advance. Instead of waiting until I reach the point of "holy shit there's no way this is going to work" before I bother. Heh.

Must say, though, that my plot flailing was partially cured by a few suggestions from that Burn Notice article Aleks wrote.  Make things bad, then make them worse, and stir vigorously.  And make your antagonists competent. And make your protagonist work to overcome them.

What I like, though, is the hero who never succeeds singlehandedly. Theoretically he's capable of it, but in the end he owes at least partial credit for overcoming the obstacles to someone else. Not dependency so much as teamwork. Because few things in life are attained in solitary effort.

I mean, yeah this is a solo project -- but I haven't been doing it alone. Far from it...