August 30th – 734,718

I’m trying to decide if I have a love/hate relationship with this manuscript or not. 37k in and I can’t work out where the characters are taking me. I know what the black moment is going to be, and I know what the final HEA point is going to be but I can’t see how to get from here via that to there. (I hope that made sense to you, because it did to me!)

In the story timeline it’s currently Sunday afternoon, and the final moment of the book, in fact I’ve pretty much got the last line written in my head (and no, I don’t mean “The End”), is going to come Tuesday evening, so I’m trying to work where to throw the relationship hand-grenade into the mix, and exactly where.

Timing in this kind of story is everything, and my sense of timing is off on this one – hence the love/hate relationship thing. In the story the explosion has to happen either Monday night or Tuesday afternoon on the phone while he’s at work. Since Tuesday is their anniversary and they’ve got friends over for dinner, him coming home from work to find her mad as all hell would make a nice black moment, but it’s kinda clichéd. If, however, my explosion goes off Monday night, the issue becomes how do the characters get through Tuesday in a manner that enables suspension of disbelief.

Damn, I hate it when it’s a timing issue in a manuscript – the other things are easy fixes by comparison – apart from total switch of point of view, of course, been there, done that one.

Ah well, maybe I’ll sleep tonight and wake up with the answer implanted in my conscious mind by the good old reliable sub-conscious – or maybe not. Still 3,210 words today, and I’m more than 26 days ahead of schedule.