Chapter 3 of In Time has been a slog. It’s been a slog because, fundamentally, I kne/ow that something was very wrong with it. It was too slow, too drunk, and too unclear in getting Elliot acting on his primary motivations.
I got fantasticallyamazinglywonderful feedback from my critique group on chapter 1, and the changes that are needed there–which are definitely needed and are spot on–left me with the opportunity to really reconsider chapter 3.
So, with a lot of help from M, I did.
And it feels like the new direction is right, and while there is a strong sense of sadness and dread on undoing months and months of work (some of it is reusable, much not), there was, this morning, for the first time in a long time, a sense of excitement when I sat down to write, a sense of something emerging that was compelling to me as a writer, something that I wanted to follow along to see what happened.
That’s encouraging.