A Novel Ending

A funny thing happened on the way to the ending…

I’m loving my new being-an-author career, despite my inability to earn a living from it. (Yet?)

One of the things I enjoy is that each book feels like it comes with its own unique challenges.  I hope that means I’m learning as I go along.

For the current book in my Leeth Dossier series, Lost Girl (#5), there were two challenges.  The first was my feeling that on the subject of plot, I fly too much by the seat of my pants, so the whole journey from start to end is like a billy-cart racing downhill out of control.  Exhilarating, but also nerve-wracking.

Looking back through my revision control files, I deduce I started writing the Lost Girl segment of the story back in Apr/May 2009.  I wrote a chunk more in Jan 2015 before posting the chapters for review on the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror over a few months and receiving valuable feedback.  By Oct 2015 it had grown to about 25,000 words.  I think that was when I set it aside to devote all my energy to completing the earlier books in the series.

That took five years.

So, for book #5 I was starting with a broad idea of the story, 25,000 words of draft, and thanks to a discussion with Jon Marshall one night, a good feeling for the theme of the novel.  I also wanted to try a hybrid approach to plotting.

Pantser or Plotter?

I love the organic surprises and creativity that comes from flying by the seat of my pants, but at the same time, having watched his video Misconceptions About Rewriting, and from my own experience in algorithmic development, I deeply understood the value in at least high-level planning.  So I hoped that creating the bones of a plot might work well, since it would only be a sketchy outline and thus pretty painless to change it if the story started going in a different direction.

I started reading John Truby’s “The Anatomy of Story” in early 2019, reaching a quarter of the way through before getting distracted. (I see there’s also a video interview here.)  The book and advice is fine, but it wasn’t sparking any flames for me and I set it aside.  (I do intend to return to it and finish reading it though.)

I’d downloaded a free writing book from Daniel David Wallace titled “How to Write Better Sentences”, and watched some of his videos, and liked them, so when he offered a course on his character-driven plotting course in December 2019 I decided to sign up for it.  I did that diligently from mid Dec 2019 to end of Jan 2020, and was very happy with the outcome.  I had lots of ideas for how the plot would unfold, all of course driven by the characters, which is how I have to write.

The problem that remained was that I only had a satisfying end.  I think you also need the ending to be unpredictable.  I (still) don’t know how you plan that.  For me it’s just happened by luck or inspiration, and I was still in the same position, lacking that final piece of the puzzle.

As I’ve written on several occasions now, I’ve really come to trust Unconscious Thought Theory.  It’s an excellent way to use the full power of your mind and surprise yourself.  So I carried on writing, always with the lightly-plotted ending in mind, and things flowed along pretty well.

Now, because the World Science Fiction Convention was to be held in New Zealand in July/Aug 2020, a place I’d wanted to visit and a convention that seems exciting, I planned to attend.  I booked my travel and accommodation, with the goal of publishing the book late July and maybe even launching it or promoting it in some way at the WorldCon.  To do that I needed to send the MS to Dave at ThEditors.com by E/April.

So I was trying hard to meet a deadline of E/March to have a good 1^st draft of the MS.  I was extremely lucky to be little affected by the unprecedented Australian bushfires of 2019, but no one could remain unmoved by those events - from the heroism of our fireys and communities ( (even this Aussie speculative fiction anthology put together for fire charities: Stories of Hope), to the jaw-dropping failures of our so-called political leader to actually lead.

There was also the ongoing drama of the Democratic run-up toward the 2020 US presidential election, which I had grown addicted to (since the US has an inordinate impact on world affairs, and I could see what a turning point the 2020 election could be, with luck).  Then of course, the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, making the insignificance of my own efforts even clearer.  Now, I may not be as stubborn as Leeth, but I am stubborn, so I carried on.

Like the period after the death of my wife Stella in Dec 2014, my writing sustained me and kept me positive. So for that reason as much as any I stuck to my plans.

Which brings me to the part of the story which most surprised me — and in the end delighted me.

How did it go in the end?

Approaching my deadline, I had set myself a (120,000) word count limit to try to hold myself to, to keep the book a manageable size for all concerned.  And as the days fell away and March 31 approached, it looked like I might just do it.  But when the days dropped from three to two to one and I arrived at the cusp of the ending, I’d run out of time and still didn’t know fully what the ending would be.

Partly this was just having confidence in my unconscious to pull a rabbit out of the hat; partly it was the belief that if I didn’t know what the ending would be, it might mean that when (if?) it did arrive it would also surprise a reader; and partly it was having faith in my characters.  I also had an interesting mix of actors there at the ending.  There was the potential to have… (counting…) seven major players in the scene at the end.  Unfortunately that meant there was a huge range of ways the ending could play out.

So I think there was a certain amount of choice-paralysis at work, although it’s also possible my unconscious was simply beavering away at the complex problem I’d set it.  Of course I was also worried I might not be able to pull it off at all.  Would the ending be good enough?  I didn’t want just an exciting one, I wanted it to have emotional depth too.  So the stakes felt high to me.

And still I couldn’t seem to make much progress.  Here’s how the last several days went:

March 29: Had reached the climactic scene — I mean, all the players were on stage together.
March 30: Wrote 3700 words of the scene.
March 31: Day off, visiting Mum.
April 1: (astute readers will see this is after E/Mar) Strangely blocked, until I forced myself to design the physical location. Then: +600 words.
April 2: Wrote 3,600 words and halfway through the “action” part of the ending.
April 3: Finished the “action” part (wrote 1000 words).
April 4: Still didn’t know how it would end. I simply considered each actor and let them do their thing. Various agendas in play, conflicting, and stage fully set and conducive to just letting the movie roll. Each one being clever and true to themselves, a dramatic race to the finish with real challenges and emotional drama. At the very end of the day (11:50pm), I felt delighted. My characters had thrilled me and moved me. I’d been biting my nails more than once, and in tears more than once. 5,100 words and the MS was basically complete.

I’ve never experienced anything like that last day.  My feeling was one of excitement and satisfaction.  I made some small additions while cooking dinner (9pm), and when I sat down with it I realised I didn’t want to watch any TV as I ate, I instead wanted to dwell on those final scenes, to savour and digest it all.  I suppose it felt a bit like I’d just stepped off an emotional roller-coaster!

I still have thirty one small gaps to fill or issues to check, and then lots of work to polish it up enough to be ready to send to my editor, so I can’t really relax much yet.  But the weight on my shoulders of finishing that critical 1^st draft, and perhaps as importantly, writing a ‘good’ ending, is over.  So a lot of unacknowledged stress has fallen away, and I must say I’m looking forward to the next few weeks.

I’ve written this because the experience felt really special, and I wanted to capture it. It was nothing like I’d had for the previous books.  Once again, I feel I learned a lot.  My fingers are crossed in the hope that readers will have the same opinion!

Overcoming Obstructions to Writing

(Photo by Travis Saylor from Pexels)

Just a quick post to share something small I learned about how my mind works when it comes to writing.  For the last week I’ve made no progress on Lost Girl (Leeth Dossier #5).  There were everyday tasks which I felt needed to be done (like coffee: harvest time won’t wait), but that wasn’t enough to explain it all.  Those tasks only took up the time and energy for a portion of each day.

I’ve written about the Unconscious Thought Theory several times now, and I know for certain it’s heavily involved in my own creative process.  (I strongly suspect it’s true for everyone, but I don’t know that.)  So I know a lot of the work happens in the unconscious.  I also noticed previously that I was blocked when my conscious plan for how a story would unfold didn’t agree with what was developing in my unconscious.  In hindsight, I felt my unconscious threw up obstacles to stop me heading down that wrong path I had consciously planned.

I also know the neuroscience says the unconscious parts of the brain have something like fifty ‘processing units’ running in parallel. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a finite number.

Anyway, what happened was that tonight I tackled a task that had been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now.  (Selecting and booking a hotel for the world SF convention next year in Wellington, New Zealand, to be precise.)  I felt some relief as soon as I’d done so.

What I realised later however was that when I started to think about the next scene in Lost Girl, my mind didn’t instantly shy away and offer up a distraction.  Then I recognised that mental shying away was something I’d learned to do a long time ago to protect myself from worry about a situation I had no control over.  At that point I finally put two and two together and realised my unconscious was trying to solve the hotel booking problem and didn’t want to spare time for book creation.  Each time I tried it distracted me in a non-creative direction.  Sneaky, wise unconscious!

So, if you’re finding yourself blocked, go looking for a cause and then tackle that.  There’s probably a lot of different things that could be the issue.  Two I’ve discovered are 1) your plan is wrong, and 2) you have something else that needs your unconscious attention first.  The unconscious is great at making patterns and weighing up combinations of possibilities, but it has limits!

Writing, Editing, Creating

I wasn't planning to write a blog article, but felt after yesterday I wanted to make some notes while the recent events were fresh in my mind. I'm not sure what this piece will be about, but I guess it's going to touch on creativity (also see The Creative Process and the Unconscious, Where Ideas Come From) and An update on Creativity and the Unconscious), blocks, editing, and book 4 progress.

Yesterday was one of those wonderful writing days that sometimes happen, so this is partly about what led up to that.

I haven't written any articles for a while because I feel I'm way behind schedule on where I wanted to be for this fourth book. I had felt pretty comfortable that I could have it ready about mid-2018, but that turned out to be wildly optimistic. I'll lay out the reasons why, and let you see what you think of them.

I think I started writing the MS in 1991, and completed that 1^st draft near the end of 1993. I just realised that might be a fun image to share… here's a photo of the MS.

I used mostly used sheets of paper that had been printed. In fact, on the left you can find a draft of a page from my wife Stella's PhD thesis on the Percy Folio.

In my first draft of the start of Leeth's story, it opened on the scene where Dr Harmon is in the office of the Mother Superior of the orphanage, looking for a suitable subject to adopt.

Anyway, the MS went through many stages — the next one being typing it up on the computer, in the troff/MM markup. I worked on it and polished and edited it, sending it off to little or no response to publishers, and then about ten years later realised the whole second half was full of story — but no plot. So I bit the bullet and cut it in half. Then it seemed a little short, and I still felt it was lacking something. The Godsson-Disten idea came from somewhere to fill the gap, and I developed that and wove it in to the story. At the end, the MS was back to its original, pre-halved size.

I still kept editing and polishing, improving my craft. I fed that whole MS, chapter by chapter, through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, and learned so much from the many very helpful reviews I received, and equally, from writing reviews of other writers' submissions there.

Learning your craft by writing a long novel is a hard way to do it — you need to fix stylistic errors through a much larger mass than a short story — but I rarely enjoy reading or writing short fiction. So I kept at it.

The point of this historical digression is to explain the first couple of special problems I faced with book 4. The first was that I hadn't touched (even read) this half of the original MS in about 15 years, so there was a reasonable amount of work just to apply what I'd learned in the meantime. A bigger problem was the lack of plot. Now, the large anti-emotion plot arc definitely helped, and tied nicely into what was already there — but even so, it needed more. There was also the fear that maybe the old MS simply might not be good enough? I had little idea what to expect when I sat down to read it again, but found myself pleasantly surprised: it was kind of nice, I felt. Leeth had grown and changed more, however, thanks to all the additional trials I'd put her through while developing the 1^st three books, so stretches had to be rewritten: what was there was more the Leeth you saw straight out of the Institute: no d'Artelle spirit confrontation, nothing with Disten, and, a really huge difference — no Marcie in her life.

Due to the need to write a short piece for my local writers' group, the Marrickville Writers Corner, I thought that one incident briefly passed over in the MS deserved some expansion: the heartbreaking Luiz assassination. And while writing that piece, while Leeth crept through the dark apartment in shock at what had just happened, she heard a creepy scratching coming from a drawer in Luiz's desk. I had no idea what was coming, just that it connected to Luiz's nasty past, but that led to the black dagger. That tiny seed germinated into the other major plot element for book 4.

The title came surprisingly easily: Violent Causes having several meanings, all of which were applicable for this book, so that was one element that I didn't have a big struggle with. But with all the things that needed addressing, and my desire to keep as much as I could of what was there, somehow even getting to the stage of the MS ready to send off to Dave at ThEditors.com) seemed harder. I'd arranged a slot, and as the deadline approached I found I was struggling to meet it. In the end I sent it off before I'd done my usual 2^nd polish, which was stupid. I'd told myself it would make it easier for me to cut things if I hadn't made over-polished them. Instead, it just made more work for poor Dave.

And when I received his detailed critique, he had some big issues with some of the early sections, and lots of the early chapters had a lot of small issues, too. (Oops: note to self: never skip the polishing!) After some very fruitful discussions back and forth, we got a handle on them and a plan for what I should adjust, and I carried on. And after a month of hard work, I was halfway through Dave's comments, and it was the end of July. Sigh.

The Marcie Problem

There was also one major extra piece of plot to work in, involving Marcie, and a key point in that was to be Marcie's inclusion into one scene. The problem was, that scene was kind of tightly scripted, dramatic, and I could see no way to work Marcie in without disrupting a sequence I'd been looking forward to making concrete, for at least fifteen years. In fact, I let this scene block my writing for at least a year, because I wanted to work it out so I could move on to the next piece of the story. This was long before I understood the role of the unconscious, and the simple trick of just writing it down, or skipping past the block. Instead, I'd sit down, and try to work out the scene in my head… and eventually fall asleep, and have used up all the time I'd set aside for writing, with visible results of zero.

Yet here I was, in 2018, with that scene looking and working like a dream — I think it would make a great piece in a movie — and now I needed to add Marcie, in a significant way. So I worked my way closer to this with, not exactly a growing fear, since I had confidence in UTT and my unconscious… but some trepidation, let's say.

And then on Monday I was at the brink: the next thing to do was what I had begun thinking of as The Marcie Problem. Tuesday I visited Mum, and saw the Equalizer 2 with her and a friend (hi Jacqui!), and then had afternoon tea and dinner with Mum, and watched an episode of The Avengers (courtesy of my brother Jonathan: B&W, John Steed and Honor Blackman as Dr Cathy King, not the Marvel Avengers), followed by the Hammer Horror film The Hound of the Baskervilles with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. (He seemed tall. I looked him up: he was: 1.96m, 6'5"!)

So, no writing on Tuesday. A whole day with ‘no progress'. But I wasn't too worried, since panic and fear are your enemies and I knew I was just giving my unconscious more time to come up with something good. And it's always a great day, visiting Mum; not to mention, relaxing and having a great meal to boot!

So, Wednesday arrives, and still no breakthrough. I could also tell I wasn't going to get it without a bit more positive action. And now we come to the nub of this article, and what drove me to write it. Because this time, I was more sensitive to what was going on in my own mind.

I remembered my own advice, of using pencil and paper to write stuff down so you're not wasting mental energy juggling ideas in your mind while trying to create new ones. So I took my little hand-made A6-sized notepad with its 4-leaf folded ‘pages' clipped to it, and my trusty propelling pencil. There are some nuances there: that style of pencil, using 2B leads, means your letters are crisp and sharp and the physical act is effortless; and the hand-sized pad means it's not flexing and flopping and you're fighting to support it. It just fits in your hand, you can lie back on the sofa, comfy and warm, and think, and write as ideas spring to mind.

All trying to make it as frictionless as possible when the ideas start flowing, you see?

But I still didn't have my idea. What I did have was some issues. So I started writing down stuff, and also thinking. Not rushing myself. Not stressing myself because I wasn't actually writing the story. Just trying to make the solution coalesce out of whatever soup of ideas was floating around in my head.

What started happening was somehow like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces of the picture didn't exist until I thought of them, and it wasn't two dimensional but three. The depth part is not especially important, but the time dimension was critical. I started with asking "How would Marcie plausibly end up in this scene?"

(By the way, I'm going to avoid talking about this in a way that gives any spoilers.)

Marcie's appearance needed to fit in with a major plot strand we'd agreed on, that involved Harmon. But how would he know? So, that meant Nelson gave him the info. And then Harmon needed to persuade someone else. And that was kind of interesting. And then Marcie herself needed to find out enough to wind up in the scene. So I wrote that little sequence, which worked very plausibly and nicely I felt, and did good things for the plot, tension, and pacing. I now had the background of my jigsaw, in the sense of both the chain of events that led up to it, and of course I already had the tightly-written scene where Marcie would appear.

Her appearance also had to be significant: it'd be pretty weak if she just waved from the sidelines. Dave had suggested Marcie's appearance should cause problems for Leeth, so that was kind of the ‘shape' of one piece. But I still didn't see how to fit her in.

Now, I'd had one thought, too, that disturbed me: "if Marcie is here, and X is here too, then Scary-Y could easily result, and blow everything to pieces." But at the same time, they say you're supposed to place your characters at risk. Yikes! So that was percolating in the back of my mind.

1^st Wednesday of the month was my MWC meetup, so I gave a quick polish to a scene I'd written the week before, and headed off for a very convivial and inspiring evening at Where's Nick. But I still didn't have the Marcie Problem solved.

Thursday arrived, and I kept feeling, for some reason, that Marcie wasn't going to go alone into this scene. I kept imagining someone with her. Which just complicated things, I felt, and I didn't want to do it. But in the end, since I was just lying on the sofa and not exactly making massive progress, I shrugged and decided to explore that. I asked myself "How does Marcie go from where she is, to here?" and just started imagining and jotting down some points. That all seemed pretty natural, and that would put Marcie at the required place, with this other person. And their reaction to my smoothly-scripted scene would definitely fit into new-Harmon-plot-item-Z, and advance that.

Then Scary-Y idea popped back in my head.

And I suddenly saw that Scary-Y could easily unfold after the smoothly-scripted scene. And with that, the problem was solved. The solution wasn't to force Marcie and her scene to meld into the existing scene: it was to let that follow on and develop from the scene!

This definitely felt a Eureka moment.

So then I just let the characters do their stuff. All the different parties with their own agendas, colliding and reacting. Let me just have a count ([Spoilers stripped out]): total of 9 parties. And so events flowed, and the drama climbed, and Leeth pushed back, and things started spiralling into dangerous areas. Maybe half of it was just in my head, the other half the occasional explanatory note written down so I wouldn't forget, or a line or two of dialogue. My notes occupied less than two A6 pages of my tiny writing, but I had enough to set off and I was eager to do so. I broke for dinner, but basically wrote from 4pm till 1am, a bit over 4k words. Sitting back, I summarised it in the flush of excitement as "very plausible, didn't change the existing scene much at all, upped the tension, fulfilled more expectations, causes more troubles down the track, and also has some laughs and more character development, all while advancing the plot!"

And it was time for bed. Looking at the page, I saw that I just needed to write the emotional aftermath, and in due course explore the repercussions of what happened. "I'll just write a little bit, to start that," I thought. Then sat back and saw it was 2am. I'd summarise that effort as taking what had happened to a whole new level. Leeth once again surprised me; but this time, herself, too, and even scared herself.

So I ended the day feeling high, extremely pleased with how it all worked out, and of course relieved to have the Marcie Problem solved and the pressure/stress removed.

I won't have a chance to do any editing or writing today, and I'll be taking a day off tomorrow, so no progress then, either. And I still have the other half of the MS critique to work through. But I'm feeling much more relaxed now. Hopefully, there should only be small bumps in the road ahead.

So, what's next? I hope to have my editing and polishing done by around the end of August. Hopefully I'll find a slot in Dave's schedule for a 2^nd round critique, and then with any luck a much easier job for both him and myself following that. Mirella is on the job with the cover design (again, with another idea mainly from Dave), and then I need to try to do some proper marketing for a month or two before releasing this one. So my guess is it will be ready near the end of the year.

Better late than half-baked.

An update on Creativity and the Unconscious

Why have I written this article now? Well, I've been reading and reviewing and doing small fixes to the half of the Leeth Dossier MS I'd set aside in… (goes away and checks some file dates…) yikes: it may have been 2008, 2004, or even 2003!

Anyway, back then, whenever it was, I'd just re-read a print out of the whole MS and been horrified to realise the whole 2^nd half had plenty of story and action — but no plot!

So I cut it in half; then realised the 1^st half was now a bit short and could also do with some strengthening, and came up with the Godsson/Disten plot. From that point I left the 2^nd half lying there, collecting electronic dust.

Anyway, with Books 1 — 3 published, it seemed sensible to go back to the half of the original MS I'd set aside, that followed straight on. So in October 2017 I think, I brushed off the dusty electrons and poured the MS into the word processor and started reading and reviewing. It went very slowly for a while, as I carefully polished as I went, before I realised that was silly: if I did decide I had to throw away some or all of it, such loving attention and effort would only make it harder for me to ‘kill my darlings'.

Excuses, excuses. So I just corrected minor stuff and made notes about issues that would require more effort to deal with. What with suddenly needing to prepare for Christmas — not to mention a years-overdue de-cluttering of my house — as well as allowing myself a holiday and time to spend on some other non-writing projects, progress was slow. I eventually finished my read-through on Feb 21^st, 2018.

At the end, I realised my assessment from 10-15 years earlier had been correct. On top of that I found other structural flaws, all of which I felt might be corrected through ‘the right' plot adjustments. I mean, the 1^st three books did lead smoothly to #4 (in particular by continuing a major plot arc from them), but overall I felt the plot was weak, with several strands that felt disconnected. It also had pacing problems too, I thought.

Overall though I still liked it, and despite the flaws, felt this could be knocked into a pretty nice shape. In particular, my gut was telling me that the right modifications to the plot would fix most of the issues I saw.

UTT to the rescue. So, with the need for some creative thinking, and having had good success with the Unconscious Thought Theory in the past (see my older blog article: Where Ideas Come From), I turned to it again.

For the UTT, the first step is to steep your rational mind in all the facts. That was what I'd just accomplished by re-reading the old MS.

But the subconscious is hungry for relevant ideas, so as different thoughts about the story and plot occurred to me — during the embarrassingly long period I spent re-reading the MS — I'd made notes I could refer to later.

Write stuff down. That's a key point: don't rely on your memory. If you don't record the ideas, you'll waste mental energy remembering them or worrying about them. Just write them down instead so you can re-read them when you find yourself in a hole.

Clear the decks of clutter. For the intense parts of the creative thinking process — the parts where you make the act of creation your top priority and give yourself time exclusively for that — you need clear mental space for a problem requiring a creative solution.

So because you need to some clear mental space, write down the problem and all the issues you can think of: like constraints, goals, characters involved, what's at stake… etc. etc. — everything you need to take into account. If you think of more problems, simply note them down as you think of them. These are all grist for your unconscious mill.

Don't get daunted. The funny thing is, that although the number of problems might look scary, each issue is just another piece of the puzzle. In a way, it adds to the richness of the solution; it adds to the stuff your unconscious can use to create an arrangement that makes them all fit.

Give yourself space. Get rid of distractions as far as you can: set them aside and give yourself time. Do this as often as you need to, in each attempt to solve the problem or come up with the needed idea(s). In other words: you can solve these problems a little bit at a time.

Try and try again. You don't need to solve the problem in a single session: you can decide, "Hmm, this might help", or "That might be part of the answer" — so, note those ideas down, too. Sometimes the solution will turn out to be a jigsaw that needs to be assembled. Sooner or later though you'll probably start sensing the big picture: and then the pieces of the jigsaw will start appearing in short order.

Trust your gut. Your gut will often tell you "This idea feels right" — trust it. Think about it, and around it. ‘Your gut' is your Unconscious talking to you. Don't ignore it!

Don't doubt yourself. At this stage, where you're not sure how much of the MS should remain for the final book (since it depends on how big a plot change or other correction is), it can be scary. You could easily spend time thinking about worst case scenarios — like tossing the whole MS! — instead of trusting your gut instincts and the hard work you put in.

Focus on what needs to be cut or added to turn your rough diamond into a fascinating piece of jewellery. At this point, negative thoughts are just distractions. So treat them like everything else: boil them down to their essence and add them to the list of Problems To Be Solved by your creative thinking.

Recording ideas and thinking. For me in this process of creation, some of the time I'll do parts of it on the computer. I'll type up notes, grouping related ideas near each other so I'll tend to reread them all when I revisit one; I'll draw up little timelines (maybe with gaps and question marks: "How does the Department discover this?" or "How do the bad guys learn that?"); I'll sometimes make mindmaps so the connections are graphical and not just linear/textual — and I'll include the holes and question marks, and maybe even colour-code stuff.

But some of the thinking I'll do on paper with pencil, lying down on the sofa. Because for some of it, the computer becomes a distraction. But the pencil and paper is important, because as soon as I have even part of an idea, I can write it down to free up my attention from remembering stuff so I can concentrate on creating stuff.

My review/read-through: While I had been (too slowly!) doing my read-through/review, I'd been:

• Making notes of ideas that might help;
• For my local writers' group (the Marrickville Writers' Corner — hi everyone!) I'd also written a few pieces that I felt might fit into Book 4 (Violent Causes), or might just be background events not to be included;
• Making notes of problems;
• Forming my overall semi-objective assessment of the MS as a whole.

So I used all these things, plus I re-read my quite large file of random ideas and notes, and the fresh ideas I'd had over the last few months. Lo and behold: a couple of months earlier I'd had a key idea which fitted very well with what I needed! It still wasn't quite right, but it felt like it could form the backbone of the plot strengthening, and so it was back to the Unconscious Thought Theory.

There you have it. With all that fresh in my mind, I thought I'd capture some of the process and get off my backside and write this combined UTT update and status report.

Ah… I suppose that means I should probably write a little status report, shouldn't I? Well, the MS now has 90k words, which at this stage I think I'll be keeping. I'm not sure how many extra scenes I need, or how much editing is needed to fix the other issues I've identified, but my feeling is that it might need as little as 10k words of new scenes (maybe 20k?). So I think it won't be too much longer before I can start trying to book an editing time-slot with Dave at ThEditors.com! I should know in a week or two.