6 September 2002

I'm trying to figure out if I'm lazy, or willfully stupid sometimes, or what.

I had this list of things to do this week. Among them, I'd wanted to write this trial scene for the novel. I got about two thousand words out, on Tuesday, and then ran into a brick wall.

How was I going to expose the real bad guy? I spent half of Wednesday trying to come up with an answer that wasn't absurdly cheesy and cliché (a henchman is suddenly overcome with remorse and decides to repent and confess), or entirely deus ex machina (evidence that has somehow evaded the prior investigation suddenly falls into Our Heroes' hands). No good.

Thursday morning, I thought, I'll lay out the bad guy's plot, from beginning to end, and then look for holes in it. That'll show me the path to take. So I laid out the bad guy's plot, from beginning to end.

I couldn't find any holes in it. Of course you can't find any holes, I thought, you made up the plot! So I laid it out for K.T., in the hopes that she could find some holes to exploit.

She did find one, but we couldn't figure out how to exploit it without falling into a Trap of Cheese.

And then she got dragged off to play EQ, so I don't know if she figured out any more ideas yesterday. I wrote down all of the ideas I could come up with, cheese and all, and e-mailed them to her; I'm hoping one of them will spark another, better idea.

So, though I spent several hours working, I didn't ever actually get anything written. It didn't actually occur to me until right before I was going to bed last night that I could have spent some time on the other two writing tasks I'd set myself. Duh.

So hopefully I'll get some writing done today and this weekend, one way or another.

--Liz