Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Oh the Humanity!

Total word count today: 1
And that was the word chapter at the top of a new page.

AAACK! (and not in the good, "I got partials requests", Jaekaebee kind of way!)

My three-act book has four parts (yeah.... that's the mathematically challenged side of me coming through). The first three parts are done. I arrived today at the fourth, and I suddenly lost my way. The direction I was taking hit a road block and I started rethinking the entire end of the book. And the politics of it all.

The problem? The medical salvation, the miracle that saves Ashley, is a stem cell clinical trial. Adult stem cell. And there isn't a lot of conflict there. Few people really know what it is, mostly because few people oppose it. It doesn't involve any embryos; it involves very few risks to the patient; it's highly successful. There are no laws against it.

The fact that it is adult stem cell is critical for the story. So where lies the resulting conflict?

Thus the stall.

I'm researching more, rethinking the climax of the book as well as some of the lead-up conflicts. I'm pondering. I'm mulling. I think I'll go to bed and see if the answer comes to me in a dream.

And here I was cruising so nicely.

3 comments:

  1. Don't push it. Take it at the pace you need to.

    And look at it this way: 1 is better than 0!

    YOU GO! :)

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  2. Oh Heidi, I've done that SO MANY TIMES with this damn book of mine!!!

    and JKB nailed it. Sometimes I just had to tell myself that at least I didn't do zero words. (Yeah sometimes I only did zero. Shhhh.)

    You're doing so great. Give your mind time to work through it and I do believe it will come to you!

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  3. Thanks, both. Plowing ahead was great for about 25,000 words, but I'm just stalled. I tried to keep going today, but even so I wrote myself into another corner.

    Sigh.

    I'm so frustrated because I just want to write!!!

    ReplyDelete