I figure it's better if I write these down, then when I get stuck again I can go back through my archives and pick the one that fits... oh, yeah, gotta learn That lesson again.

Anyway... took the kids to school and went back to bed, which is typical after having them for a four-day weekend. And in one of those sort of sleeping but not quite phases, I was thinking about my book I'm editing and gnawing on the "what's missing" bone: I know something is seriously missing in some scenes whereas others just glow, but I don't know what it is, and how hard a question it is when it's such a stupidly broad symptom to begin with... something's missing.

Then I finally combined the symptom with a blog entry I read this morning while I was waiting for the kids to get ready for school... and duh!

In the scenes that glow... do I love what I wrote? Yeah, I do, and a fair amount of it I don't believe I wrote. Okay... In the scenes that don't work, do I love what I wrote? Nooo... duh...

Ah! Then simple solution! Change the scenes that don't work so that I love them.

Excuse me?!?! If it was that simple wouldn't I have done it already? (No nasty comments.)

Then... I think of the first line of the story... not explosively exciting, but completely in character for the person and place... okay that line's fine. And I think of the second line... ooohhh something's off. But if I changed 'pulled' to 'snatched'... ah! that changes the whole feeling of the paragraph, and I love it.

Okay... we're back to I'm a moron...

If I don't love the individual sentences, there isn't any way I can love the scene.

Yeah, it's going to take a while, but it's fixable.