Spent four hours today with a gal I've been mentoring (or playing Literary Midwife, whichever you want to call it) mostly talking about plotting.  Since plotting is what I've been dealing with lately in this edit, it's always useful for me to try to explain it to somebody else.  While we were indeed talking about her books, making myself explain the concepts made things more solid for me.

After we got done, and I got other stuff out of the way, I went over Jack Bickham's "Scene and Structure" book, because I needed to look his explanations over again to redraw the illustration I made for the concepts in the book.  I think I've puzzled that out, and tomorrow if I get a minute I'll redraw it, which I think will really help me.

But as for chapter 6... well... I really should have known better.  **sigh**  Nothing about this edit has been easy so far.

There's no change in the 1st scene of the chapter and no change in the 2nd scene of the chapter.  That makes a total of four scenes in a row with no change.  Stupid me.  I KNOW better.  **grumble, grumble**

So... while not sleeping a couple hours ago, I figured out a change for the 1st scene of this chapter, which plays in amazingly well for a scene about 7 or 8 chapters from now when I had a character showing up for basically no reason... now there is a reason for her to show up... cool!

I'm still not sleeping, obviously, since I'm doing this instead of sleeping, but I haven't yet figured out the change for the 2nd scene of the chapter.  I don't want to ditch the scene since it really is a cool scene and necessary for several other reasons, but I need to make it have some plot significance... oh joy.

Hopefully the answer will come to me tonight, or tomorrow during our trip to the Ren. Faire since I really don't have the time to spend another blasted week battling this chapter.

Jeez! At this rate it feels like I'm never going to get this book done.  And I really hate it when me being damn-stupid in the first place is causing me so many problems.

Live-and-learn, and all that.

I guess I can say that the good thing coming out of this is that I really have a very clear picture of what signifies a "change" in a scene, and by tomorrow I should have a picture that shows it.  Which is always cool... having pictures to explain a concept to people is a great thing, but damnit! I just want to get this blasted book done!