My Mid-Book Crisis
I'm hitting a wall with Weather Vane Island. I'm on chapter 8 and, despite the grouping of many tiny adventures, a question still lingers: "When is the story going to begin?" Looking at the manuscript, I feel dejected. I can only shrug my shoulders and answer: "I don't know." This is familiar territory for me. I ran into it in the first draft of Weather Vane Island and my answer was to just add whatever crazy thing came to mind, eventually kneading the dough of my story into something ineditable. I ran into the same wall in my first draft of Nothing Extraordinary (a work in progress) and my solution then was to charge forward, keeping faith in my outline until my writing became a bland, programmed march to the end. I've also run into the same wall with other stories that I put into drawers, unfinished, because I didn't have the wherewithall to push through. I've come to term this a "Mid-Book Crisis." For whatever reason, af...