Bass turd!!

I chatted with Scott the other night about our soon-to-be archnemesis: Book 2. It's been a frustrating process for both of us. We can work long distance, but it's so much easier if we can get together occassionally. When we do, the ideas fly, we can nail down plots and twists, and the process is pure bliss. However, right about now, I'm ready to swear off collaboration altogether. If it's this frustrating with my second best friend ever, how much harder would it be with someone I don't know as well?

Anyway, once we got past the gritching and squabbling and excuse making , we started to toss ideas around. I could feel the magic starting when he told me a little tidbit about one of our original characters that I didn't know, and it started to flow just like in the old days. It's amazing what happens when I beg for just one character to maim and kill. I volunteered to work on that part of it. Yesterday I sat down and wrote more than 4,000 new words. My rough estimate is that I paused to think and re-read approximately every 700 words and walked away once for lunch. I left myself in a good spot to pick it up tonight.

I found myself, as I often do, thinking ahead to what happens next as I was going to sleep last night. I was happy with the direction of the story, but then it hit me in the gut: our new, wonderful, delicious plot twist is going to cause me to rewrite more of Rogue Pawn. I'm already rewriting the last quarter (almost) because Scott didn't like the ending that he'd suggested, and now, because a particular character is also in Rogue Pawn I'm going to have to axe some scenes or completely rewrite them because she would not do in Rogue Pawn what she does because she's with somebody else at the same time in Book 2! Forking asprin munching bass turds! (Sorry, creative non-swearing was a must when my kids were toddlers.)

Confused yet? Let me 'splain. Rogue Pawn is a spin-off of Book 2. I know, it doesn't make sense to write the spin-off first, but it didn't start as the book it finished as. When I started, it made sense, but then it went a different way and I couldn't stop writing just because of that. It's about one of the new main characters, which made things easier in some ways when writing Book 2. I just took the major plot points and rewrote them in someone else's point of view. It was more editing than writing, but it got us a lot of new material quickly. My plan was to rewrite the ending (when we figured it out what it was) and then give it a quick polish so I could start agent hunting. That's going to be difficult now. Stupid might be a better word.

The new plan, as of this morning, is to finish and polish one of my Christian fiction pieces and start agent hunting. I'm fairly certain I saw some in my guide that take both Christian fiction and science fiction. Since I'm leaning more toward the Christian fiction these days, that's probably smarter. I hope. If nothing else it will keep me from flying to Dallas to strangle Scott.