The puzzle pieces fit!

I went back to work today. No more vacation. =(

I did a lot of writing over vacation, and I ended up nixing a lot of it too. In fact, I completely erased two entire scenes from the manuscript. I had struggled with making these scenes coherent and making them fit, but I found that they were just too draggy and not very interesting. I was upset, but as soon as I deleted them, I found that I had a whole new flood of ideas to fill in those blank pages.

Which is why I am happy to announce that the first two chapters are almost done. =D And when I say almost done, I mean that they are almost done. Polished. Once I finish polishing them, I won't have to touch them or rearrange them or change them again (until a few months later when I pull this manuscript back out to go over it before sending it off). I am just really excited about how these two chapters have evolved. I feel so much more creative energy now that I was able to rid myself of the parts of the manuscript that were weighting it down unnecessarily.

I even introduced a new character in the first chapter who I am already loving. I had so much trouble figuring out where I would sequence everything. I don't plan my writing out at all--I just write. I don't spend months figuring out a time line and an outline (I tried that once--it did not work). I just go with it. This new character creation was not planned. It just happened. This means that I tend to have trouble sequencing things, because I write them in parts, rather than in order. Nixing those two scenes really really really helped all the puzzle pieces fall nicely into place.

I was just so excited about it that I had to put it on the blog. Yay me!