Right now, I’m staring down the barrel of a chapter 3 re-write. The second half of the chapter is generally pretty good, just needs polishing and copy editing. The first half, however, has major plausibility issues. Well, not major, but they’re annoying enough that they won’t work. It’s not so bad it can’t be fixed, and once I do it’s going to be a whole lot better. I just haven’t got the foggiest idea on how to go about dealing with it. Part of the issue is that the circumstances of the scene have been in place for such a long time, I’m having a hard time visualizing a different, better situation.

The more I think about it, the stupider it seems that I can’t just tweak it. As much as I want to rubber-duck* this, and have a solution, I’m still struggling to come up with one. Perhaps the solution is to try a few different things and see where they eventually lead me. I mean, I’m really only talking about twenty-five hundred words. So, with that in mind, I’m going to start by changing the situation to be impossibly difficult for the protagonist (and writer), then revise until it works. With any luck, I will have fixed the problem.

* For an explanation of rubber-ducking see my about page