Mixing It In

Although I'm aware that my Second Chance reboot keeps going on and on, I've made the story complicated enough that it'll require a lot of words to resolve. I accept that.

I also cleared up a few troubling issues, one that I just discovered yesterday when I was penning another blog post. I think when we're writing, we get so excited by a plot twist that we skirt right past a hole that would smack a reader in the face. In my case, my main character had finally escaped the Iowa snowstorm with her three-person crew and she stopped at a truck stop to fill her tank. That's when she learned that her credit card had been canceled. None of the other three had any money, so she wound up texting her cousin for a loan. No, it didn't occur to me that she had a bank account she could draw from! If that were true, however, it would have ruined everything that came after, and there was no way I was going to change those great scenes. 

It was an easy fix. I just went back to her first meeting with the man who would become her manager. Her new label had given her a ten thousand-dollar advance, and New Manager told her the common practice was to put that money in a trust and draw from it at regular intervals to pay living expenses. Sounded smart to MC. Well, guess what happened? Yep, he went ahead and made himself a trustee. And now she'd fired him, and now he's gotten his revenge. 

I also had to add to the scene in which she's canvasing her people for gas money. First she goes inside to the ATM, which is completely uncooperative. After three tries, it ultimately flashes, "Insufficient Funds" on the screen. And there you go. Done.

Whew! Now I could continue where I left off. MC has become far too comfortable hiding away inside the Luck Hotel. Her "one extra night" has turned into a week. She's exhausted every avenue for coming up with the money to get back to Nashville, and now she's stopped caring. I noted in a blog post yesterday that perhaps someone finally had to tell her to grow a pair, and what do you know? Someone did. Naturally, I took the long way to get to it. Her friend, the hotel manager, sits down with her and tells her about his troubles growing up in a small town and how all his classmates shunned him. And blah blah blah, he got an invitation to his high school reunion and almost tore it to pieces before he had second thoughts. This went on for a bit, but the bottom line was, face your fears.

Then he tells her that the owner of the Chance-It is having trouble finding competent help. She's appalled by his suggestion. How could she go back and face those people? She just couldn't do it.

But she does. The owner is unsympathetic. In fact, he thinks it's a publicity stunt for a documentary about where this new recording star got her start, and he's offended by being used that way. She blurts out that she's lost her contract, which is probably but not definitively true. (Her A&R guy has finally stopped his daily calls, which she has stubbornly refused to answer.) The saloon owner sizes her up, then finally acquiesces. He's not doing it for her; he's doing it for himself, but the outcome is the same. It was important to spell out that no one is welcoming her back with a big hug. They're granting her as much grace as she gave them by slipping out of town without a word. 

Smartly, I didn't go into MC's whole three-month experience in her conversation with the hotel manager. That would have been redundant and boring, since readers already know about it. I just wrote something like, "I told him the whole story."

I also managed to tie up a couple of loose ends that I'd written into the story and just let drop. One was that when she was complaining to her mentor about her record label, the mentor had said something about knowing "their game", but their conversation was interrupted before the game was explained. MC has now figured it out on her own. It's a bitter realization. She decides that in the long run, though, she'd rather be in breach of contract and spend the rest of her life paying the label back than continue living under its thumb.

So, she's going back to work at the Chance-It, albeit as a temp, and the first person she encounters will be her former bartender friend, who's not in a forgiving mood. He'll be nowhere near as accommodating as the bar owner. I do love writing scenes like that. 

And that won't be the end of it. The band she unceremoniously quit will be playing there as well. I haven't decided how that reunion will go. 

Yes, of course, the man who broke up with her will need to make an appearance eventually. She still hasn't read his letter, by the way, a sure sign that she's no longer pining for him. 

Lots and lots of knots yet to untangle. I'm relatively satisfied with how things are going, but my heavy use of dialogue concerns me. I think when writing in first person, that's pretty inevitable. She's either talking to someone or thinking a lot. Will readers hate it? Maybe. On the other hand, what readers? With no promotion, it's a safe bet no one's going to read it.

I used to be in a hurry to finish a story, but now I just go where it leads me. The important thing is, I'm enjoying it.