Everything is NOT Great

Yesterday I wrote about how I'd fallen into the trap of thinking my entire manuscript was great. Well, I've now managed to free myself from the trap.

Things were going along swimmingly, until I ran into a cascade of scenes that confused even me, and I'm the one who wrote them. "Confusing" is probably the wrong word; "schizophrenic" is more like it. While I admit to having a glass of wine or two while I was editing these passages, it wasn't the wine that made me dizzy. Don't get me wrong; the scenes I wrote are valid (which isn't exactly a term that's ever used for novels); what I mean is, they're a logical progression of the plot. But, oh my. One minute the main character's here, then she's over there. Then there's talking and talking and talking ~ Who's she talking to now? I forget.

It's all just too much. I still haven't tallied my word count, but I can tell this thing is LONG. I was so happy as I was writing it, discovering that I could write a fat manuscript, which had always been a struggle for me. I fully admit that with my first three novels, I padded. I had to; they were coming up too short. (Spoiler Alert: Padding makes a novel worse, not better.)

That hopeless feeling is starting to creep in. I'm not sure I can fix this. Maybe if I take a deep breath and think, I can figure a way out of the morass. Maybe. 

Perhaps I had too many ideas when I was writing the story. Too many what if's. At the time, I patted myself on the back for that, but in hindsight, I was obviously nuts. 

The problems, as I see them:

1. The locations keep changing. She's in her apartment, then she's working at the club, then she's in the recording studio, then back to her apartment, then back to the club. Rinse, repeat. By now, I've forgotten where she is at any given time.

2. Too much talking! My God, the whole thing has suddenly turned into a gabfest. Her former A&R guy, who she's now hired as the producer for her band's album, has lots of inside information to share about her tenure with the record label, but not only that; he's got wisdom, lots of it, and he doesn't hesitate to impart it. Great, I guess, but not really. It becomes tedious. She and he have a whole long conversation at the airport while he's waiting for his flight home, and while I found their dialogue eye-opening at the time, now when I read it, I think, just stop talking already! Get on the damn plane!

3. Competing emotions. Emotionally, Leah is all over the place. It's like a roller coaster ride without the "fun" part. She spends a great deal of her time being sad; morose. Why hasn't her mentor called her back? Why doesn't the mentor want to be friends anymore? Why can't she reunite with the guy she's hopelessly in love with? Everybody wants her to record the song she wrote about him, but she just...can't. 

The whole thing is a huge bummer. But that's just half of her emotional state. At times she's excited, or kidding around, or contemplative, or...

4. Details that I found interesting when I wrote them now read as simply irritating. Does anyone really care how she and her band managed to convert a motel room into a recording studio?

These four are just an encapsulation of the story's many problems. Then, to make things worse, Microsoft Word's apparently chronic issue popped up again. I've been pasting one chapter at a time from the draft onto a new document and editing from that, but suddenly Word has begun whiting out sections of the pasted text. So I'll be reading along and suddenly there's a half page of nothing. And it's uncorrectable. I tried highlighting the blank section and changing it to a different font color; that doesn't work, apparently because there's no text there to change. I've tried copying again from the manuscript and re-pasting it, but the problem persists. I've tried closing out of Word completely and even rebooting my PC to see if the document magically corrects itself. Nope. By that time, I was so frustrated with both my writing and with Word, I just went to bed.

I don't know what I'm going to do with the story. At this point, I just want to forget about it. On the plus side, I have lots and lots of words. The downside is, most of those words suck. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to rip the thing apart and try to piece it back together in a way that makes it all work. I just don't know if I can do it.