Turns out Harriet was a smart woman.
As you may recall from my last post I was having a bit of a panic attack having decided that my second book was a disaster and that I might need to start from scratch. In my post I outlined the steps I took to ward off that panic and come at the problem from a more rational and effective position. http://dumpygrace.blogspot.ca/2013/10/do-not-panic.html
I mentioned that things were improving but I thought you might like to know how I fared.
I am thrilled to report that my efforts paid off. It took a good forty eight hours or so of focussed analysis to determine what was wrong and how to fix it. I had a few false starts but have settled on the fix that works.
1) Knowing that my villains were not in the least bit menacing, I did a complete 180 and decided to go with a more classic scenario. Very bad guy and his victimized wife. So far, so good. Both of them are much easier to bring to life and the story crackles because of it.
2) I was spending too much time on secondary characters and not enough with my protagonist, Signy Shepherd. Once I recognized that fact, it was a very easy fix.
And that's about it. Weird, huh? All that angst, and it came down to a couple of relatively easy solutions.
I'm now half way through my rough plot revisions and I THINK the story is moving along smoothly and the characters are popping from the page. I will have to write a couple of more action scenes and delete a couple of extraneous character driven scenes but all that is very doable.
Lesson Learned Harriet! The tide has turned and with any luck, it will be smooth sailing from now on.
CHEERS!
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