Something's been eating at me. No, not literally. All my pieces and parts are intact. I mean figuratively, and it's because of my outline for Neutral Ground.
It just wasn't quite right.
The great thing about outlines, though, is that they're not whole novels. If I was a pantser, then I'd be looking at major revisions involving thousands of words. But with an outline, preforming major surgery on a novel's structure is fairly easy. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and a thousand words of outline is worth ten thousand of novel.
So I rearranged a few things. Instead of having Character A and B have a conversation in Setting X, I now have Characters A and C having that conversation much later and in Setting Y. And I may trim down some other scenes, too, that I fear may bog the story down in the beginning.
For me, this is the "creative" part. This is where I do my thinking. Once I start the draft, I don't want to think anymore. I want the actual writing to be more like filling in the blanks. The prose shows what the outline tells, more or less.
I don't when I'll start this draft. All I know is I won't start it until the outline is right.
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