Ah ha!

I have continued to rewrite chapter one of my Monkey Man sequel over and over…I don’t even know how many times I’ve rewritten it, but I’ve saved seven different versions (and each of those seven versions was rewritten MANY times before I abandoned the file and started again). I will say it’s been getting better…I actually found T.J.’s voice last week — that helped a lot! And I finally got to the point where the first half of the chapter was pretty good and the second half of the chapter was pretty good…even the transition between the two wasn’t bad…but something still wasn’t working. Which was why I continued to start over.

Then it hit me! I’m trying to do too much with this chapter…I’ve introduced too many ideas and the reader doesn’t know which one is the most important. In other words, the chapter lacks focus. What I need to do is break this chapter into two chapters and then expand each one. Which shouldn’t be too hard.

Onward!