What I did today…

I revised my “outline” (which is actually a 10-page list of whose POV each scene is told from and what the point of that scene is) so that it actually matches the manuscript. This will help me see the “shape” of the story as a whole and give me an idea of what needs to be cut, what needs to be expanded and what needs to be moved around.

I also transferred comments from each member of my writing group to one document to make it easier to work with – they didn’t have as many problems as I expected them to have, but then again, they haven’t seen the last 25 pages, either. Preteen read them last night and on the way to his piano lesson this afternoon, he asked, “so did you fix that ending yet?” I told him I was going back to the beginning again, so it would be a while before I worked on the ending.

Then he said, “well, if I had written comments on the last 25 pages, I might have written, ‘YOU CALL THIS AN ENDING?’ but that probably wouldn’t have been very polite.” No, not very polite…but not necessarily off the mark. Sigh…

Now personally, I didn’t think the last couple paragraphs were too bad…so I told Preteen to ignore the fact there are a couple of loose threads still hanging…pretend everything is all tied up…is the actual ending (i.e. the last couple paragraphs) really all that bad? He paused for a bit, then said, “well, it just doesn’t feel like a good ending.”

Grumble, grumble…