Friday, April 6, 2012

To Sleep, Perchance To Plot

I'm back at work on The Shade Of The Moon, having written eight pages yesterday, and only intending to delete five of them.

Some scenes seem to make a lot of sense when you create them, and then make no sense at all when you write them.

Sadly, it turns out I do my best plotting while I'm lying still in bed, and even more sadly, since I do my writing in the afternoon, my lying still in bed time seems to come at night, when I'd much rather be sleeping. I mean a whole lot much rather.

Last night/this morning (all one giant blur of sleeplessness), I came up with a terrific confrontation scene. I mean super duper incredibly powerful terrific confrontation scene. It came from a scene I already intended to write, and at 2 in the morning, it made sense to make that original scene bigger and more powerful and, well, more confrontational.

Alas, at 6:45 this morning, when Scooter woke me, I realized the fabulous confrontational scene wouldn't fit in the scene I intended to plop it into. So now, I have this amazing confrontational scene, and no place to put it. And I lost several highly desirable hours of sleep to boot.

Somewhere around 1:30 AM, I came up with a fun poll to put up on the ever more crowded right side of the blog. I decided that I should wait until this morning, just in case the poll idea might prove really really dumb once the sun was shining.

But when has dumb ever stopped me? Lookit- there's the poll.->

I hope it entertains you during this holiday season. And I hope while I clean my apartment (next on my to do list), I can figure out where my fabulous confrontation scene can go.

Happy holidays everyone!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you haven't already deleted the confrontation scene, don't. I know, I'm not published -- yet -- but I hang onto some of my discards and see if any can be reworked for another scene. Stupid, I know, but my late mother was a hoarder, so I come by it honestly.

By any chance, did the confrontation scene involve Miranda and Mom? About the baby names? It'd be interesting to know.

Happy Passover!

Anonymous Santa Fe

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Hallo Anonymous Santa Fe-

Sometimes I keep what I dump, but in this case, the scene might just as well vanish. It wasn't important, and it would hurt the book. So out it goes.

And no, the confrontation scene won't involve Miranda and Mom, and has nothing to do with baby names!

Anonymous said...

Happy Passover anyway!

Anonymous Santa Fe

Fear Death By Water said...

i all of them. love me some mayhem.

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Hi Fear Death By Water-

It's that mayhem loving side of you I find so appealing!

Anonymous said...

I remember reading a passage from WWLIN about Miranda's reaction to the planet no longer being in total darkness because of the moon. Could that be spinned into a psychological disorder affecting much of the population? Sufferers from this "moon syndrome" wouldn't be able to sleep unless they had total darkness around them -- sleep masks, covering all windows with blankets or sleeping in rooms with no windows altogether. Does that sound like a possibility? Not for Jon, of course, but other members of the family -- like Miranda and Mom?

Anonymous Santa Fe

Susan Beth Pfeffer said...

Good morning Anonymous Santa Fe-

Thank you for your suggestion, but I'm not lacking in plot possibilities right now.

I pretty much have the material under control, and now it's more a question of what small changes might I make. I'm certainly not looking for big ones!

Anonymous said...

I'd only meant for Jon to maybe mention it in passing -- no big deal for him.

Anonymous Santa Fe

CRibbits said...

yay! I just checked back into your blog and learned you ARE going forward with book 4. So happy. I missed the poll though. Can we romance it up? I think Miranda and Chris should meet, marry, and produce the new world order. Alex should be a priest. :)