Pantser's remorse

Hello again!

Sometimes I feel like I spend half my time on these blogs apologizing for delays (and yes, this is my way of saying I've run into more delays.) 

But why do I have so many delays? Well, this week, I thought I'd share a little bit of what's going on behind the scenes that's led to my latest delay. I don't know if this will be more educational, entertaining, or more like a rant... so strap in!

So, without any further ado, here's my post on Pantser's Remorse, also titled, "Why I'm always running behind schedule." 

Did you know that books have timelines? I know, shocking, right?

Okay, all sarcasm aside. This all started when I was working on my book, editing at a fair pace, and excited to be approaching the halfway mark of my WIP when I was struck by a sudden thought, 

"Oh, crap. I established a schedule for Emma in Book 1. 

I can't randomly forget to keep to it now, in Book 2!"

I have no idea how I'd forgotten about this up to this point, but there it is. So now, out of nowhere, I found myself rechecking my WIP for these "new" errors and tweaking the timeline of about 2-4 chapters of my book. 

As you can probably imagine, I was having a hard time balancing a few of my chapters with this new, resequenced timeline. Ultimately, I even went to my Alpha (mom) to see if she could help me figure out what to do with one, particularly challenging chapter. 

Unfortunately, in trying to help me, she (accidentally) uncovered yet another problem with the timeline, which resulted in another trip through the WIP.

All in all, this change only seemed to affect two chapters (at first glance.) And one of them only needed a slight tweak... but it completely ruined the other. Basically, every part of this chapter ended up being broken down, resequenced, and rewritten. 

In the process of fixing my troublesome chapter, I accidentally also upset the timeline of the next chapter, so I had to change that one as well. (Not to mention all the chapters that needed micro tweaks around this new timeline.)

So, yeah... I'm not starting Alpha edits yet, even though I thought I would be. Sorry about that, I really am doing my best to make sense of all this. The plus side of all of this is that the book is actually stronger for it, though I still feel like there must have been an easier way to strengthen the book without all this fuss.

Ah, life as a Pantser... at least it's never boring!

Have a great day, and keep writing!