Meredith Mansfield, Author

I’ve been making good progress on the first draft of BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING.

And new ideas have been flowing. Some that needed to happen earlier, but were mainly just additions. And some that needed to come a bit later.

Now this first draft isn’t, quite, in parts. In the first place, I’d written this story–from the point of view of the wrong main character–a couple of years ago. I’ve completely re-imagined it since then. In the second place, I’ve struggled with the first third or so of the re-imagined story for months until I finally broke off the early relationship of the brothers into a prequel novella–BECOME: BROTHERS.

In the third place, I took a short break from this story after I published the novella and while I was working on taking many of my books and stories to wide distribution. So, now I’m going through what I already had to re-familiarize myself with it so I don’t end up with a bunch of consistency problems to weed out–and, of course, doing a few revisions as I go. And I’ve been getting new ideas that will make the story stronger.

Of course, the way my creative process works, at least some of this would have happened even if I were an outliner. I might have avoided trying to shoehorn the early story of the brothers into this book, but I would still be getting newer and better ideas as I write. That’s just how my muse works. Which is one of the main reasons I’m not an outliner.

So, now I’ve come to a place where I need to add a short scene. It needn’t be very long–in fact, it probably shouldn’t be very long. It’s just something that needs to point out a problem my main character isn’t aware of, yet. Not that he’s going to realize until much later exactly what that problem has to do with him, but it’s a seed I need to sow now so that the readers will, hopefully, see it coming when he does figure it out.

And so now, I have to figure out exactly where to fit this little scene in. Hmm.