Wisdom from The Lovin Spoonful

Read AJ Hartley's post at Magical Words. He's described the exact problem I'm having: too much Stuff happening in the latter part of the WIP. I love what the characters have gotten into, but it seems like a too sudden a change of pace from the rest of the book. New characters pop up, the antagonist pulls his worst stunt, one of Neal's biggest lingering questions since the beginning gets resolved, characters hop on planes to go back and forth between the West and East Coasts, people get shot at--all in the space of a few weeks!

AJ's solution was to force a stop to the action by making the characters (temporarily) unable to move forward. Everybody gets a breather, readers included. Characters think their way back into the action, which I often like better than the brute force approach.

I'd also like to point out that I only realized I had a problem because I looked at my outline. I saw that I was roughly 2/3 of the way through the outline currently, but still had a bunch of very active scenes laid out. Toss stuff out the window, make it two books, condense the way some stuff is told without actually tossing out plot points?? *sigh*

If any of this sounds familiar, stay tuned because once I figure out how to resolve it, I'll let you know. If you've had a similar problem and fixed it, do share so the rest of us maybe won't get quite as bloodied :)

This brings us to that icon of 60s breezy pop music, The Lovin' Spoonful: Did you ever have to make up your mind? It's not often easy and not often kind. And because it's such a huge issue for me and my characters, I've run out of things to say about it!!! (for now)